From ancient Greek offerings to medieval Christian commemorations, the ritual foods of southern Italy reveal a remarkable relationship between the remembrance of the dead
Category: Medieval Histories
‘Medieval Histories’ offers medievalists all the news about exhibitions, books, research, archaeology, travel-tips and much more from the Medieval World
The Testament of the Parisian Nicolas Flamel (1330-1418)
Nicolas Flamel, was a very wealthy Parisian slumlord making his living from renting out rooms and apartments in houses build on the right side of the Seine in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Upon his death, he donated his entire wealth to churches and hospitals to atone for his sins.
The House Nicolas Flamel Built for the Living and the Dead in 1407
Built in Paris in 1407, the surviving house of the Parisian Bourgeois, Nicolas Flamel, offers an unusual glimpse into medieval housing, charitable foundations and the religious obligations of working people.
Reading Medieval Paris: Fifteen Books on the City
Medieval Paris was not simply a royal capital, a university town or a city of magnificent churches. It was also a crowded and constantly changing urban landscape
Medieval News 19-26 October
The week the opening of the exhibition on Nicolas Flamel at Musee de Cluny in Paris is the main event. However, a major exhibition at Tewkesbury, a major Norman building, explores how the social consequences of conquest unfolded following Hastings.
Constructing the Medieval Maritime State of Islamic Denia
How did a small Islamic principality on the eastern coast of Spain - Islamic Denia - become a major maritime power in the eleventh-century Mediterranean? A new study explores how warfare, commerce, slavery and cultural connections helped forge a medieval state
Early Medieval Venice – How a City Emerged from the Lagoons
How did a collection of marshy islands on the northern Adriatic coast become one of medieval Europe's most remarkable cities? A new study challenges the familiar story of Venice's origins
Repentance and Social Welfare in Renaissance Florence
Where did you go if you were a prostitute in Late Medieval Florence? The obvious place was the convent, Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite, dedicated to enrole you in a life of penitence.
Prostitution, Repentance and Social Welfare in Renaissance Florence: The Monastery of Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite
By Gillian Jack
University of London Press 2026
ABSTRACT:
From the fourteenth century, Florentine women seeking to leave prostitution could enter Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite, a monastery dedicated to repentance. Its long life – more than 500 years – made it a meeting point for religious ideals, municipal government and the precarious circumstances of women with limited economic options. The institution cannot be understood simply as a place of private redemption: it also formed part of the city’s response to poverty, sexuality and civic order. Witness the splendid Renaissance art, which was donated to the convent intended to inspire the inmates to lifelong repentance by recounting the life history of St. Mary Magdalene
In this new book, Gillian Jack reconstructs the monastery’s changing relationship with Florentine authorities over several centuries. Financial support, public intervention and efforts to regulate prostitution repeatedly altered the institution’s position. Her account places the women who lived there within larger transformations in charitable practice and urban welfare, without reducing them to illustrations of policy. It is only by uncovering successive governments’ involvement in Sant’Elisabetta that we can fully understand how the city attempted to manage both prostitution and welfare.
This is a study at the boundary between medieval and Renaissance history. It offers a way of following continuities that conventional period labels conceal, especially in the complex relationship between penitential religion, social discipline and the lived experiences of women on the margins of urban society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gillian Jack is associate lecturer in history at the Open University, where she teaches history from Greek myth to the 1970s.
FEATURED PHOTO:
Detail of the predella with painted scenes of the story of St. Magdalene. By Botticelli c. 1484-91. Now in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Source: Wikipedia
Late Medieval Parish Churches in England
Who actually paid for, organised and built England's late medieval parish churches? New book enters the discussion with a new contribution focusing on the distinct new design
Medieval News 12.10.2026 – 19.10.2026
This Week is all about The Avars and their Genes, when the The Natural History Museum Vienna opens the special exhibition GENEchangers, based on the early medieval cemeteries of Leobersdorf and Mödling near Vienna.
Resequencing the Middle Ages through Archaeogenetics
Between 2020 and 2026, Patrick J. Geary has been part of a large research project exploring the Genetic History of the Migration period (c. 400-700).
The Avars and the Hungarians – Long Memories of Kinship
What can Avar cemeteries and a twentieth-century Hungarian village tell us about the extraordinary persistence of family traditions?
St. Francis in Arezzo 1226-2026
New Exhibition in Arezzo showcases images from the 800 years since his death in 1226, and celebrates the multiple imaginations of who St. Francis was.
Medieval News 05.10.2026 – 12.10.2026
This week is all about medievalism: a new exhibition in Lübeck, a Medieval Modern Exhibition at Frederiksborg in Denmark, and a new book on "unthinking medieval poetry"
How Did St Francis of Assisi Become an Icon?
How did the man remembered by Thomas of Celano become the instantly recognisable St Francis of medieval art?
Modern biographies of St. Francis
From Sabatier to Leppin, modern biographers have repeatedly reconstructed the “real” Francis, each revealing as much about their own age as about the saint