A lot of History
Here you will find quite a few of my reflections on various topics related to medieval history, with a particular focus on the Wars of the Roses and other similar disputes, in any time, in any place, and in any universe.
You can also find the same articles in Italian under the category “Articoli in Italiano”
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There is a figure that keeps resurfacing in books, discussions, astrology, and modern reinterpretations of history. Her name is Lilith, and she seems to change face every time someone tells her story. Now… a clarification is necessary right away, because over these thousands of years an incredible number of legends have been built around Lilith.…
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And if I told you that they did, how would you react?Yes, it was a harsh era… austere… so much so that perhaps someone needed to get high… or perhaps not.Maybe drugs, as we understand them today, were not meant to get people “high” at all… but let’s take this one step at a time.…
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You probably think that swearing is a modern invention. That profanity belongs to us, the enlightened, irreverent present, and that in the Middle Ages, for instance, not only was it impossible, but it was actually quite likely that God would strike you down from the sky and set you on fire. Well, no. In the…
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When the name Heloise is spoken, collective memory almost automatically turns to another figure: Pierre Abélard. Their love story, overwhelming, scandalous, tragic, has, over time, become one of the founding myths of Western romantic imagination. Yet to stop there is to betray precisely what makes Heloise an exceptional figure. For Heloise is not merely the…
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Objects, as we know, travel through time. And sometimes monuments or chronicles are not needed: a single line of ink, a signature, a motto slipped into the margin of a book is enough to bring back to the surface, after five centuries, a truth of identity. In the first part (here), we followed the most…
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When we think of Christmas, we most often think of the tree, Santa Claus, lights, and huge family tables filled with laughter and arguments (yes, that happens too, let’s admit it peacefully!). But in the Middle Ages, how was Christmas experienced? First of all, Christmas festivities did not begin on December 8 as they do…
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Objects, as we know, travel through time. They retain something of us, something we chose to imprint so that our children, our grandchildren, and all those who come after us might understand who we truly were. Sometimes a single book, a line, a signature, a motto… is enough to cry out to the world, centuries…
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If today a doctor told you, “To understand what’s wrong with you, let me examine your urine… under the light of the Moon,” you would probably run for your life. In the Middle Ages, however, not only would you not have been scandalised… you would have considered the request perfectly normal.For centuries, in fact, the…
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Every year on October 31st, for the past thirty-six years now (at least in this earthly life of mine), I’ve heard people criticize the day of Samhain, or Halloween as it’s now called, in the most absurd ways imaginable. Some call it an evil day, devoted to the devil; others dismiss it as nothing more…
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All my life I’ve heard people say: “What is this, the Middle Ages?” or “It feels like we’ve gone back to the Middle Ages,” whenever they want to comment on something absurd that makes us regress so much we turn into barbarians, puritans, God-fearing souls destined to die of the plague. And every time I…
Beyond Death 