Barbara Newman

Albertus Magnus​, the Dominican friar born sometime around 1200 and canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity. The 38 volumes of his collected works cover not only theology, law and logic, but almost every science known to his era: zoology and botany, physiology and medicine, astronomy and...

Robin Hood’s Greenwood anticipates Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, where the virtuous exiles in As You Like It find refuge from persecution. In these stories, it’s not the church but the natural world that offers sanctuary from the corruption of courts, kings, sheriffs and other self-serving institutions. There’s a modern twist in the tale: the idea that, far from being able to provide sanctuary, nature itself requires it.

A hand can be slanted or upright, rounded or pointed, spacious or cramped, with distinctive letter forms, ligatures and flourishes. Some pocket-sized Parisian Bibles are written in such tiny script that a magnifying glass is required to read them, while scholastic writings are heavily abbreviated to save parchment. Thomas Aquinas’s shorthand was so illegible only his secretary could decipher it. 

In​ one of the most poignant moments of Dante’s Commedia, the exiled poet anticipates his triumphant return to Florence:

Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem,to which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand …should overcome the cruelty that locks me outof the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb …then …shall I return a poet and, at the fontwhere I...

This book​ begins with a paradox: we speak incessantly of death, yet can’t say anything about it because it has no being. A subsidiary paradox has long puzzled medievalists: ‘It is hard to tell, when you read only the poetry of the late 14th century, that the Black Death had ever arrived,’ D. Vance Smith writes. There is nothing in all English literature to parallel...