What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives?  Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four who did: Marie de France,...

How did descendants of Viking marauders come to dominate Western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land and the Middle East? In this Virtual Branch talk Levi Roach, author of Empires of the Normans, tells a tale of ambitious adventures...

The Mongol invasions into the Near East had a devastating effect upon many societies, sultanates, empires and kingdoms. For decades, wave after wave of armies swept across the area, defeating every army sent against them and utterly reshaping the area’s complex political ecosystem. Some powers fell in battle; some submitted...

The Baltic Crusades were Christianization campaigns undertaken by Catholic Christian military orders and kingdoms, primarily against the pagan Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic peoples around the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, and also against Orthodox Christian East Slavs. The most notable campaigns were the Livonian and Prussian crusades. In this podcast, Emeritus Professor Helen J. Nicholson (Cardiff University), provides a short introduction to the role...

In 2023, Emerita Professor Helen J. Nicholson (Cardiff University), published her book Women and the Crusades. This book surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570,...