The donation of portable Mass kits was a way for non-combatants to participate in the war effort in a way that is uniquely tied to religious material culture.

Sarah Luginbill on medieval and modern liturgical inscriptions

Genealogies are at their best when they both demonstrate complexity and simplify historical relations by applying principles of significant proximity for specific purposes.

Ryan McDermott maps out historical relationships over time

To my surprise, I found Pope Francis a medievalist, St. Francis an eco-theologian, and a papal encyclical a work of literary ecocriticism.

Kathryn Mogk Wagner on medieval studies and ecocriticism

From the vantage point of Pierre d’Ailly’s introduction to the Consolation of Philosophy, history looks like a tower of hand-wringing moderns all the way down.

Matthew Vanderpoel looks to the medievals and finds that we are not the first moderns

When we are doing genealogies of modernity, we may find that what we are doing is arguing for which epoch we think is best for the future. Thee real question for the present may be this: which past will be our future?

Terence Sweeney on living within different eras

Joseph Henrich’s account shows that much of what we take to be typically modern habits of mind—individualism, impersonal prosociality, an acute sense of guilt—were already deeply imbedded in the Western psyche by the High Middle Ages.

Brendan Case reviews The WEIRDest People in the World

From the crusades to WWII, Catholic materiality in combat did not just serve the needs of the faithful but also anchored broader conceptualizations of what constituted “just warfare.”

Sarah Luginbill examines portable altars and the relation of war and religion

When modernity lost its modularity, it became an asset to be fought over, a territory to be controlled. Modernity became the cool neighborhood that scholars jockeyed to buy into.

Daniel Zimmerman critiques the excess of periodization

Why excommunicate these leggy litigants who had never been communicated? Whose chirps of defense fall on unwitting human ears?

Maggie Slaughter on grasshoppers

Chivalry is an attempt to internalize restraints so that powerful men police one another and themselves—masculinity taming the excesses of masculinity.

Kathryn Mogk reassesses chivalry amidst the Me-Too era and deepening concerns about police violence.

Ultimately, nobody is interested in hermeneutics and intertextuality for their own sake … but everyone wants to know what is real and how we should live, and if books can help us there, interpretation becomes intensely interesting.

Kathryn Mogk rediscovers reading with Augustine.