One thinks of the Middle Ages as a time when peasants rarely moved more than a few miles from their huts or monks from their monasteries—when people generally, other than perhaps the well-to-do, were ...

In some ways, the subject of the Getty Center’s exhibition “Play and Pastimes in the Middle Ages” might seem a bit peculiar. Play and pastimes in the world of the Black Death? In towns where sewage ...

Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “Beatrice’s Last Smile” opens with a daring assertion: “My intention is to comment on the most moving lines literature has achieved.” In the “Paradiso,” the third part of his ...