Medieval Art: Did you mean...?

Swords used by Japanese samurai were renowned for the craftsmanship which produced strong yet flexible curved steel blades with a single, super-sharp cutting edge. Produced from the 8th century CE onwards and symbolic of the samurai's...

The Black Death was a plague pandemic that devastated medieval Europe from 1347 to 1352. The Black Death killed an estimated 25-30 million people. The disease originated in central Asia and was taken to the Crimea by Mongol warriors...

Marie de France (wrote c. 1160-1215 CE) was a multilingual poet and translator, the first female poet of France, and a highly influential literary voice of 12th-century CE Europe. She is credited with establishing the literary...

The manticore, derived from the Early Middle Persian merthykhuwar or martiora, meaning "man-eater" (also known as a mantichora or a martichore), is a fearsome hybrid creature found in classical and medieval literature. It has the body...

In Geoffrey Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE), two genres of medieval literature are combined – the French poetic convention of courtly love and the high medieval dream...

Sun Tzu (l. c. 500 BCE) was a Chinese military strategist and general best known as the author of the work The Art of War, a treatise on military strategy (also known as The Thirteen Chapters). He was associated (formally or as an inspiration...

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French impressionist painter who transformed modern art with his emphasis on light brushstrokes, bright colours, and uncluttered nature. Famed for his landscapes and series of paintings that captured...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French impressionist painter. Capable of painting in many different styles, even in the same painting, Renoir was certainly prolific, creating over 6,000 paintings in a long career...

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian poet, writer, and scholar. His most famous and influential work is the Decameron, completed by 1353, in which his ten characters present 100 tales of everyday life. The book covers...

The Great Hall was the architectural centrepiece of a medieval castle's interior and functioned as the social and administrative hub of the castle and its estates. With everyone dining and sleeping in the hall in its early days, the...