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"Ever since antiquity astronomy has consisted of both theory and observation, but these two components have often received different treatments in the original sources. In the medieval period we find many texts that present theories (even new theories) for the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; and other texts that describe instruments (some newly invented) for making observations. Moreover, medieval scholars carefully read various works that survived from antiquity, notably Ptolemy's Almagest, and these treatises served as a guide for the scientific study of astronomy. In particular, Ptolemy described methods of determining the planetary models (or parts of them) from sets of dated observations, and he gave numerous examples (including many based on observations he himself made) which take up a major portion of his magnus opus. In this respect, however, the vast majority of his successors did not follow him, for we find surprisingly few planetary observations in the medieval astronomical corpus. (A similar paucity of observations of the Sun, the Moon, and eclipses has also been noted.) Indeed, in most astronomical tables compiled in the Middle Ages observations play no role, and it can be demonstrated that the tabular entries are largely based on earlier astronomical theories."

This interest stands in contrast, as Hatcher points out, to the view of the Black Death taken by historians at mid-century and it may be that the social and economic history of late medieval English society has emerged from the shadow of historians such as Postan and Levett, where the Black death was seen as a catalyst, not a prime mover. Colin Platt's King Death. The Black Death and its aftermath in latemedieval England is a work of synthesis which continues this trend. Written in a fairly chatty style (phrases such as 'Mickey Mouse numbers' and 'rich old ladies' abound) with a liberal sprinkling of modern marketing-speak ('shopping blight', 'customer base' and 'market spread', for example), it is a personal tour through a great deal of the recent secondary literature, largely generated by historians of town and countryside; the book also offers a brief survey of postplague art and architecture.

The Romance language group (or Gallo-Romance) in the north of France is that of the langue d'oïl, the languages which use oïl (in modern usage, oui) for "yes". These languages, like Picard, Walloon, and Francien, were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken by the Frankish invaders; Norman was later also heavily influenced by the Norse settlers who founded the Norman state of Normandy. From the time period Clovis I on, the Franks extended their rule over northern Gaul. Over time, the French language developed from either the Oïl language found around Paris and Ile-de-France (the Francien theory) or from a standard administrative language based on common characteristics found in all Oïl languages (the lingua franca theory). Oïl derives from the Latin hoc ille ("that is it").

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to cover all of the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the end of the eleventh century. It is based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints' Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, and coins.

Medieval celebrations revolved around feast days that had pagan origins and were based on ancient agricultural celebrations that marked when certain crops should be planted or harvested.

Les illustrations des récits de voyage - paintings, prints, drawings from the archives of the University of Lausanne.  Search by key word or by geographical location.

"In the Navigatio sancti Brandani, the ocean voyage is imagined as a liminal phenomenon, suspended between earthly life in the terrestrial world and paradise, envisaged as an oceanic island, beyond it. Many famous medieval maps, such as the late thirteenth-century Hereford Map and its near-contemporary, the no longer extant Ebstorf world map, can be adduced to support the ocean's conceptually peripheral status in this period. Nevertheless, the genesis of the paper on which this article is based lay in a simple observation: that in a corpus of detailed world maps drawn in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - the same period in which the Voyage of St Brendan and texts like it were circulating across Europe - the notion of the ocean sea as a   peripheral phenomenon is repeatedly and graphically counteracted."

"This application shows the order in which all the 26 cantons joined the Swiss Confederation and it's based on Wikipedia and BFS datasources. Created by Vasile Coțovanu, the project it's powered by GeoAdmin API, Boostrap 3.0 and it's open-sourced on Github."