The development of education for deaf people
Some aspects of the history of blind education, deaf education, and deaf-blind education with emphasis on the time before 1900.
Christmas traditions and performance rituals: a look at Christmas celebrations in a Nordic context
This article grew out of a project with our drama students at Bergen University College, Norway, in December 2002. I wanted to introduce the students to pre-Christian roots of Yule, and to give them an historical introduction to extant dramatic/ritual Christmas customs in our country.
Medieval Christmas Celebrations
Richard and Anne’s first Christmas as king and queen in 1483 was happy, even though they were in London and their only son Edward had to remain at Middleham, too sickly to travel.
Christmas: Its Origin and Associations: Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries
Henceforth, I became a snapper-up of everything relating to Christmastide, utilised every opportunity of searching libraries, bookstalls, and catalogues of books in different parts of the country…
‘Synge we now alle and sum’: Three Fifteenth-Century Collections of Communal Song
The manuscripts British Library, Sloane MS 2593, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e.1, and St John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.54 are compact collections of song lyrics written during the fifteenth century, largely without notation.
Consequences of Bad Weather in Medieval Literature. From Apollonius of Tyre to Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron
Contrary to common assumptions, medieval poets did not shy away from discussing the various consequences of bad weather on the lives of their protagonists.
Organization and modus operandi of the Byzantine salt monopoly
This article analyzes the organization and functioning of the Byzantine salt monopoly. Saltworks were owned by the state, but some were also owned by monasteries and laymen.
Symposium on The Social Stigma of Disease: The Archaeology and Bioarchaeology of Leprosy
This symposium explores the social stigmatization of disease by considering the long-term history of leprosy: from the origins of the pathogen Mycobacterium leprae to the foundation of leprosaria in late medieval Europe to the creation of leper colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anglo-Saxon building discovered in Yorkshire
Building dating to the 7th century discovered in Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Responses to Mental Illness in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Normandy
To what extent was mental illness attributed to the devil? What was the view of illnesses which had physical signs and non-physical signs? What about mental illness caused by trauma?
On the properties of wild men: the bestiary men of De proprietatibus rerum and Shakespeare’s Caliban
The purpose of this article is therefore to draw attention to the wild men and hybrids of the DPR less as unobserved analogues for the figure of Caliban but as types of figurative and illustrative beings, and thus to contextualise him in their mode of ‘animal other’.
Views of Jihad Throughout History
The essay traces the transformations in the meanings of jihad, and the related concepts of martyr and martyrdom, from the earliest period of Islam through the late medieval period and down to our present time.
Adam and Eve in the Western and Byzantine Art of the Middle Ages
The pictorial art of the Church, as a spiritual product of the Christian civilisation, has continually received great influences from its ecclesiastical tradition and it was defined by its formal aesthetical standards and its iconographic preferences.
Saga-Accounts of Norse Far-Travellers
What did medieval saga-writers think about the Viking travellers who sailed west across the ocean without knowing the way to the lands they sought, or even whether or not these lands existed?
Customary law before the Conquest
In trying to discover how disputes were settled by mediation in Anglo-Saxon England, I found that the practice must have relied on a quite sophisticated law of property.