How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production

The Corfu Papers

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial…

Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways

Mapping sanitary infrastructure in large urban societies in the Low Countries, 1200–1900

Politically speaking, the Frisian coastal area constitutes a special case in late medieval Europe since it was not subject to an overlord as it withstood feudalization in the 13th century. Its many sub regions, which were dominated by elites of small noblemen and freeholders, long time succeeded in…

Due to the fact that the Frisian lands lacked major political centers in the Middle Ages and also because most of its monasteries suffered complete destruction in the second half of the 16th century, relatively few written documents concerning medieval Frisian history have survived. To analyze them…

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the creation, function, dissemination, and conservation of medieval and early modern culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

This research project studies the distribution and impact of medieval malaria in the Netherlands.

This book is a result of the collective research project Urban Societies in the Port Towns of Atlantic Europe in the Late Middle Ages. It studies the connections between diplomacy and trade from a comparative and transnational perspective throughout medieval Atlantic Europe.

This collection brings into conversation several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship which have tended to remain separate over the last two to three decades, a period of steadily increasing scholarly interest in this topic.

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship?

This thesis attempts to establish a dialogue between the modern and the medieval traditions in logic, by means of ‘translations’ of the medieval logical theories into the modern framework of symbolic logic, i.e. formalizations.

Due to the national measures that have been taken in response to the corona virus the secretariat will work from home. This will inevitably have an impact on its functioning. Thank you for your understanding. Within the Dutch Research School for Medieval Studies, medievalists from six Dutch universities…

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Byzantine and Ottoman Archaeology, Amsterdam, 21-23 October 2011

The research themes and projects of this research cluster demonstrate the interest in the creation, conservation and dissemination of the literary and visual arts and their roles in society as outlined in the framework of the Institute’s research agenda and interests.

The Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies (LAMS) is an academic initiative housed at the Leiden University Institute of Philosophy. It brings together researchers and academics working on one or more aspects of late antiquity and medieval studies, across the fields of philosophy, history, theology,…

Generations of Leiden students and academics have done archaeological research into the early medieval history of Oegstgeest. This makes this old settlement one of the best-documented sites from that era. In a new book Leiden researchers take stock.

This research project focuses on the thoughts of ethnicity and political orthodoxy in Medieval China by investigating Wang Tong’s works.

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various English and Dutch cities in the early modern period.

This new study by professor Peter Hoppenbrouwers focuses on conflict in village communities of late medieval Drenthe in order to depict a typical peasant society in late medieval Europe.

This book is witness to Hendrik Vanden Abeele’s research into the development, construction and creation of a present-day performance practice of late medieval plainchant, based partly on his work with the Belgian chant group Psallentes.

This research project aims to investigate the development, construction and creation of a present-day performance practice of late medieval plainchant, based partly on his work with the Belgian chant group Psallentes.

In Voices on Birchbark Jos Schaeken explores the major role that writing on birchbark – an ephemeral, even ‘throw-away’ form of correspondence and administration – played in the vibrant medieval merchant city of Novgorod and other cities in the Russian Northwest.

Magistri Symonis (?) Questiones secunde partis Doctrinalis Alexandri de Villa Dei First Critical Edition from the Manuscript with Introduction, Appendices and Indexes

This project incorporates spatiality into the discussion of medieval demography, allowing for a more nuanced view on medieval town populations. It establishes a maximum population count for towns for periods prior to 1400 and provides a means to compare the ranking of towns using size and density instead…

How can the importance of the image in late medieval spirituality be understood in the context of the love mysticism inspired by the imagery of the Song of Songs?

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and…

The contributions in this volume seek to highlight the atypical features of the Hanse, and place them in a wider context of common roots, influences and parallel developments.

In collaboration with Vlogboek, a number of videos about publications by LUCAS employees have been produced. Jörgen Apperloo (founder of Vlogboek) discusses the content of some works under the heading "Vlogboek Science". All the videos can be found on this page.

Interview for National Public Radio sparks media frenzy.

This book is a celebration of the work of Professor Frans Theuws and was published in conjunction with the symposium held at the University of Leiden, June 29, 2018. It comprises of 38 archaeological papers from over 50 authors. They range from the Roman period, Early Medieval, Early medieval in the…

Anyone who thinks that #MeToo is a new phenomenon, can think again. Subjects such as sexual intimidation, female self-defence and subjection to male desires can be found as early as in Medieval Islamic literature. Senior lecturer Asghar Seyed-Gohrab explains further on the Leiden Medievalists Blog,…

Join-in courses are MA-courses in medieval topics given in set MA-programs of the six participant universities of the Research School. On request, such courses are accessible to MA-students from other (Dutch) universities. Course loads and number of credit points to be obtained are usually between 5…

According to a number of British historians, the elderly had a particularly high status in the early Middle Ages. A new book by Leiden cultural historian Thijs Porck sheds a different light on the matter: elderly people had to earn that respect first, and old age was often described in negative terms…

Did early farmers deliberately use animal manure on their fields?

Ariadne Schmidt, Isabelle Devos and Julie de Groot provide you with refreshing insights concerning the study on urban singles in the period between 1200 and 1900.

One of the three long-term research interests of our group concerns the Transformation of the Roman World (c AD 450-900).

Minims are letters that are made up of short, vertical pen strokes, such as 'm', 'i', 'n' and 'u'. In Gothic script, there is often little distinction between letters composed of minims. Assistant professor of medieval literature Krista Murchison has written an article in History Today on the hidden…

What can a doodle tell us about the person who drew it? Erik Kwakkel is a Dutch book historian at Leiden University who searches for the secret meanings of doodles and scribbles in medieval manuscripts. He talks to BBC World Service about his passion for books.

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

The archaeology of food is in all sorts of ways ‘hot’. To illustrate this, recently the book Medieval MasterChef was published, focusing on cuisine and foodways in the Mediterranean and north-western Europe during Medieval and Post-Medieval times.

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

On October 9th, Peter Alexander Kerkhof succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Peter Alexander on this great result.

Erik Kwakkel, researcher at the Faculty of Humanities, has found an extraordinary manuscript in the University Library’s extensive collection of medieval books. The book in question dates back to the first half of the eleventh century and is made entirely out of waste left over from the production of…

The KB has launched a meme generator containing medieval imagery.

The Digital Medievalist has recently created a curated Zenodo community, called the Digital Medieval Webinar Repository (DMWR) to house recorded presentations on medieval topics.