The Bavarians from the Ground Up

Since written history doesn't spread very much light on the people who lived in sixth century Bavaria, let's literally look to the ground and examine what their cemeteries tell us about them.  Aschheim is the only place where plague aDNA has been found, but as far as I know, it is the only Late Antique...

Who were the Early Medieval Bavarians?

My reading for the last year has been all over the place as I try to catch up on the world of the Plague of Justinian. A sample of my reading for the last few months is here. Believe it or not, they all relate in some what to what was going on during the...

Oswiu’s Bad Luck

I've been reading Marilyn Dunn's The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and just thinking about King Oswiu's bad luck after the Synod of Whitby. He is celebrated by Bede and the Church of England ever after for choosing to accept the authority of Rome over the independent tradition of Iona, the mother house of the Irish...

Emperor Justinian and the British Kings, c. 540

Roman historian Procopius had a lot to complain about in his Secret History. Its pretty easy to say that he did a hatchet job on his bosses, Emperor Justinian and General Belisauris. Procopius was the Late Antique equivalent of a severely conservative 'think tank' founder, you know the type that queue up to appear on talk...

Procopius’ indictment of ‘outlandish theories of natural science’

"During those times there was a plague that came close to wiping out the whole of mankind. Now for all the calamities that fall upon us from the heavens it might be possible for some bold man to venture a theory regarding their causes, like many marvelous theories about the causes that the experts in...

Aldhelm on the Medicinal Uses of Beavers

Riddle 56 I am a dweller on the edge of steep stream banks, and not lazy at all, but warlike with the weapons of my mouth. I sustain my life with hard labour, laying low huge trees with my hooked axes. I dive into water, where the fish swim, and immerse by own head, wetting...