We typically think of England as being a fancy-pants font of high culture. After all, British people have those upmarket accents, Shakespeare, and the high-quality programming of the BBC. Not. Fair...

Allegory is a fancy word that really just means "extended metaphor." In an allegory, people, places, things, and happenings (oh, those nouns) have two layers of significance. First, there's the lit...

Okay, so here's one of the more unpleasant episodes of the Medieval Period: the Black Plague. People back then also referred to it as the Great Mortality or, even more bluntly, the Pestilence. This...

No—this doesn't refer to those novels you see in the supermarket checkout line, featuring muscular hunks with rippling biceps and swooning ladies in peasant blouses. When we say "romance," we're...

You know you're important when you get your own brand of baking flour named after you.Seriously, though, Arthurian literature has been popular for basically forever. No, really, how long has it bee...

Quick game interlude. Off the top of your head, name something that is highly valued in contemporary literature. Here's some appropriate quiz-type music to get your noggin working. Okay, time's up....

So, when you think of eras known for their pervasive social equality, we're pretty sure you don't think of the Middle Ages. This was a time when there were huge inequities between "the haves" (the...

Add this one to the medieval writers' Top 10 Themes List, because you're going to see over and over again. Beowulf gives us one early example of this theme. Allow us to explain, though. The Germani...

There's a reason that Chaucer's Wife of Bath stands out for many readers as the most memorable character in his Canterbury Tales… and perhaps even in all of medieval English lit. She wants to liv...

The Roman Catholic Church was the central institution around which medieval life was organized. By default, everyone was a member of the Church, and "Catholic" actually means "universal." If you we...