Medieval Histories – Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages

“Oh, could I but once experience what it felt like to live in a medieval castle”, a renowned medievalist once confessed to me at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Medieval Histories – medieval.eu – is dedicated to exploring this intuition: that it is, in fact, possible to approach an understanding of how people once inhabited their worlds.

Medieval Histories seeks to understand how people in the past lived within their worlds—and how those worlds changed.
Rather than presenting history as a sequence of events, the aim is to reconstruct the cultural frameworks through which people acted, thought, and made sense of their surroundings. The Middle Ages are not treated as a distant or isolated period, but as a laboratory for examining how human beings organise power, land, belief, identity, and material culture.

Each article is grounded in specific cases—individuals, places, objects, or texts—but moves beyond them to ask broader questions. How did people understand authority? What made land legitimate property? How were loyalties formed and maintained? And how did such structures shift over time? In short: how did people live ou their lives from ca. 500-1500.

The purpose is not simply to inform, but to offer historical insight that can be used: ways of thinking about how human worlds functioned, and how they changed—and what this may suggest for us today.

The site is open to all readers and offers a wide range of essays, notes, and reflections. It also serves as a platform for medievalists—professional as well as independent—whose work engages closely with texts such as inscriptions, charters, laws, sermons, and literature, or with the study of material culture: architecture, sculpture, jewellery, textiles, and everyday artefacts.

For those who wish to follow these investigations in greater depth, extended essays and ongoing series are available through the subscriber edition Medieval Histories, where topics are developed more fully and placed within a larger, cumulative framework.

In this way, Medieval Histories seeks to build—not merely a collection of articles—but a coherent body of work: a sustained exploration of how Europeans inhabited their worlds from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and how those worlds were continually reconfigured.

By engaging with medieval landscapes, buildings, and artefacts—whether castles, churches, houses, or the wider natural environment—it becomes possible to gain a sense, however partial, of what it meant to live in a world not yet shaped by modernity, and to reflect on how that world differs from our own.
Read more about why medieval history matters

Please enjoy

• Essays on the historical anthropology of the Middle Ages
• Reviews of exhibitions, archaeological finds, anniversaries, concerts, and musical performances
• Reviews of new books

OWNER:

Medieval Histories is owned by Medieval Histories Ltd, Paradisstien 5, DK2840 Holte, Denmark CVR: DK29934215. Medieval Histories Ltd operates the following alias’: Wilder Europe Ltd, Kulturhistorier Ltd, and Medieval.eu Ltd.

CONTACT

Karen Schousboe, Editor-in-Chief, Ethnologist and Author, Paradistien 5 DK-2840 Holte Denmark 0045 24 23 36 10 info@medieval.eu

PRIVACY POLICY

Please read about our privacy policy here

GENERAL TRADING CONDITIONS

Please read about our general trading agreement here

Please read about our general trading agreement concerning our premium subscription service here

Medieval Histories