Most reliquary crosses are found broken, opened, or separated, which strips away key information about how they were made and used. This one is different: it’s a two-part cross permanently sealed with ...

Whenever a fantasy story treads too far into gruesome violence or plain old human exploitation, storytellers like to trot out four little words: “But it’s historically accurate.” That was the ...

To "doodle" means to draw or scrawl aimlessly, and the history of the word goes back to the early 20th century. Scribbling haphazard words, squiggly lines and mini-drawings, however, is a much older ...

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, by Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry, (HarperCollins: 2021), 336 pages. Around the year 849, a group of Byzantine monks paid a young woman to accuse ...

The largest of four fifteenth-century tapestries, known collectively as the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, takes falconry as its subject. Lovers are depicted strolling arm-in-arm as their birds hunt ...

A stained-glass window depicting Empress Matilda's voyage from England to Normandy Andreas F. Borchert via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 In three decades of teaching medieval European history, ...

Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor, and holds certifications as a personal trainer and weightlifting coach. She has been writing about health for over 10 years. What was life like in ...

Olivia Swarthout has brought medieval art to the masses (460K Twitter followers and counting) but she’s not formally trained in medieval history or art. A self-described “proprietress of weird ...

Learn how ancient DNA and tooth enamel are rewriting England’s medieval history and showing connections between climate change and migration. For centuries, popular history has framed early medieval ...

In the ninth and tenth centuries, castles were often built of wood and easily burned down by enemies. As unrest spread across Europe and warfare began to change, castle designs had to adapt. Looming ...

We often romanticize the Middle Ages, seeing them as a time of chivalry, gallant knights, and castles. Beneath all of this pageantry and myth lies the stark reality of an era defined by brutal warfare ...