Essay

The Glory of Chartres

June 6, 2025 Sandra Miesel 9

This Pentecost weekend, 19,000 pilgrims are making a three-day walk from Paris to reach Chartres Cathedral. Now organized by a French Catholic lay group called Notre Dame de Chrétienté (“Our Lady of Christendom”), the pilgrimage has expanded so much […]

Essay

The Flowers of the Martyrs

December 27, 2024 Sandra Miesel 8

“Then Herod, seeing that he had been tricked by the Magi, was exceedingly angry; and he sent and slew all the boys in Bethlehem and all its neighborhood who were two years old or under…” […]

Books

Distorting Mirrors

May 5, 2024 Sandra Miesel 37

As headlines daily remind us, antagonism towards Jews is the most enduring hatred in our world. The Lost Mirror: Jews and Conversos in Medieval Spain examines one segment of this phenomenon at the time that […]

The Dispatch

The Inquisitor who wouldn’t burn witches

October 28, 2023 Sandra Miesel 4

“… only ‘the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition’ made the witch craze ‘comparatively harmless’ in Spain.” — William Monter, quoting Henry Charles Leai Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition […]