Barbara Newman

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in...

What makes​ a ruler a tyrant? Is it justifiable to depose or even kill one? Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the...

When an innkeeper’s​ daughter accused the monk Marinos, a hardened ascetic, of fathering her child, his brethren were appalled. But Marinos, meekly confessing his sin, accepted the punishment of exile and even nursed the infant with milk supplied by shepherds. After several years, the monks readmitted him to the usual monastic routine, along with extra penitential labours. It was not...

Historians​ usually exclude gossip and rumour from their sources, or use them with caution. In her new book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Karen Sullivan does the opposite. She looks at what friends, enemies, troubadours and chroniclers as late as the 16th century had to say, often relaying it with the phrase ut dicebatur, ‘as it was said’. Eleanor has been many things to many...

Women frequently travelled on campaign with their menfolk. But female warriors were rare, not only because of conventional gender roles but because women lacked the specialised training and equipment of knights.