if you want to learn more:

Our brief discussion of the Vikings barely scratched the surface of this rich, fascinating subject. To learn more, you are encouraged to check out my course next term (appropriate also for 1st- & 2nd-year students):

HIS 3200, The Viking Age

Lecture: TR 10:10-11:25; Section(s): TBA (will probably be similar slots to what we have now)

The pre-enrollment period begins at 7:00 AM on the first day and ends at 4:30 PM on the final day.

In the meantime, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (by the Smithsonian Museum) and VIKINGS (by the BBC) allow you to explore the topic on your own; at the BBC site, you can even play Viking Quest, a game of prowess, skill & luck that tests your abilities to build a ship, sail it across the North Sea, and pillage an unsuspecting monastery.

On the more peaceful & constructive side, you can explore the Swedish town of Birka, a bustling centre of commerce, religion & the exchange of ideas in the 9-10thCs. (There are further Viking-related links at the bottom of this webpage, by the PBS franchise NOVA.)

 

Reading the text of the Benedictine Rule, it can be difficult to imagine how monks actually observed its precepts in lived experience. In a brief vignette from his 1990 novel, The P illars of the Earth (which revolves around the adventure of building a medieval cathedral), Ken Follett perhaps captures some of the flavour of life under the Rule. The novel has been adapted into a TV mini-series.

Having witnessed the Gregorian reformers' sweep of ambitions inthe Dictatus Papae, drafted in Pope Gregory VII's court in 1075, test your knowledge of medieval Latin & abbreviations with the original manuscript page.

This old online tutorial gives a good introduction to Romanesque & Gothic church architecture, including many visual illustrations. (Unfortunately the external links no longer seem to work.)

Medieval music is a vast & fascinating field for study, even if, as some medieval critics maintained, it "can more easily occasion titillation between the legs than a sense of devotion in the brain." You may want to begin exploring it from this page (part of the Labyrinth project).

Many members of the medieval laity could not read; instead, they often learned about religious precepts by 'reading' the paintings & sculptures that adorned their churches, as illustrated on this online catalogue of wall paintings on medieval English parish churches. A recent discovery in a Norfolk church, apparently from just after the Norman Conquest of 1066, has not yet made it into the catalogue; read a discussion of it & marvel at the talkbacks it has generated.
At the Cathédrale St-Lazare in Autun (France), built 1120-1146 as a Romanesque church (with later Gothic additions), you can see an entire programme of education through stone sculptures. Unusually, the stonecutter responsible for this work is not anonymous, having signed his handiwork in the tympanum (arched display above the main doors of the church): Gislebertus hoc fecit, "Gislebertus made it."