Group items tagged

The plague also affected religion and art, which became very dark and preoccupied with death. Many people believed that the Black Death came from God's extreme anger at the world. A group of fanatics, called Flagellants, inflicted various punishments on themselves in an attempt to atone for the world's sins--and end the disease. An artistic style known as the danse macabre depicted skeletons and corpses mingling with the living during happy occasions. These actions reminded the people of the overriding sense of doom that shadowed their lives because of the Black Death.

"One of the oddest myths about the Middle Ages is that people did not drink water. Many books and articles have repeated the notion that water was so polluted during this period that medieval men and women would only drink wine, ale or some other kind of beverage. However, there is plenty of evidence that people regularly drank water."

"History of the English People, Volume I by John Richard Green" Read Chapter 4 re the Angevin Empire

Famous Medieval People This section of the site provides information about people of the middle ages such as King Arthur, Maimonides, and Theodoric the Great.

" Want to know what kind of jobs there were in the Middle Ages? A unique source from 15th century Germany gives us some beautiful images of medieval people at work. Known the House Books of the Nuremberg Twelve Brothers Foundation, these were records of a charitable foundation started in the city of Nuremberg in 1388. The foundation would take 12 poor and needy people and provide them with training in a trade."

"Our list of the best medieval maps - ten maps created between the sixth and sixteenth centuries, which offer unique views into how medieval people saw their world. These maps are arranged chronologically, which helps to reveal some of the changes that took place during the Middle Ages in how people created maps."

"Wish to go travelling medieval style? Here is a list of books, which will tell you all about how people in the Middle Ages went about it What time of the year should you venture out? Which mounts should you choose? Or should you go by the sea? Where to cross rivers? What inns were safe? Where to find food? Anyone living in the Middle Ages had to have a good working knowledge of what was both reasonable and feasible. At a time when people had to move around in order to trade, to learn, to fight - or just to connect, practical knowledge about landscapes, food, hostile strangers and friendly hospices might often mean the difference between life and dead. Here is a list of books, which will introduce you to the field in general. Further literature may be found in the generous bibliographies, they are all fitted with."

"From 1096 to 1101, over 100,000 people from all over Western Europe set off towards Jerusalem. These men and women, these warriors and pilgrims, priests and nuns, lords and laborers, didn't have a name for what they were doing-no one would use the word Crusade to describe an armed pilgrimage, or holy military expedition, until more than another century had passed. Yet the battle that preceded their march, a battle along the way to Jerusalem, and still another after that city was conquered by a tiny remnant of the original force, combined to permanently reshape the nature (both spiritual and physical) of Catholic Europe. Dr. Jessica Goldberg, Assistant Professor, Medieval History, University of Pennsylvania, speaks at this "Great Battles: Moments in Time that Changed History" series lecture program."

"Introduction: History sometimes has scattered poppy without merit. We know little of many who were once great in the earth, and still less of the life of the people in their times. The life of the past must be visualized by piecing together detached and scattered fragments from many sources. The result is a composite picture, not a portrait. It is only now and then that the student of history is able to penetrate behind the veil of obscurity and get glimpses of intimate personal life and learn to know the men and women of the past with some degree of acquaintance."

"No matter which dates you use to define it, the medieval period was a very long time ago. Most of the people who existed during that time lived and died anonymously - at least as far as history is concerned. So how is it that we know anything about this period at all?"

"The idea that Medieval people drank beer or wine to avoid drinking bad water is so established that even some very serious scholars see no reason to document or defend it; they simply repeat it as a settled truth. In fact, if no one ever documents the idea, it is for a very simple reason: it's not true."

"Here is our quiz on the First Crusade. Eight questions to test how well you know some of the key people and events of the 11th century invasion of the Holy Land."

" By the later Middle Ages there was great interest in anatomy and how the body worked. Medieval people made illustrations to explain medical and anatomical issues of human body. Here is a list of medieval images of the whole or parts of the body, which offer a fascinating, unique and strange views from the Middle Ages."

" What did medieval cities look like? Or more precisely, how did medieval people depict cities? Here are 15 images from the Middle Ages that show how the urban world looked like."

Europe in the first half of the 14th Century seemed to be preparing itself for significant changes. Cities grew in importance, though most of the population was still rural. Population increases had led to overuse of the available land. Poor harvests-also due to cooler, wetter weather-led to famines. The serf system was being undermined. Centralized political authority was becoming more powerful. Then the Black Death cut a path-both literal and figurative-through the middle of the 14th Century. The disease was caused by the bubonic plague, which was spread by rats, whose fleas carried the plague bacilli from the East along trade routes until it penetrated almost all of Europe, killing at least one out of every three people. Such a radical alteration in population in any place, at any time, would likely set off dramatic changes in society. What happened in a Europe already beginning to transform itself? In this lesson, students analyze maps, firsthand accounts, and archival documents to trace the path and aftermath of the Black Death.

For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their high nobility spoke only one of the langues d'oïl called Anglo-Norman, which was a variety of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period and originating from a northern dialect of Old French, whilst English continued to be the language of the common people. Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman and, later, Anglo-French (see Anglo-Norman language, "Characteristics").

The English language has been shaped by a number of other languages over the centuries, and many English speakers know that Latin and German were two of the most important. What many people don't realize is how much the French language has influenced English.

Many people overlook the connection between the Mongol empire and the Black Death. However, the great Eurasian empire may have been responsible for this epidemic.

The Dark Origins of Britain is a landmark series dealing with the greatest unresolved mystery in our history - how the modern nations of England, Wales and Scotland were born out of the chaos of the Dark Ages. In 400 AD, when Roman power collapsed in Britain, we were a province inhabited by Celtic peoples speaking a mixture of early Welsh and Latin. But only two hundred years later, the foundations of a new, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking nation were being laid.

The 14th century was an era of catastrophes. Some of them man-made, such as the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Great Schism. These were caused by human beings, and we shall consider them a bit later. There were two more or less natural disasters either of which one would think would have been sufficient to throw medieval Europe into a real "Dark Ages": the Great Famine and the Black Death. Each caused millions of deaths, and each in its way demonstrated in dramatic fashion the existence of new vulnerabilities in Western European society. Together they subjected the population of medieval Europe to tremendous strains, leading many people to challenge old institutions and doubt traditional values, and, by so doing, these calamities altered the path of European development in many areas.