God of Wednesday

It is the blue of blues, the ultra-blue or ultramarine. It is "a color illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other color...

Today, June 17, Icelanders celebrate their independence day, on the birthday of Jon Sigurdsson, the leader of the nineteenth-century Icela...

Lovers of Icelandic sagas are celebrating these days: It's the 350th birthday of Arni Magnusson, the man who, more than anyone else, s...

In the year 997, the excommunicated archbishop of Reims sent the Holy Roman Emperor a kingly gift: a copy of Boethius's On Arithmeti...

When were Arabic numerals introduced into Western Europe? We used to think it was in the 1100s. But scholars studying the life of Gerbe...

As I said last week, for me the hardest part of writing a book is deciding what to say. But in the Middle Ages, as I learned when resear...

For me, the hardest part of making a book is deciding what to say. In the Middle Ages, there was more to it than that, as I learned whe...

To write my most recent book,  The Abacus and the Cross , I traveled throughout Europe interviewing experts on medieval science around t...