Medieval Arabic manuscripts, East India Company papers, to go online
The British Library and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development have unveiled an ambitious partnership to transform people’s understanding of the history of the Middle East, and the region’s relationship with Britain and the rest of the world.
Manuscript collection in danger of being broken up, sold off
The Mendham Collection, which is owned by the Law Society of England and Wales, contains about 5,000 invaluable items including medieval manuscripts, rare books and unique copies of some of the earliest books to have ever been printed.
Sleeping bodies, jubilant souls: the fate of the dead in Sweden 1400-1700
The study of burial practices and the treatment of the dead has long been used to gain an understanding of the cultures of the past, particularly by anthropologists.
Pervenimus Edessam: The Origins of a Great Christian Centre Outside the Familiar Mediaeval World
This is the meeting place of the western and eastern worlds, for near here passed the movements between Palestine and Mesopotamia associated with Abraham, near here the Assyrians made their last stand after their capital fell in 610 B.C., and near here Crassus ill-advised attempt to press eastwards came to an end.
Christ or Aristotle: Where did this book come from?
Although easily dismissed for its casual attention to detail, poor scholarship, and flair for the fantastic, the medieval bestiary offers a wealth of information – not, perhaps, about animals themselves, but about the people who wrote about them.
How did Persian and Other Western Medical Knowledge Move East, and Chinese West? A Look at the Role of Rashīd al-Dīn and Others
This paper looks specifically in this larger context at one key aspect of the western knowledge arriving in China, Islamic medicine, which included major Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Syrian Christian as well as Persian and even Indian components, making it truly international, and speculates as to how it got there.
Religious Orders and Growth through Cultural Change in Pre-Industrial England
The central hypothesis advanced in the present study is that the cultural virtues emphasized by Weber had a pre-Reformation origin in the religious Order of the Cistercians, a Catholic order which spread across Europe as of the 11th century, and that this monastic order served to stimulate growth during the second millennium by encouraging cultural change in local populations.
A Cluniac Office of the Dead
The office of the dead has become a familiar portion of the divine office to anyone who studies chant, but this is the limit of most research. Although Cluny maintained a reputation for its frequent celebration of the office of the dead, the Cluniac office of the dead has only been mentioned in passing in many chant studies.
Sokemen and freemen in late Anglo-Saxon East Anglia in comparative context
The dissertation is an investigation into sokemen and freemen, a group of higher status peasants, in tenth- and eleventh-century East Anglia.
Ring-givers and Romans : the cultural roots of Anglo-Saxon church architecture
The stone churches of pre-Conquest England are markedly different from those of their continental contemporaries and Norman successors, yet generations of historians have viewed these differences as inferior attempts to replicate continental forms.
Classical and Secular Learning among the Irish before the Carolingian Renaissance
Classical and secular learn ing maintained their close association with each other until the end of antiquity, when they gradually became divorced.
Christian Cato: A Middle English Translation of the Disticha Catonis
It is possible that this translation is the result of an exercise by a not very gifted schoolboy.
Medieval lingerie? Discovery in Austria reveals what really was worn under those tunics
A recent discovery in an Austrian castle has revealed that bras existed back in the 15th century.
John of Salisbury’s Entheticus and the Classical Tradition of Satire
iterary historians of the Middle Ages, with few exceptions, have haltingly dismissed or merely acknowledged the Entheticus. To Wright and Sinclair it was simply “a curious poem.”
The Use of the Rhetorical Exordium in Middle English Drama
In this paper I wish to single out one group of Middle English writings, the mediaeval drama, to examine more closely the interesting applications of the doctrine as exhibited in the “banns” of the miracle plays and of certain moralities, and in the traditional prologues, but es pecially in the more “organic” solutions arrived at by the authors of Man kind and Everyman.
“I will never consent to be wedded with you!”: Coerced Marriage in the Courts of Medieval England
The goal of this paper is to provide a reasonable answer to this predicament: if a woman did find herself the victim of coerced marriage, what were her legal options?
The legal aspects of the Stefan Dušan`s involvement in the civil war in Byzantium 1341-1354
The problem of the legal aspects is consisting mainly of the measure of influence of contemporary concepts of what was legitimate and legal towards the sequence of events during the civil war which started a few months after the death of the Emperor Andronikos III (died 15 June 1341) and lasted with certain periods of a relative peace until his son John V finally succeeded to take the sole rule of an Emperor (after 10 December 1354).
Late medieval Tombstones (stecci) in the area of Zabljak (Montenegro)
Although stećci have been investigated for more than a century and thousands of them have been found many questions still arise. Many monuments have been only been registered as existing, with no excavation; most of them have not been excavated archaeologically.
City Orphans and Custody Laws in Medieval England
The extent to which English towns protected children during the Middle Ages is known only in broad outline.
The Sword Brothers – Knights Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights
Listen to the three-part programme The Sword Brothers, broadcast by the CBC radio show Ideas
Motivations and Response to Crusades in the Aegean: c.1300-1350
Since the Fourth Crusade, there had been a permanent Latin settlement in the Aegean made up primarily of the Venetians who had fought alongside the Frankish knights in 1204.
Of the Thief on the Cross: The Problem of Pain in Punishment
Legal and social historians assume that once a state structure became involved in the punishment of crimes, the aim of punishment was obviously deterrence. The spectacle of hanging or of broken bodies hoisted on the wheel served that end.
Codex Argenteus and political ideology in the Ostrogothic kingdom
One of the most intriguing manuscripts of late Antiquity, the early-6th – century Codex Argenteus, combines elements typical of lavish Greek and Latin bibles with yet another significant aspect.
ARABIC CONFLUENCE FROM CONSTANTINE TO HERACLIUS: The Preparation for a 7th Century Religio-Racial Explosion
This paper’s argument is purposeless without the reader knowing the seventh century events of the so-called explosion of Islam, and the interpretation of which I find so contentious. Thus a brief description of the episode is necessary.
Medieval Houses in Brittany: Questioning Reconstructions
Our knowledge of medieval houses in Brittany is therefore mediated by archaeological research, a project that began in earnest in Brittany in the 1970s.