Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in the context of "Astrological sign"

The Château de Lusignan (in Lusignan, Vienne département, France), of which hardly any traces remain, was the ancestral seat of the House of Lusignan, Poitevin marcher lords, who distinguished themselves in the First Crusade and became the royal family of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Cyprus and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Built in the 10th century, it reached its peak four centuries later, decayed and was finally dismantled in the 18th century.

September is the ninth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Its length is 30 days.

September in the Northern Hemisphere and March in the Southern Hemisphere are seasonally equivalent. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the meteorological autumn is on 1 September. In the Southern Hemisphere, the beginning of the meteorological spring is on 1 September.

The medieval household was, like modern households, the center of family life for all classes of European society. Yet in contrast to the household of today, it consisted of many more individuals than the nuclear family. From the household of the king to the humblest peasant dwelling, more or less distant relatives and varying numbers of servants and dependents would cohabit with the master of the house and his immediate family. The structure of the medieval household was largely dissolved by the advent of privacy in early modern Europe.

Variations were immense over an entire continent and a time span of about 1,000 years. However, it is still possible to speak of a classical model of the medieval household, particularly as it evolved in Carolingian France and from there spread over great parts of Europe.

Genre painting (or petit genre) is the painting of genre art, which depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively, thus distinguishing it from history paintings (also called grand genre) and portraits. A work would often be considered as a genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known person—a member of his family, say—as a model. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have been intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class.

Genre subjects appear in many traditions of art. Painted decorations in ancient Egyptian tombs often depict banquets, recreation, and agrarian scenes, and Peiraikos is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a Hellenistic panel painter of "low" subjects, such as survive in mosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings at Pompeii: "barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects". Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in the Labours of the Months in the calendar section of books of hours, most famously the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.

John of Berry or John the Magnificent (French: Jean de Berry, Latin: Johannes de Bituria; 30 November 1340 – 15 June 1416) was Duke of Berry and Auvergne and Count of Poitiers and Montpensier. His brothers were King Charles V of France, Duke Louis I of Anjou and Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy. He was Regent of France from 1380 to 1388 during the minority of his nephew Charles VI.

John is primarily remembered as a collector of the important illuminated manuscripts and other works of art commissioned by him, such as the Très Riches Heures. His personal motto was Le temps venra ("the time will come").

In the Middle Ages, the medicine of Western Europe was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity. In the Early Middle Ages, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, standard medical knowledge was based chiefly upon surviving Greek and Roman texts, preserved in monasteries and elsewhere. Medieval medicine is widely misunderstood, thought of as a uniform attitude composed of placing hopes in the church and God to heal all sicknesses, while sickness itself exists as a product of destiny, sin, and astral influences as physical causes. But, especially in the second half of the medieval period (c. 1100–1500 AD), medieval medicine became a formal body of theoretical knowledge and was institutionalized in universities. Medieval medicine attributed illnesses, and disease, not to sinful behavior, but to natural causes, and sin was connected to illness only in a more general sense of the view that disease manifested in humanity as a result of its fallen state from God. Medieval medicine also recognized that illnesses spread from person to person, that certain lifestyles may cause ill health, and some people have a greater predisposition towards bad health than others.

Fashion in 15th-century Europe was characterized by a surge of experimentation and regional variety, from the voluminous robes called houppelandes with their sweeping floor-length sleeves to the revealing giornea of Renaissance Italy. Hats, hoods, and other headdresses assumed increasing importance, and were draped, jeweled, and feathered.

As Europe continued to grow more prosperous, the urban middle classes, skilled workers, began to wear more complex clothes that followed, at a distance, the fashions set by the elites. It is in this time period that fashion took on a temporal aspect. People could now be dated by their clothes, and being in "out of date" clothing became a new social concern. National variations in clothing seem on the whole to have increased over the 15th century.

Kerygma (from Ancient Greek: κήρυγμα, kḗrygma) is a Greek word used in the New Testament for 'proclamation' (see Luke 4:18-19, Romans 10:14, Gospel of Matthew 3:1). It is related to the Greek verb κηρύσσω (kērússō), literally meaning 'to cry or proclaim as a herald' and being used in the sense of 'to proclaim, announce, preach'. Amongst biblical scholars, the term has come to mean the core of the early church's teaching about Jesus.

The Catholic Church under Pope Francis strongly emphasized the importance of the kerygma as the center of all evangelization and work of renewal, formulating it as "Jesus loves us, died for us, is alive and near us", and extolling it as the wisest and truest proclamation and stating that "all Christian formation consists of entering more deeply into the kerygma."