When we think of medieval friars, we may well picture Robin Hood’s jolly Friar Tuck, known for his rotund figure and love of food and drink. But it turns out some of these monks were full of more than ...

Jamie Kreiner (Hist/Mus,’04) thinks a lot about thinking. Her new book, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, achieved a rare feat for a scholarly work: The Wall Street ...

A University of Cambridge study has found that many -- if not most -- monks were "riddled with parasites," even more than commoners, despite their advanced technologies and wealth. Corbis via Getty ...

Research examining traces of parasites in medieval Cambridge residents suggests that monks were almost twice as likely as ordinary townspeople to have intestinal worms -- despite monasteries of the ...

Kreiner is a professor of history at the University of Georgia specializing in the early Middle Ages, and the author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction It’s time for ...

Their results, reported in the journal Nature, uncover new information about one of the most volcanically active periods in Earth's history, which some think helped to trigger the Little Ice Age, a ...

What do medieval monks and volcanic eruptions have in common? According to a team of researchers led by the University of Geneva, quite a bit because chronicles from the 12th and 13th century are ...

It took the researchers almost five years to examine hundreds of annals and chronicles from across Europe and the Middle East, in search of references to total lunar eclipses and their colouration.

While excavating a castle in Spain, archaeologists found a surprise: a woman buried alongside more than 20 medieval monks. And like the men, she was likely a warrior who died in battle, a new study ...

Tom is a writer in London with a Master's degree in Journalism whose editorial work covers anything from health and the environment to technology and archaeology.

In the early Middle Ages, Irish monks transported an important collection of texts to continental Europe. Written during Ireland’s golden age (between the sixth and ninth centuries), the manuscripts ...