history of religion – Going Medieval

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.

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.

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:

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.

My fav saints: St Sebastian

Last week I went to the National Gallery to do some research for my next book and spent a bunch of time taking photos of altarpieces that feature one of my favourite saints – Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of athletes, soldiers, and people who want to die a saintly death. He was a big fav of medieval people as well, which is why we end up having great images like this to geek out over:

On non-written communication (in Norwich)

I am aware, my gorgeous readers, that the blog has been languishing of late. This is down to the fact that I foolishly agreed to write a book which is, and I am not sure if you are aware of this, hard. Luckily I should have more time to spout off here now that it is all turned in, however. As a little celebration of finishing up, the other week I took a little mini-holiday to Norwich, and today I want to talk to you about some cool medieval stuff I saw there and what it means.

Podcast alert – Medieval Contraception at Medievalists.net

Medieval Contraception with Eleanor Janega

On canonical hours, comfort, and daylight savings

I want you to know that I hate Daylight Savings. I began writing this blog on Monday, when I was cruelly forced from bed an early hour for nebulous reasons, none of which I find particularly compelling. How, pray tell, am I meant to entertain and delight you, my very beloved readers when I have had a precious hour of my life stolen from me? Truly, no one in history has suffered as I now currently suffer by virtue of being slightly sleepy. Now we can all agree that time is a construct and obviously that a delicate flower such as myself should not be held in such constraints, but I suppose it is also an opportunity to think of the reasons that we keep time.

On treating sex with the utmost reverence

For my last post of this garbage year I wanted to write you something festive. Maybe about commemoration, or compilation, or Christmas traditions of some kind. Then I logged into twitter and well lord forgive me, but it is time to go back to the old me.

You see, the first thing I was presented with as my poor tired eyes struggled to adjust to the weak light of a December morning was this: