Going Medieval

On secret romantic communications

It’s the commercial day of love, and you know what that means – it’s time to buy things to prove your emotions, or something. And look, we all know that Valentine’s Day is made up and has nothing to do with St Valentine. Did people sometimes pass love notes around St Valentine’s Day? Yes. I mean, at least from the fifteenth century onward. Did people buy chocolates and book restaurants? Not so much. Anyway, other people have written about the oldest Valentine and the commercialisation of a forgotten saint’s day and I don’t need to add to that. Instead, I thought I would talk a little about fancy medieval people and their various ways of communicating about love.

My fav saints: St Margaret of Antioch

Friends, since I made you all think about death recently I thought I would keep it light for you real quick and talk to you once again, about one of my favourite saints – the good St Margaret of Antioch. I was thinking about her recently because I was writing up something about your good friend and mine, Joan of Arc. See, Margaret was such a cool saint that even noted badass Joan looked up to her, and claimed that Margaret was one of the voices that spoke to her and told her to go out there and beat up some English people. My love for several English people, and currently location in the capital of England notwithstanding, I do agree that probably it’s good to beat them up when they are in your backyard stealing your pig. So, I think it is probably good that she was out there inspiring anti-invader violence. ANYWAY! If she’s good enough for Joan, she’s good enough for you, so today we’re going to learn all about her and how you can spot her in medieval art.

On the Black Death in Africa and Asia, and the interconnected Middle Ages

Friends, I get angry sometimes. Yes, I know you are aware of that because this blog is, more or less, a catalogue of the various righteous indignations which I seize upon from time to time. Often this comes from seeing something silly in the wild and getting worked up about it, but this week it happened because I was talking to a colleague of mine, Prof. Philip Slavin, about the Black Death, as one does.

My top medieval books of 2023

I am unbelievably shaken to be once again at the end of the year, and babes, for me it’s been a year of books. Firstly because, of course, my book The Once And Future Sex made its debut in the world. As I type this, it is in the process of being translated into several other languages, and is already out as Die Ideale Frau auf Deutsch. As a result, I spent a lot of this year thinking about and explaining it to people, which has been a real delight and privilege.

Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry

You know those little jokes that centre around a person with a PhD being on a plane, and someone asks for a doctor, and they say they aren’t that kind of doctor but the emergency involves their field of study? I love those. If you don’t know what I am rabbiting on about I mean these:

No, “the Church” did not kill Joan of Arc, you credulous dullards

So you know how a lot of the time my blogs are inspired by stuff I saw on twitter that made me angry? Well, because of all the incipient fascism I just haven’t been on twitter very much any more, which has been extremely good for the blood pressure. I do, however, be scrolling over on Insta, which as a general rule of thumb is a nice thing cuz I mostly get served socialist memes and then some cat videos. A+ stuff. No notes.

However, because of the memes I like, occasionally I am served a miss and one such of those was this:

You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn

Say you are me (sorry about that) and you are minding your own business online, just trying to survive in a world of unrelenting horror when suddenly you are served an ad. Because of the dark magic of the algorithms and ad service providers, the ads are being tailored to me based on things I have read, or purchased, or allowed my eyes to linger on for a little too long. Maybe it has figured out that I am mates with a bunch of the people who appeared in the Witch podcast. It has certainly gleaned that I am a woman, I tend to read things about history, and am interested in feminist theory more generally.

Hillariously, what that means is I am often served ads for this schlock:

On sickness and conspiracy

I woke up this morning on, October the fifth in the year of our lord 2023, and was not a zombie. This is notable for reasons which will shortly become clear. Because I am not a zombie, this means that I had to get up and do my job. Unfortunately, as a part of said job, a thing that I have to deal with on a frustratingly regular basis is the fairly pervasive idea that medieval Europeans were somehow uniquely stupid. The foolish medieval person is usually proffered in comparison to the total brain genius who is making the statement, who is somehow simultaneously smarter than a medieval person, and yet hasn’t read a single book on medieval history or considered how to make any sort of social analysis at all.

Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire

Long time readers of the blog will remember that I have written, a couple of times, about the Holy Roman Empire in the past before. There’s a few reasons for this – first of all the HRE goes so hard, is very cool, and everyone should know about it. The second is that it’s one of my areas of expertise, given that I work on the Czech lands and they are very very much a part of said HRE. However, I realised recently that I’ve never actually, you know, sat down and explained exactly what the Holy Roman Empire actually is. That’s a problem.

On successor states and websites

This month, like everyone online, I have been watching with a mixture of chagrin and schaudenfruede as platform capitalism digs itself into ever more complex and narrow burrows. By this I mean it’s really funny how a bunch of very rich dudes are breaking stuff online and making worse versions of existing products in response to said breakage. Obviously it is quite amusing to be shown how stupid rich people are, and I very much enjoy it. However, it is also useful for my purposes as a medieval historian in that it serves as a really excellent way of explaining to people what happened in the early medieval period.