Thanks to all those Star Wars movies we know the Jedi can barely survive an attack from just a pair of evil Sith lords. But pit a small battalion of 300 lightsaber-wielding Jedi knights against a giant army of 60,000 medieval soldiers armed with only swords, and it’s not even a challenge.
Sorry, I still have a Game of Thrones hangover, so when I watch this beautiful drone footage that gives sweeping views of castles across Europe, I see the map of Westeros in the opening credits come alive. Some of these castles are in ruins, some are near rivers, some are on islets, some are embedded on the mountain…
Two hours outside of Paris stands Guédelon, a castle that looks like it’s from the medieval period, but is actually being constructed right now. What’s more, the castle isn’t being built with new technology but instead with medieval techniques and materials. That means every stone, every tile, every single part of the…
Fire arrows are in everything from Gladiator to Braveheart to Game of Thrones. The good guys stretch their bows in unison and rain flaming death en masse onto the opposing army, looking like total badasses the whole time. But like so many things on this terrible planet, fire arrows are too good to be true and almost…
What can one expect to find out on the dusty plains of Mars? This new map shows you through the eyes of a medieval cartographer.
Unusual mashups have resulted in some remarkably popular toy lines over the past few decades; think cars + robots, ninjas + turtles, and cabbage + dolls. The latest comes from Lego, whose new Nexo Knights line combines all the fun of medieval weapons and castles, with futuristic technologies.
Long before humans had figured out beer, we learned that you can make a damn tasty crunk-juice by stewing rainwater in a beehive. Mead was the drink of ancient Greek philosophers, Asian hunter-gatherers, and Celtic berserkers. It’s also the secret behind some of the best summer cocktails.
Last month, a microbiology lab in Nottingham, England made international headlines when it unearthed a substance that kills methicillin-resistant staph, one of the deadliest superbugs of modern times. The most astounding part about the find? It was a 1,000-year-old Viking potion.
The Black Book of Carmarthen, named for the color of its binding and believed location of origin (the Augustinian Priory of Saints John the Evangelist and Teulydog in Carmarthem), is the oldest surviving manuscript written in the Welsh language.
If future generations want to know how we whiled away our daily hours, they'll need to look no further than our constant streams of tweets, pictures, and status updates. But what of the poor medieval villager who had no Instagram with which to document the badass tapestry he just wove?
Some tropes are so ingrained in Medieval-inspired fantasy stories that it's tempting to think that they represent real aspects of Medieval life. But often these stories are just reinforcing myths and misconceptions about life in the Middle Ages.
It wasn't easy to find a specific book on library shelves in the Middle Ages. The spine title had not yet been invented, and the books weren't published in standard sizes. But readers didn't have to spend hours searching, thanks to an ingenious system that made use of concepts similar to modern GPS.
We've seen one artist portray Batman as a medieval knight battling and endlessly grinning Joker dragon, but this illustration by Jason Kang focuses more on what the medieval Dark Knight's armor might look like—and his might steed, the Bat...well...Bat. He even has a Robin.
While they weren't always depicted as shirtless teen heartthrobs, creatures who turn from human into wolf (and vice versa) appear in tales dating back to antiquity. So throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, artists have had plenty of strange and creepy stories to inform their werewolf illustrations.
My uncle used to own an old medieval Spanish armor. I remember looking at it and thinking how the hell knights could fight stuffed inside those heavy and clunky metal suits. This video shows how: Reconstructing medieval fight techniques using combat treatises of that time as a reference.
Andrew E. Larsen is an historian who specializes in Medieval England and blogs about pop culture and history at An Historian Goes to the Movies. In "Disney's Robin Hood: A Bit More Medieval Than You Might Think," Larsen explores the film's true inspiration, which wasn't Robin Hood but a different medieval tale.
The past and the future seem to collide in this week's writing prompt. Why is this giant mechanical creation outfitted like a medieval knight?
And you thought zombie comics were a recent idea? Over the centuries, medieval artists applied their talents to illustrate a mysterious tale of animated corpses who tormented the living.
At first glance, these may look like Russian Orthodox iconography from the Middle ages. But they are actually striking illustrations of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Ukrainian artist Sergei Iukhimov.
Before the era of "set it and forget it" countertop rotisserie ovens, kitchen gadgets required a lot more manpower—and if not manpower, then dogpower. The turnspit, a breed of dog dating for medieval Britain, would run around and around on a wheel like a hamster in a cage, ensuring evenly roasted meat for hungry…
