Spend any time gazing at medieval European paintings, and one question tends to emerge: What is going on with those babies? Far from the sweet, chubby cherubs we might expect to see, these infants often resemble balding middle-aged men, complete with wrinkled foreheads and dour expressions. What could possibly explain this bizarre artistic choice? To understand, we have to dive into how European art — and the perception of children — evolved from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Religi...| History Facts
The Middle Ages weren’t just shaped by monarchs and wars — they were lived by everyday people whose names appear in the records they left behind. Parish registers, royal charters, tax rolls, and literature give us a glimpse into the history of common names in medieval England and other parts of Europe and what they meant to the people who carried them. Some of the most valuable insights about what people were called, and why, come from medieval books created specifically to record names. ...| History Facts
According to popular legend, the English aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was engaged in an all-night card game in 1762 when he became distracted by hunger pangs. Not wanting to stop playing, he instructed his servant to bring him a snack of beef between two slices of bread, allowing him to satiate the twin desires of filling his belly and raking in more dough. While he was hardly the first person in history to consider eating food in this fashion — Montagu may have been i...| History Facts
Her reign from 1558 to 1603 is considered a golden age of English history.| History Facts