Matt Gabriele
Smithsonian Magazine
United States
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Past articles by Matt:
The Many Myths of the Term 'Crusader'
Conceptions of the medieval Crusades tend to lump disparate movements together, ignoring the complexity and diversity of these military campaigns → Read More
Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
The mythical beasts were often cast as agents of the devil or demons in disguise → Read More
'The Green Knight' Adopts a Medieval Approach to 'Modern' Problems
A new film starring Dev Patel as Gawain feels more like a psychological thriller than a period drama → Read More
What the Medieval Olympics Looked Like
The Middle Ages didn't kill the Games, as international sporting competitions thrived with chariot races and jousts → Read More
On Guillotines, Monarchy, and the American Right
François Furet, his reading of the French Revolution, and the use of authoritarian political discourse by the US political right. → Read More
How bad analogies undermine our understanding of history
No, getting vaccinated isn't like being forced to wear a yellow star. → Read More
Donald Trump Jr.’s rifle shows how obsessed the right still is with the Crusades
They love the iconography of holy war, but they don't seem to care much about historical facts. → Read More
Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes.
As we watch Notre Dame burn, it's worth remembering that mourning need not give way to despair. → Read More
Why Historians Are Like Tax Collectors
The 'point' of history, the role of the historian, has always been a bit uncertain. They're often characterized as just cataloguers of facts but how scholars are now engaging with the public reveals that they serve a much larger role - as 'remembrancers.' → Read More
The Medieval Precedent For President Trump Signing Bibles
While visiting victims of the recent tornadoes in Alabama, many raised eyebrows when President Trump visited a church and signed the personal bibles of some of those in attendance. But politics and bibles have a long, interconnected history dating into the Middle Ages. → Read More
There Was No Such Thing As The 'Renaissance'
When we talk about the past, we know that eras don't suddenly "begin" or "end." But we still talk as if there are clear lines separating one from the other. Looking at the "Renaissance" next to the "Middle Ages" shows how fuzzy (almost non-existent) the line between the two actually was. → Read More
Death Is Coming In The Trailer For Game Of Thrones' Final Season
The new trailer for the final season of "Game of Thrones," and the great war between the armies of the living and the dead, evokes both the actual European Middle Ages and the fantastic one of JRR Tolkien. Those models might help us see what's to come. → Read More
Yes, There Were Viking Women Warriors In The Middle Ages
A fascinating archeological find in Sweden, now revisited, confirms that Viking warrior women (at least in this one case) were real. → Read More
The Medieval Women In Drag Who Maybe Caused The Black Death (But Really Didn't)
Buried in a medieval chronicle, the author tells us about a troop of women who dressed as men in order to attend tournaments. The chronicler suggested this angered God to the point of sending the Black Death but new research suggests a much better way to understand this anecdote. → Read More
How A Medieval Video Game Can Help Us Think About The Past
A recent video game walks through a version of the Middle Ages. Its imagery might say a lot about modern assumptions related to the period - ones related to darkness and death - but its status as a video game opens up great possibilities to explore the real complexity of the past. → Read More
What You Didn't Know About Academic Kindness (And A Black Man In Medieval Iceland)
Sometimes research breakthroughs come in unexpected ways. At academic conferences, sometimes the most interesting things you learn come from the conversations after the formal presentations - the moments of intellectual generosity when people share what they know with each other. → Read More
The New Book That Will Change How We Understand The Crusades
People have been trying to understand the meaning of the so-called "Crusades" since they happened more than 900 years ago. A new book by historian Jay Rubenstein may finally get us closer to that goal. → Read More
What The New Footage From Game Of Thrones Can Teach Us About The Real Middle Ages
The new footage from Season 8 of Game of Thrones may only hint at what's to come, but it does help us understand why it thinks about the Middle Ages in the ways it does and also why the Middle Ages were so much more complex - and interesting - than we might otherwise imagine. → Read More
Trump says medieval walls worked. They didn’t.
They had more to do with reassuring those who lived inside them than they were about dividing self from other. → Read More
What You Didn't Know About Children In The Middle Ages
One of the "zombie myths" about the medieval world is the idea that childhood "didn't exist" in that period, or that parents didn't really care about their offspring. That, however, is nonsense. Scholars of have shown us a much richer understanding of what medieval families were actually like. → Read More