Medieval history gets medieval on itself

The discipline, on social media at least, appears quite troubled

I love history. I crave history. If I could, I’d inject history straight into my veins. No, my eyeballs… anyway you get the point.

I especially love medieval history, perhaps because it the first subject I remember reading about. This is often the case with children, who become interested in the stories of King Arthur, knights and chivalry, which become a gateway drug for the heavier stuff. It’s only later, as Dominic Sandbrook put it, that you find yourself learning about crop rotation and the importance of horse collars towards agricultural yields, or whatever.

Medieval history is also deeply romantic, which is obvious when you consider that our very ideas of romance stem from the literature of 12th century France. Songs and poems about doomed desires had a huge influence on western notions of love, almost as important as the more prosaic ban on cousin marriage initiated by the Catholic Church.