Get into Medieval Mayhem 👀🪶

Picture the Middle Ages and you probably smell them first. But the “no one bathed” cliché collapses fast when you look at bathhouse records, monastic rules about washing, city laws on cesspits, [...]

Medieval cuisine gets a bad rap — often imagined as bland gruel or suspicious meat pies. But in truth, people in the Middle Ages enjoyed surprisingly rich and diverse meals, especially if [...]

If you've ever complained about a public restroom, just be glad you weren’t living in 13th-century Europe. The Middle Ages were full of mystery, superstition... and raw sewage. While castles, towns, and [...]

The Middle Ages weren’t all sword fights and epic quests. Behind the moats and tapestries were thousands of people doing some of the strangest jobs history has to offer. From scraping out [...]

The Middle Ages were not for the faint of heart. From surprise plagues to suspect bread, survival meant navigating disease, famine, superstition, and the occasional drunken knight with a grudge. But believe [...]

The Surprisingly Real World of Medieval Magic and Petty Revenge Forget sleek spellbooks and wand duels. In the Middle Ages, cursing your enemies was often as low-tech as a carved wax [...]

Debunking the Great Medieval Dirt Myth Let’s clear the (musty, unwashed) air: people in the Middle Ages were not the filthy, mud-caked goblins pop culture loves to depict. Contrary to popular belief, [...]

Today is the annual bonfire tradition of "Sankt Hans" in Denmark—a night where we pile up wood, douse it in gasoline, and set fire to a homemade doll meant to look like [...]

This wasn’t a Monty Python sketch. It was the Cadaver Synod, one of the weirdest, most macabre, and most petty events in papal history. If you thought modern politics were [...]

  Author’s Note: When I first became aware that a pig actually got dressed in human clothes and sentenced to death in the 14th century, I was both a [...]