Any fan of English church iconography knows that a horse’s haunches protruding from a portcullis on a misericord (a hinged seat in a choir stall) must represent a scene from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain. This 12th-century French romance was translated into several European languages: German, English, Norse, Welsh, and was depicted in European wall paintings,…

Travelling alone was very dangerous for women in the Middle Ages. For this reason, some women disguised themselves as men. This motif is also very common in medieval literature and is played out in many variations. It plays a special role in a late medieval German prose text from circa 1435, Herzog Herpin (Duke Herpin)….

Depictions of the Last Judgment are ubiquitous in medieval pictorial art. The scene appearing on folio 7r of Stowe 944 is one half of a two-folio spread that combines motifs of the Final Judgment and individual post-mortem judgment. In the top register Christ sits in majesty while St. Peter beckons to the blessed to enter…

A well-known story: the Queen of France is wooed by a dwarf, but rejects him. Nevertheless, when the King has left for a hunt, the dwarf enters the bed of the sleeping Queen, cuddling up to her. When the King returns, he seizes the dwarf and in a surprisingly violent act throws him against the…

This absurd – surprising! – image shows a clerkly figure riding across a stylised landscape on … what? The figure, it turns out, is our author, the poet known only as Dolent Fortuné; dreaming, he is woken, told to arm himself with ink and parchment, and allow a white greyhound (of all things) to carry…

This woodcut is the first image still extant of a monster that haunted medieval literature. French fourteenth-century poems describe Chicheface (lean face) or Chichevache (lean cow) as a monstrous beast that feeds upon obedient wives. As the story goes, these were so scarce that the monster was constantly starving, while its fat counterpart, Bigorne, thrived…

In the popular imagination the Middle Ages remains the time of obscurantism and ignorance. One of the most vivid images associated with the period is the idea of a flat world. Numerous surviving medieval encyclopedias, however, describe the spherical Earth. When dealing with what we now know of as the Solar system they also describe…

Alexander the Great likes to get around in style. When he is not riding in his flying machine powered by griffins, he can be found sitting in a rudimentary diving bell at the bottom of the sea, watching the fish swim by. Medieval tales of Alexander depict him as more than a conqueror – he…

Marvels or events that defeat the most elementary laws of nature form a common ingredient of Arthurian romance. So much so that on great occasions King Arthur adopted the custom of demanding either the occurrence or the narration of such an event, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this late-14th century Middle…

London, Lambeth Palace, MS 6 (c. 1485) captures the ambivalent attitude of the English towards the Flemish. The manuscript contains the only surviving copy of St Alban’s Chronicle. This English chronicle, based on the prose Brut, must have been written sometime after Philip the Good’s Siege of Calais (1436).  From its conquest in 1347 by Edward…

Brother Jofroi woke up early for lauds in the Dominican friary of St Saviour’s, Waterford, Ireland, on a Spring morning in 1301. He performed his ablutions and devotions before heading to the library. Once there, he retrieved a quill, some ink, and leaves of parchment from the store cupboard, and took his usual place at…

In quite a few Arthurian stories, characters are misled in bed scenes. Merlin’s mother finds a potent devil in hers, even though her door was locked; Arthur is conceived by Uther disguised as Ygerna’s husband Gorlois, and Arthur himself lustfully climbs into the bed of Morgause, who mistakes him for her husband. Lancelot is the…