Random post of the week – who are my top 5 people from the Middle Ages – real historical medieval people, not characters from any of my stories that is! Frederick II Hohenstaufen – not quite the Renaissance prince that earlier historians such as Kantowicz would like to think, but even so still quite amazing [...]

From Canto I of Dante’s Inferno: Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. These are the opening lines to Dante’s great poem, and probably the most famous poem of the Middle Ages. What better way to start [...]

I have been working through some ideas of how to portray hell in my novel Hell has its Demons. If you read the synopsis of the story you’ll have noticed that it ends with a journey by some of the main characters into hell itself. As the story is set in the middle ages there is [...]

This is a classic myth and misconception about history and its epochs and one I’m sure many people realise. The Renaissance, the rebirth of classical learning made new by writers and scholars such as Michaelangelo and Petrarch, did not start after the Middle Ages, it was actually a phenomenon that started probably in the late [...]