For many, the medieval world seems dark and foreign – a miraculous, brutal and irrational time of superstition and strange relics. The pursuit of heretics, the inquisition, the crusades and the domination of the "Holy Land" come to mind. Yet the medi...

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastic world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among arti...

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabro...

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled "sodomitical"‌ or evoked the use of ambiguous phrases such as the "unmentionable vice" or the "sin against nature". How, though, did these categories enter the field of...