Tag: Charlemagne

The Random Herbalist: Charlemagne, St. Gall, and the History of Medicine

August 3, 2009

The history of medicine, a fascinating subject, shows how people began to understand more and more about the corporeal body. Herbs played a big role in the evolution of this understanding, and medieval monasteries encapsulated this knowledge: The curriculum of these cathedral schools embraced originally the Trivium, (arithmetic, grammar, music), and the Quadrivium (dialectics, rhetoric, … More The Random Herbalist: Charlemagne, St. Gall, and the History of Medicine

At the Tables of the Monks: Charlemagne Loved Cheese (Part IV)

May 21, 2009

A possibly apocryphal story, told  in many places — print and Internet — reads something like this: After a long day of traveling, the emperor Charlemagne stopped at a bishop’s residence to rest, conveniently at dinnertime. In a ninth-century biography of Charlemagne, written by an erudite monk at St. Gall monastery in Switzerland, the author … More At the Tables of the Monks: Charlemagne Loved Cheese (Part IV)