The medieval period often gets painted as a thousand years of darkness, filth, and ignorance. Popular culture loves to show us dirty peasants wallowing in mud, superstitious fools who thought the ...

Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor, and holds certifications as a personal trainer and weightlifting coach. She has been writing about health for over 10 years. What was life like in ...

In medieval Europe, castles were the ultimate homes for kings and nobles. The big stone structures weren't just fancy ...

The Middle Ages, usually dated from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, were a period of striking contrasts. Castles rose across Europe, knights pledged their loyalty to their owners, and entire ...

Since the dawn of humanity, dogs and humans have lived side by side as friends, companions, and fellow hunters. Pet dogs have been depicted in prehistoric cave paintings, on the walls of ancient ...

The largest of four fifteenth-century tapestries, known collectively as the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, takes falconry as its subject. Lovers are depicted strolling arm-in-arm as their birds hunt ...

Learn how ancient DNA and tooth enamel are rewriting England’s medieval history and showing connections between climate change and migration. For centuries, popular history has framed early medieval ...

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, by Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry, (HarperCollins: 2021), 336 pages. Around the year 849, a group of Byzantine monks paid a young woman to accuse ...