Month: August 2014

Norse era construction - St. Magnus Church, Egilsay, Scotland
Articles

Norse Influences in the Organisation of the Medieval Church in the Western Isles

In its definitive form of a system of local churches serving identifiable districts, usually known as parishes, grouped together under a diocesan bishop, the medieval church cannot be said to have existed in the general area of Scotland until the twelfth century. At this time, and for some three centuries previously, the islands to the north and west, with parts of the adjacent mainland, were under Norse control.

1449 - Medieval Workshop - by Petrus Christus
Articles

Did Purchasing Power Parity Hold in Medieval Europe?

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing power parity held in Europe during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Articles

Seamus Heaney and Beowulf

Anglo-Saxonists everywhere should celebrate, perhaps annually in a brief offering of gifts at a local temple, the remarkable fact that Seamus Heaney completed his commissioned translation of Beowulf and published it in 1999, creating the first breaking wave of what was already a gradual tidal swell of interest in the text.