Geography Archive
-
The so-called Genoese World Map of 1457: A Stepping Stone Towards Modern Cartography?
Posted on May 18, 2013 | No CommentsAround the time of Christopher Columbus’s birth, we find on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, especially in the north of Italy, a variety of people particularly interested in problems of geography and cartography. -
‘Fromm thennes faste he gan avyse/This litel spot of erthe’: GIS and the General Prologue
Posted on May 2, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was given at the Canada Chaucer Seminar on April 27, 2013. -
Queen of All Islands: The Imagined Cartography of Matthew Paris’s Britain
Posted on April 29, 2013 | No CommentsIn the middle decade of the thirteenth century, the Benedictine monk and historian Matthew Paris drew four regional maps of Britain. The monk's works stand as the earliest extant maps of the island and mark a distinct shift from the cartographic traditions of medieval Europe. -
The European Reconquest of North Africa
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe chief structural features of Africa Minor are simple. The territory consists of a long strip of land bounded on the north by the Mediterranean,on the south by the Sahara, on the east by the Gulf of Tripoli and the Libyan Desert, on the west by the Atlantic. -
Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East
Posted on April 11, 2013 | No CommentsWhat the Anglo-Saxons ‘‘knew’’ about Moslems and Jews, and about Babylon and Egypt and India, depended upon Biblical exegesis, saints’ lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English texts, as well as Latin versions that circulated and were copied in Anglo-Saxon England, concern Asia; these are quite varied in genre and in content. -
Here there be no dragons: Maravilla in Two Fifteenth-Century Spanish libros de viajes
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsMonsters, anthropomorphs, and marvels are common ingredients in medieval travel literature, and even narratives of real medieval journeys include these creatures, to the delight of the reading audience. -
The Cone of Africa . . . Took Shape in Lisbon
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsThe year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic and Isabel and Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain, an unheralded event took place. A cartographer in Lisbon, Portugal, drew an amazing map detailing the coasts of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and western Africa. -
Coastal Command: Surveying Scotland’s maritime superhighway
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsFrom ground level, the western Scottish seaboard can be a place of glorious isolation. Dave Cowley and Colin Martin climb to 2,000 feet to reveal once bustling sea-lanes and a Viking harbour. -
Body Mass and Body Mass Index estimation in medieval Switzerland
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of the present study is to test the available BM estimation formulae based on the femoral head breadth (Auerbach and Ruff 2004, Grine et al. 1995, McHenry 1992, Ruff et al. 1991) on skeletal populations from medieval Switzerland and to reconstruct the BM and the BMI within a specific temporal and geographical setting. -
Jews of Medieval Eastern Europe migrated from Caucasus region, study shows
Posted on January 22, 2013 | No CommentsDespite being one of the most genetically analysed groups, the origin of European Jews has remained obscure. -
The Effects of the Muslim Conquest on the Persian Population of Iraq
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsThe Muslim conquest was responsible for changes in the distribution of Persians in Iraq wrought by the combined effects of death, captivity, defection, and migration. -
The Emergence of the North
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsApart from this bipolar system that contrasted North and South, authors writing in the Old Norse-Icelandic language also appear to use the term Norðrlönd within a quadripolar system that held good beyond the immediate region: Norðrlönd, the Vestrlönd (the British Isles), Suðrríki (Germany, the Holy Roman Empire), and Austrríki or Austrvegr (Russia and other lands to the East). -
Conquest or Colonisation: The Scandinavians in Ryedale from the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe study of settlement history has developed within the fields of history, archaeology and geography. As a result much of the work carried out in settlement studies has borrowed the research and conclusions of scholars from other disciplines. -
An island archaeological approach to the Viking colonization of the North Atlantic
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe present paper is a brief exploration of the application of methods commonly used in the archaeological study of the Pacific and Mediterranean islands to the expansion of the Vikings across the North Atlantic during the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. -
The pattern of settlement on the Welsh border
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe attempt made in this paper to answer these questions will be based almost entirely on Welsh evidence. The English evidence, examined and re- examined since the late nineteenth century, is already sufficiently familiar to members of the British Agricultural History Society. -
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. -
Settlement and Field Structures in continental North-West Europe from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries
Posted on October 10, 2012 | No CommentsSince the eighties and increasingly during the nineties there has been a renewed interest on the continent in medieval rural settlement, mainly among archaeologists and geographers -
Leicestershire settlements through the late fourteenth century poll tax records – urban or rural?
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsLeicestershire's medieval settlement pattern consisted of nucleated villages, generally 1·2 miles apart; these followed a regime of mixed farming on common fields. -
Slavery and Identíty in Mozarabic Toledo: 1201-1320
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsRomán Iberia became thoroughly Romanized early in its existenec. Spain adopted the law, the language, the culture, and eventually the religión of clas- sicat Rome. Moreover, Hispania produced some truly stellar figures in the arena of Latin scholarship, including Séneca, Lucían, Quintilian, Columella, and Prudentius. -
Townscape as text: the topography of social interaction in Fethard, county Tipperary, AD 1300-1700
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No CommentsThe idea that complex social order in the past can be ‘read’ in the built environment, and indeed in material culture - tangible artefacts and landscape phenomena - in general, is a foundation of contemporary archaeology and historical geography. -
Fossa Carolina: The First Attempt to Bridge the Central European Watershed
Posted on September 16, 2012 | No CommentsBeside the intention of Charlemagne to build a continuous waterway network for his extensive travels, there are two more possible reasons for connecting the river systems of Main and Danube. -
The Romans as Viewed by Arabic Authors in the 9th and 10th Centuries A.D.
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe reason why Muslims authors of the 9th and 10th century A.D. dealt with the history and culture not only of the Romans but also of other ancient and contemporary nations is related to the social, political and cultural circumstances of their age. -
One World under the Sun: Cosmography and Cartography in the Liber Floridus
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsTo a modern cartographer a map should represent geographic reality by means of coordinates such as latitude and longitude. Not one of the cartographic images in the Liber Floridus corresponds to this definition, yet not a single work on historical cartography omits the early-twelfth-century encyclopaedia -
Hellenism and the Shaping of the Byzantine Empire
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the role of Byzantine Hellenism on the art, literature, and society of the Empire has been the subject of tremendous study, the question of its origins has, nonetheless, rarely been raised, and the strongly Hellenic Byzantine identity seems, to a large extent, to have been taken for granted historiographically. -
A Dis-Integrated Urban Landscape: Making Kyoto Medieval
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsTo begin, we must ask the question, 'what was ʻmedievalʼ about medieval Kyoto?'
