Cloth as Currency: Clothing and the Naked in Old Frisian Law
The present article will discuss an economic meaning given to clothing and nakedness that similarly relates clothing to economic means and nakedness to poverty, but is informed differently still.
Aquinas, Averroes, and the Human Will
Scholars have largely read Aquinas’ critique of Averroes on the issue of will and moral responsibility in a positive light.
The role of the mechanical clock in medieval science
What is a mechanical clock? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask. Today, most people consider it a time-telling instrument.
Game of Tropes: Subversion of Medieval Ideals in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire
Martin does not only incorporate these medieval “building blocks” into his own work, he also deviates from them.
Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry
Using both late medieval surgical manuals and examples of gunshot wound treatment found in chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it shows instead that those late medieval surgeons who treated gunshot wounds did so in a manner not unlike their treatment of non-gunshot wounds, without cauterization.
Medieval Eclipse Prediction: A Parallel Bias in Indian and Chinese Astronomy
Since lunar and solar parallax play a crucial role in predicting solar eclipses, the focus of this paper is on the computation of parallax.
Historical eclipses and Earth’s rotation
1330. In this same year on the Ides of July at the 8th hour of the day, the Sun was so greatly obscured that of its great body only a small extremity like a three-night-old Moon was seen.
Sport During the Byzantine Era
It is without question that chariot racing was the most celebrated sport event of the Byzantine era.
Cross purposes: Frankish levantine perceptions of gender and female participation in the crusades, 1147-1254
Though numerous historians have studied the participation of women in the Levantine crusades during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, few have investigated the trends in gender perceptions within the Latin states.
Network Analysis of the Viking Age in Ireland as portrayed in Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh
The year 2014 marked the 1000th anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf, an iconic event in the history of Ireland.
Reading Margery Kempe’s inner voices
The richness of Margery’s multi-sensory experience, and the care with which it is depicted, is illuminated by and illuminates the experience of contemporary voice-hearers, offering a powerful alternative perspective to often reductive bio-medical understandings.
Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study
This article aims to present a preliminary study of the various uses of mann as attested in Old English prose, particularly in its surprisingly consistent use by an individual author, namely that of the ninth-century Old English Martyrology.
The Insular Landscape of the Old English Poem The Phoenix
The Old English poem The Phoenix, found in the Exeter Book (fols. 55b–65b), describes the mythical bird, the Edenic landscape it inhabits and the cycle of death and rebirth that it enacts in an extended Christian allegory.
Living with Books in Renaissance Ferrara
The growth of private libraries was one of the most remarkable aspects of the history of the medieval book during the 14th and 15th centuries.
Joanna II of Anjou-Durazzo, the Glorious Queen
This short essay reflects on Queen Joanna as a test case of both the difficulties and the potential that always reside in communication and confrontation between disciplines, even when they are as closely related as history and art history.
Christ as Priest in Byzantine church decoration of the 11th and 12th centuries
The 11th century was a watershed in the Byzantine church decoration.
The York Gospels: a one thousand year biological palimpsest
Medieval manuscripts, carefully curated and conserved, represent not only an irreplaceable documentary record but also a remarkable reservoir of biological information.
Love, Freedom, and Marital Fidelity in Malory’s Morte Darthur
If we examine closely Malory’s representation of courtship and marriage — a sphere of human activity within knightly society where men’s and women’s interests and activities converge — we will realize that he is not at all “misogynistic.”
Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenth-century Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older Mediterranean pharmacological tradition and studying the materials on which it relied.
The Viking Shield in the British Isles: Changes in use from the 8th-11th Century in England and the Isle of Man
The Viking Shield in the British Isles: Changes in use from the 8th-11th Century in England and the Isle of Man By Emma…
Malaria and malaria-like disease in the early Middle Ages
This paper clears up contours of malaria’s occurrence in Frankish Europe. It surveys sources relevant to its study and establishes guidelines for retrospectively diagnosing the disease.
Characteristics of Gothic Cathedrals in France and their Structural Elements
Cathedrals represent some of the finest examples of interconnections architectural, aesthetic, functional, but also the structural design of the building
Constraining Elites: The Self-Enforcing Constitution of the Patricians of Venice
This paper analyzes how late Middle Age and Renaissance era Venice achieved economic prosperity despite being ruled by elite patricians.
Ramon Llull and The Book of the Order of Chivalry: an attempt to retake the ideals of the Christian Chivalry
This study has as theme the resumption of the ideal of Christian Chivalry, or milles Christi, present in The Book of the Order of Chivalry, from Ramon Llull.
Shapeshifting in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
This article aims to cast a light upon the colorful yet largely unknown shapechanging motifs found in Old Norse-Icelandic literature as well as in related literary works conceived from Classical times until the middle of the 16th century