Early Modern Archive
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Pilgrimage and Embodiment: Captives and the Cult of Saintsin Late Medieval Bavaria
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsChief among the stories contained in these miracle stories are tales of escapes from captivity. Almost forty percent of the reports in the two Munich Latin miracle collections deal with liberations from imprisonment and escapes from captivity of various sorts. -
English Mystery Plays – Staging Patterns and Orality Features
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsMedieval English theatre is a term covering a large body of plays, performances and theatrical activities. The entire period of medieval drama spans for five hundred years. -
Shakespeare’s Richard II: Machiavelli for the Good of England
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil. -
Jacopo da Firenze and the beginning of Italian vernacular algebra
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsWhatever the reason, nobody seems to have taken an interest in the treatise before Warren Van Egmond inspected it in the mid-seventies during the preparation of his global survey of Italian Renaissance manuscripts concerned with practical mathematics. -
How Icelandic Legends Reflect the Prohibition on Dancing
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe following article is about repression, and how repressed culture can find expression in legends. -
Adventures far from home: Hanseatic trade with the Faroe Islands
Posted on December 3, 2012 | No Commentshe voyage to Iceland, now a major destina- tion, took about four weeks (gardiner & mehler 2007, 403; Krause 2010, 150). The Faroe Islands are situated more or less in the middle of that distance and provided a fine stop-over. The islands were an additional market for their trade business and in case of storms offered a safe and most welcome shelter. -
![So what about the famous confession? By historians in the Tudor tradition this is usually seen as absolute proof that he was an impostor, arguing that "there is nothing in [his] confession which should make us doubt his truthfulness". Somehow they cannot have looked at it too closely.](http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/220px-Perkin_Warbeck-115x115.jpg "Perkin Warbeck: Whether my hero was or was not an impostor, he was believed to be the true man by his contemporaries")
Perkin Warbeck: Whether my hero was or was not an impostor, he was believed to be the true man by his contemporaries
Posted on December 2, 2012 | No CommentsSo what about the famous confession? By historians in the Tudor tradition this is usually seen as absolute proof that he was an impostor, arguing that "there is nothing in [his] confession which should make us doubt his truthfulness". Somehow they cannot have looked at it too closely. -
The Curious Career and Uncertain Past of Perkin Warbeck
Posted on December 2, 2012 | No CommentsWas Warbeck just another in a long line of pretenders to the throne of England, or did his appearance in Ireland in 1491 prove the innocence of Richard III, whom most historians accuse of murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower? -
Tasting Histories Lecture: “Seasonal and Local Dining in the Middle Ages”
Posted on November 30, 2012 | No CommentsThis was a paper given at the University of Toronto by Yale Professor, Paul freedman, on food during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. -
A Marginal Occupation? The Medieval Laundress and her Work
Posted on November 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe wider study of an ostensibly menial activity that, with certain notable exceptions, offered insecure and poorly paid employment to illiterate women of low status is certainly beset with problems. -
Shifting Experiences: The Changing Roles of Women in the Italian, Lowland, and German Regions of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsSpecifically, the thesis compares and analyzes the changing roles that women could employ economically, politically, socially, and religiously. -
The Satanic Phenomenon: Medieval Representations of Satan
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsThe ever-evolving, interconnectedness of culture, religion, and superstition make for a truly unique theatrical experience in the middle ages. With limited understanding and access to scripture, medieval Christians generated a blended belief system, in order to make sense of the metaphysical world, which manifests itself in medieval drama‟s representations of Satan. -
Medieval Snuff Drama
Posted on October 29, 2012 | No CommentsThis was the piece that led to Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. Over a decade later, I still find it fascinating that the Middle Ages had its own snuff stories, along with a host of other legends about all those mysterious things that never really happen at the theater . . . but people still believe them anyway. The medieval folklore puts to shame even all those legends about "method actors" going mad while playing madness. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. -
Prescribing Love: Italian Jewish Physicians Writing on Lovesickness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Posted on October 29, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper begins with a general survey of early modern European medical literature concerning lovesickness. This is followed by a short introduction to the Jewish physicians who lived and worked in the geographic area currently constituting Italy during the beginning of the early modern period, focusing on three physicians who wrote about lovesickness... -
God’s Warriors from the Czech Kingdom – the Terror of Central and Eastern Europe in the First Half of the 15th Century
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe aim of this study is to point out a distinct phenomenon in the history of Central And Eastern Europe wherein part of the population of a fairly small kingdom in Central Europe invoked justified fear throughout the majority of Europe. Czech history is not all that popular a theme of study within the framework of European history. One of the few exceptions is the period of the first half of the 15th century in particular. -
The Proportions of the denominations in English mint outputs, 1351-1485
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis article will combine the evidence of mint indentures, pyx trials, numbers of dies and hoards in an investigation of the problem of the proportions from 1351 to the end of the reign of Richard III in 1485. -
Religion, Warfare and Business in Fifteenth Century Rhodes
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsHow did a military-monastic order manage the resources of an island commercially asimportant as that of Rhodes while overcoming the limitations due to its patrimonial struc-tureto cover their defensive needs? In this essay weattempt to answer this question interms of practice and in the light of relationsthatthe Knights maintained with two distinctgroups of merchants: the Catalan-Aragonese and the Florentines. -
Iconography of the Unicorn from India to the Italian Middle Ages
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe earliest unicorn figure discovered in Iran dates to the proto-Iranian cultureof Amlash (9th-8th century B.C.). This consists of a small bronze statue representinga goat with a frontal horn. The unicorn measures four centimeters in height and sixand a half centimeters in length and was part of some grave goods -
A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East in Late Medieval Thought, Report and Cartography
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsFocusing in particular on the southern and eastern parts of the Ocean Sea, this article traces the broad contours of a representational and conceptual shift brought about, I argue, by the interplay between geographical thought and social (navigational, mercantile) practice. -
10 Female Philosophers Who Should Be Studied More
Posted on October 18, 2012 | No CommentsAn article provided by OnlinePhdPrograms.com showcasing overlooked women philosophers! -
What was the British Perception of the Turk between the Fall of Constantinople and the Siege of Vienna?
Posted on October 17, 2012 | No CommentsIn assessing the British perception of the Turk during the halcyon centuries of the Ottoman Empire, it is hard not to drown in a cacophony of opinions. However, it would be simply too convenient to claim that the sources were too contradictory and fluid; the patterns too faint and far between, to construct a decent argument. -
The Lands and ‘Sisterlands’ of Aberdour, c.1100-1650
Posted on October 13, 2012 | No CommentsOf the lands in Aberdour, we begin in very uncertain time long before the Sisterlands became such and a period from which few documents are available. It is thought that shortly after 1100 some of the lands in what was later to become the burgh of Aberdour came to be held by a Norman-French family, the Viponts. -
The Holy Roman Empire, the Schmalkald League, and the Idea of Confessional Nation-Building
Posted on October 12, 2012 | No CommentsRecent research on nationalism draws a fundamental heuristic distinc- tion between political and cultural nationalism. Scholars define the his- torian’s task as the analysis of political and cultural nationalism in each historic context. -
Chaucer’s costume rhetoric in his portrait of the Prioress
Posted on October 10, 2012 | No CommentsNo critic has ever discussed costume signs in order to reveal to what extent the Prioress does or does not conform in her costume to the fourteenth century norm, with consideration given, simultaneously, to the historical records, literature and visual arts of the period that form and inform the signs from the many traditions Chaucer in corporates in his portrait of the Prioress. -
Waldensians at the turn of the fifteenth century in the Duchy of Austria: Perception of Heresy and Action against Heretics
Posted on October 1, 2012 | No CommentsThe other major field of research that pertains to my current investigation is the inquisition; or the repression of heresy, as Richard Kieckhefer asserts. He notes that there was no such a thing as the Inquisition, because it existed only as mere offices, or functions of carrying out the inquisitorial justice, and did not as an institution as such, not even institutions, as was later the case in the sixteenth century.
