By compiling stories about the accomplishments of women, Christine set out to build an allegorical city where women and their achievements would be safe from sexist insults and slander.
The iconic image of a witch on a broomstick has apocryphal origins. But whether they could actually fly didn’t stop Christian society from persecuting them.
Meg Leja, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Your doctor’s MD emerged from the Dark Ages, where practicing rational “human medicine” was seen as an expression of faith and maintaining one’s health a religious duty.
The medieval is part of the mosaic of modern Australia. Our nation’s heritage on this island continent is full of it: in aesthetics, institutions, laws, languages, identities, moralities.
Humans have attempted to understand and treat mental illness for centuries – from ancient Greek medicine, Middle Ages exorcisms and the rise of asylums, to modern medical breakthroughs.
Standards of beauty have been embedded in different cultures, in varying forms, from time immemorial. What endures is that women are still regarded as inferior to men.
During the Middle Ages, women were steadily excluded from both the practice and the study of medicine by an overwhelmingly male-dominated, institutional and hierarchical system.
Churches’ struggles to respond to the plague and constant warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries helped shape the kinds of Christianity in the world today.
Ever since players tweaked the game to reflect the medieval social order, poets and writers have used chess as an allegory for love, duty, conflict and accomplishment.