Happily, there is yet another hero in present day London who actually dislodges the real sword from the real stone in which it has been wedged, sitting unnoticed, presumably for a very long time, ...

It begins with the Teletubbies, dancing and singing. The camera pulls back. A group of children are crowded around the TV set, but they aren’t watching the inane antics of the Tubbies. They are terrif...

This four-day lesson plan, inspired by a lesson plan by Erik Wade, draws together Beowulf , the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest, the movie Outlander , and Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s ‘Seven Theses’ to dis...

Monstrosities and Demonstrations. The parallel makes for more than simply a catchy title (though I can never resist a catchy title): the two words are closely related to one another. Monster was lik...

When more efficient ways of doing things come along, returning to the inefficient is rebellious. It requires taking the time to learn a dead skill or find an out-of-production device. This pull to ‘em...

As a jaded adult, I had given up on Truth long ago, so much so that ‘being duped’ no longer hurt my feelings. It was exactly what I had paid $25 to experience. Reality is too distressingly banal, so, ...

ALT: Curious Cat Peeking Through Blinds

ALT: Angry Birds Manuscrit animé

Tracing cascading continental-scale medieval megafloods across Europe indicates that current flood management is unprepared for such sequences, highlighting the urgent need for proactive flood risk ma...

In September of 2024, global pop icon Chappell Roan performed her hit song ‘Good Luck, Babe’ at the MTV Video Music Awards. Before this performance, Roan walked the black carpet, dressed in her first ...

Social media comes in many forms: tweets, posts, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and more. Over the course of the last decade, the lines between certain elements of social media and public history have ...

In December 2024, TikTok user @snapdrag.n uploaded a twenty-second video with the caption ‘reject minimalism, medieval revival 2025.’ The video has images of fair maidens, gallant knights, castles, an...

Like most people, I never meant to be an eel historian. In fact, until about halfway through my graduate work, I didn’t know anything about eels at all. I intended to write my doctoral dissertation on...

ALT: a man in a blue shirt is making a funny face and the word boom is on the screen behind him

ALT: a man with a beard wearing a chain mail helmet and a crown

ALT: a picture of a puppet with the words let the game begin above it

A man goes off to war. He sees his comrades, including his best friends, killed on the battlefield. He falls apart, weeping uncontrollably, refusing food for days. He returns home alive, but life has ...

The Devil’s status as a cultural icon is so widely accepted that he doesn’t just have a place in folklore and religion: he has his own Wikipedia page. His list of names alone are extensive — the Devil...

The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has increasingly become an obsession of my art practice and academic research, its imagery and themes providing inspiration and posing difficult questions. T...

Community is essential to human experience in medieval romance texts of the fourteenth century. Women in Emaré , the Man of Law’s Tale , Octavian , and Sir Eglamour of Artois (to name but a few) ...

ALT: a small brown and white puppy is sitting on a tiled floor

Call for Proposals:  Sports Medievalism - TSW Special Issue *** Submission Deadline for Proposals: March 31, 2026*** In athletics, athletes are often described as ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ when t...

Arthuriana & Arthurian Literature Present: Publishing 101 Workshop Curious about the inner workings of academic journals? This Free hands-on workshop will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the pu...

ALT: fozzie bear is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee

In 2021, I published an article in Arthuriana that mapped this facet of the QAnon conspiracy back to JKF’s assassination and discovered a distinctly medievalist bent to the discourse surrounding t...

‍There are two contexts for this story. The immediate context was the 2009 Yuletide Fanfiction Exchange , where I had been given a prompt focused on the character of Palomides in the Arthurian lege...

There’s no doubt of it: this is not your college professor’s Boccaccio. In fact, the 2024 Netflix series sets out to create a TV version of The Decameron only in the loosest possible sense, borrowin...

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked creativity in many people stuck at home, and this creativity brought people in the twenty-first century closer to people in the fourteenth century. Beginning in 2020, a n...

Boccaccio’s Decameron has been called “the privileged text of the contradictory, rich, and unpredictable experiences of life.” Netflix’s Decameron, while it is interested in the contradictions of ...