Medieval Europe
From the Archives: A Woman’s Home is Her Castle
In every book I write I reach the point where I am so deep in the work that I have to stop writing blog posts and newsletters. I always hope to avoid it. That somehow I’ll be smarter, or faster, or more organized, or just more. This time I’ve managed to avoid hitting the wall…
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In search of “Heinrich the Fowler”
This morning, while working through Sigrid Schultz’s articles from 1936, I stumbled on a creepy story. There are, of course plenty of creepy stories from Berlin in 1936, but this was creepy in a different way. The article opened this way: “A mystical ceremony in honor of the 1000th anniversary of the death of…
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Aethelflaed, Saxons, Danes, and The Last Kingdom
Over the last few weeks, it seemed like almost everyone I knew was watching or had watched The Last Kingdom: a British television series based on Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels The Saxon Stories. It is set in Britain in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, when Alfred the Great* (and his adult children) defended…
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