Welcome to
If you have any further questions for me, go ahead and
use
AllExperts to ask away! Or, you can email
me at djhalnon@snet.net.
Web Sites
These pages contain a lot of information, but more importantly, most of them
contain lots of links to even more info. You may have to browse a while to find
what you want, but these are excellent starting points.
- General Portals
- Scholarly/Academic Sites
- Overview Sites
- Topical Sites
- Dicussion Venues
Books
All of these should be available in any good library. I don't know whether any
are still in print.
- Life in a Medieval Village, by Joseph & Frances Gies
- Life in a Medieval Castle, also by the Gies's
- ... plus other Gies titles, all with similar names
- A History of Prive Life, Volume II: Revelations of the Medieval World
by George Duby.
- The Crusades, by Zoe Oldenbourg
What Everyone Interested In Medieval History Should Read
These are all "primary sources," or works from the Middle Ages —
or in the case of St. Augustine, which heavily influenced the Middle Ages. Most
of these are available on the Web, as well; try searching one of the
"academic" sites, listed above, for them.
- Beowulf
- The Song of Roland (or Rolandslied)
- Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- The Prose Edda (or Snorra-Edda)
- Everyman
- Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
- Le Chevalier de la Charrette by Chrétien de Troyes
- Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach
- Confessions and The City of God by St. Augustine
- Historia regum Brittaniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth
Furthermore, any serious study of the Middle Ages must, by definition, include
learning the Latin language. Latin comes in many flavors (classical, medieval,
ecclesiastical, vulgar, etc.) but in all cases is quite systematic and easy to
learn to read, at least for native speakers of English. It's even easier if you
also know Spanish or Italian.
Also, knowing Old English and Middle English cannot hurt, either. Again, these
are actually rather easy for speakers of English to learn. The words are often
recognizable in written form, even if they were pronounced differently.
The academic portals listed above contain information about these medieval
languages. In addition, the following are good sites which serve as good
starting points for learning these languages:
- Other Old English Resources
Articles
Here are a few short articles I wrote about topics that I find important to
understanding the Middle Ages.
You may also want to look at my series of essays on the “Greatest
Moments” in the history of western civilization. Some of them relate to
medieval history.
You can get to all my essays, from my "Main Home Page."
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to
email me at
djhalnon@snet.net.