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- YES! To begin with, let's try and fully understand what Renaissance Florence actually has accomplished, apart from making tourists feel like this: "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear...

I am currently writing a book on Medieval Holy Women and their response to Leprosy. I am hoping that some of the Catholics on this board can help me out. I am checking to make sure I have all the main Saints or Blesseds that discuss lepers or leprosy in thier vitae. Please post if you know of any that I am missing.

Shackled skeleton found in Ávila By h.b. Wed, 31 Jan 2007, 14:05 The famous Ávila city walls in recent snow - Photo EFE A skeleton tied up with shackles and chains and thought to date from the Middle Ages has been found in an archaeological dig in Ávila, behind the city’s Church of San Pedro. It’s the second such find in the city, although coming in a different place, and it has led experts to think that death occurred during some form of punishment. Tomorrow, Thursday the latest find will be taken to the Provincial Museum where the skeleton will...

Monasteries and Madrassas: Five Myths About Christianity, Islam, and the Middle Ages By H. W. Crocker III Does Islam need a Reformation? Not unless you think it would benefit from additional dollops of Puritanism; further encouragement to smash altars, stained glass, and other forms of ?idolatry?; prodding to ban riotous celebrations like Christmas and Easter; and support for fundamentalist Islamic schools that insist on sola Korana and sola Sunnah . Indeed, it would seem that Islam has already had its reformers. Railing against the corruption of the West (let's call it ?Rome? for short) have been such modern Islamic...

All of us know that historical revisionism is a favored tool of the liar and those who like to play the blame game. Right after 9/11, this was on display for the whole world to see when Bin Laden and the Left decided to blame the Middle East’s hatred of the West on, of all things, the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars that were fought nearly a thousand years before anyone on this Earth was born, yet the extremists hang on to it today like it’s some kind of personal injustice. I find it inconceivable that one...

1410 Grunwald Battle re-enacted 15.07.2006 The Battle of Grunwald of 15 July 1410, one of the biggest armed clashes of Medieval Europe, is being re-enacted in mid-northern Poland this afternoon. The event began with a holy mass and the Grunwald roll call. Taking part are 1,500 amateur troops from Poland and abroad, who will recreate the battle in which allied Polish and Lithuanian troops defeated the forces of the Teutonic Knights, thus sparking off the collapse of that medieval military order.

X-rays of the sword, which predates the Vikings, revealed its blade is made up of six individual strands of carbonised iron bonded together to form the blade, a practice which has rarely been seen before... The sword was discovered in the first-ever excavation at Bamburgh Castle by the late Dr Brian Hope-Taylor in 1960. Following his death in 2001, the sword was found in a suitcase during a clearance of his house along with a rare pattern-welded sword and an axe also from Bamburgh... A replica sword is being reconstructed which will be displayed at Bamburgh Castle with the original...

Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire is excited to announce its partnership with the Calhoun County Parks system and Emmett Township to produce the 15th season of Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire at Kimball Pines Park... With a permanent home for the event, SLRF Productions is looking forward to creating new relationships in Calhoun County and Emmett Township while maintaining solid ties with its current Kalamazoo County suppliers. The faire and park have entered into a 30-year lease allowing the production company to develop its area of the park and plans are in the works to produce several events year round.

How low will the forces of political correctness stoop? Well, all the way down to the basement of Chicago's Adler Planetarium, that's for certain. I took Litte Marathon Pundit there Tuesday afternoon. She's on spring break from school this week, and her third grade class is spending a lot of time discussing astronomy. The planetarium underwent a major expansion in the 1990s, I hadn't been there since the project was completed. My daughter liked our day-trip a lot, and that was enough for me. Almost. My probing eye picked up some frightening political-correctness in the astrolobe section of the planetarium....

The Victory of Reason Christianity and the West February 22, 2006 At the heart of the furor over Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad are the different values and ideals of two civilizations: one shaped by Christianity, the other by Islam. Of course, it's seldom put that way, especially in the elite media. Instead, the values being defended are called "Western," as if a compass point produced the freedoms we today enjoy in the Western world. Fortunately, there's a new book that sets the record straight. The book is called The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western...

History revisionists have tried to marginalize and rewrite Christianity’s role in the development of the Western world. Rodeny Stark’s “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success” details why their attempts are completely unfounded and sometimes motivated by anti-religious beliefs. Stark briefly details how science thrived in Christian Europe after the fall of Rome, while it stagnated in other regions. But he focuses in on how Christianity was central to the development of the other aspects of Western culture, especially economics and democracy. As he wrote, the Renaissance didn’t just suddenly appear any more than...

Archeologists Unearth 1,300 Skeletons Jan 24, 2006 A large medieval cemetery containing around 1,300 skeletons has been discovered in the central English city of Leicester, archaeologists said Tuesday. The bones were found during a dig before the site is developed as part of a 350 million-pound ($630 million) shopping mall. University of Leicester archaeologists say the find promises to shed new light on the way people lived and died in the Middle Ages. "We think, probably outside London, this must be one of the largest parish graveyards ever excavated," said Richard Buckley, director of University of Leicester Archaeology Services. "Archaeology...

At times, we lose perspective. Let us regain some of it by realizing that however bad Hurricane Katrina seemed, it was not the worst natural disaster during the past 12 months, nor even during the summer. In fact, it may not even be the deadliest hurricane: in Central America a mudslide caused by Hurricane Stan may have cost 1,400 lives in Guatemala just last week (figures vary), as opposed to Katrina's awful but smaller toll of 1,200. We are in a steep curve of chastisement.And then there is the Pakistani-Indian quake: more than 40,000 dead from the weekend tremors. These...

They come for the fighting — and the dancing. They come for the feasting, and because they get to wear cool clothes. They come to play, to socialize, to learn. Mostly, they come because they have fallen in love with a time so removed from our own that many people never give it a thought — yet it's a time that laid our foundations and shaped our thoughts in important and intriguing ways. Welcome to the Current Middle Ages — or as some say, the Middle Ages "as they ought to have been." This is the period researched and re-created...

PARIS: Two star-crossed medieval lovers, Abelard and Heloise, are again stirring passions in France as a literary controversy rages nearly 900 years after their affair. At the heart of the drama is an obscure Latin text that some scholars say contains the long lost love letters written by the ill-fated pair. Others say the correspondence is fake. The illicit liaison between Abelard, an up and coming 12th century philosopher, and the gifted young woman he tutored, shocked medieval Europe not least for its gruesome end. Abelard was castrated on the orders of Heloise's uncle after she became pregnant with his...

MEN FROM EARLY MIDDLE AGES WERE NEARLY AS TALL AS MODERN PEOPLE COLUMBUS, Ohio – Northern European men living during the early Middle Ages were nearly as tall as their modern-day American descendants, a finding that defies conventional wisdom about progress in living standards during the last millennium. Richard Steckel "Men living during the early Middle Ages (the ninth to 11th centuries) were several centimeters taller than men who lived hundreds of years later, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution," said Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University and the author of a new study that...

The origins of Trader Joe's and why Americans don't drink more wine By PAUL FRANSON Register Correspondent At the recent Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, some of us had the pleasure of meeting the real Trader Joe and hearing how he started the cultish chain. To celebrate its 30th Anniversary, the California Association of Winegrape Growers invited Joe Coloumbe to address at its annual meeting. Telling a tale worthy of PBS's "Nova," he enthralled the audience about why the Little Ice Age kept Americans from drinking wine, how the breakdown of an international monetary agreement affects the wine...

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant. As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to...

The Real History of the Crusades By Thomas F. Madden With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant. As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by...

We dressed up in appropriate costumes, piled in the car, and went to Atlanta for the Renaissance Festival last weekend. One of the performances there was, of course, jousting. Those who haven't seen jousting probably have a false idea about how it's done. If you've watched some movies, like Ivanhoe, you think that jousting is fought to the death and is generally hard on the health of the participants. Not so. The phrase "blackmail" came from the period when jousting was the equivalent of NFL games in Europe. Here's how it was conducted: Weather permitting, jousts were held in venues...

.... snip ... Physical Aspects Of The Dark Ages Let's first look at the onset of "the" Dark Ages in the sixth century AD. The Roman Empire was finished, nothing was happening in the sciences, and worse was happening in nature. The Italian historian Flavius Cassiodorus wrote about conditions that he experienced during the year AD 536 : "The Sun...seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the Sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany...

The Knights Templar were a monastic military order formed at the end of the First Crusade with the mandate of protecting Christian pilgrims on route to the Holy Land. Never before had a group of secular knights banded together and took monastic vows. In this sense they were the first of the Warrior Monks. From humble beginnings of poverty when the order relied on alms from the traveling pilgrims, the order would go on to have the backing of the Holy See and the collective European monarchies. Within two centuries they had become powerful enough to defy all but...

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant. As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to...