Medieval History

Offering a comprehensive introduction to the history of books, readers and reading in the Byzantine Empire and its sphere of influence, this volume addresses a paradox. Advanced literacy was rare among imperial citizens, being restricted by gender and class. Yet the state's economic, religious and political institutions insisted on the fundamental importance of the written record. Starting from the materiality of codices, documents and inscriptions, the volume's contributors draw attention to the evidence for a range of interactions with texts. They examine the role of authors, compilers and scribes. They look at practices such as the close perusal of texts in order to produce excerpts, notes, commentaries and editions. But they also analyse the social implications of the constant intersection of writing with both image and speech. Showcasing current methodological approaches, this collection of essays aims to place a discussion of Byzantium within the mainstream of medieval textual studies.

Few Byzantine emperors had a life as rich and as turbulent as Manuel II Palaiologos. A fascinating figure at the crossroads of Byzantine, Western European and Ottoman history, he endured political turmoil, witnessed no less than three sieges by the Ottomans and travelled as far as France and England. He was a prolific writer, producing a vast corpus of literary, theological and philosophical works. Yet, despite his talent, Manuel has largely been ignored as an author. This biography constructs an in-depth picture of him of as a ruler, author and personality, as well as providing insight into his world and times. It offers the first analysis of the emperor's complete oeuvre, focusing on his literary style, self-representation philosophical/theological thought. By focusing not only on political events, but also on the personality, personal life and literary output of Manuel, this biography paints a new portrait of a multifaceted emperor.

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

Exceptional Now The climate has been warming since the industrial revolution, but how warm is climate now compared with the rest of the Holocene? Marcott et al. (p. 1198 ) constructed a record of global mean surface temperature for more than the last 11,000 years, using a variety of land- and marine-based proxy data from all around the world. The pattern of temperatures shows a rise as the world emerged from the last deglaciation, warm conditions until the middle of the Holocene, and a cooling trend over the next 5000 years that culminated around 200 years ago in the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have risen steadily since then, leaving us now with a global temperature higher than those during 90% of the entire Holocene.

Herbs and spices have a traditional history of use, with strong roles in cultural heritage, and in the appreciation of food and its links to health. Demonstrating the benefits of foods by scientific means remains a challenge, particularly when compared with standards applied for assessing pharmaceutical agents. Pharmaceuticals are small-molecular-weight compounds consumed in a purified and concentrated form. Food is eaten in combinations, in relatively large, unmeasured quantities under highly socialised conditions. The real challenge lies not in proving whether foods, such as herbs and spices, have health benefits, but in defining what these benefits are and developing the methods to expose them by scientific means. The place of herbs and spices in the diet needs to be considered in reviewing health benefits. This includes definitions of the food category and the way in which benefits might be viewed, and therefore researched. Research may focus on identifying bioactive substances ...

Twentieth-century warming could lead to increases in the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere, altering the hydrological cycle and the characteristics of precipitation 1 . Such changes in the global rate and distribution of precipitation may have a greater direct effect on human well-being and ecosystem dynamics than changes in temperature itself 2,3 . Despite the co-variability of both of these climate variables 3 , attention in long-term climate reconstruction has mainly concentrated on temperature changes 4-8 . Here we present an annually resolved oxygen isotope record from tree-rings, providing a millennial-scale reconstruction of precipitation variability in the high mountains of northern Pakistan. The climatic signal originates mainly from winter precipitation, and is robust over ecologically different sites. Centennial-scale variations reveal dry conditions at the beginning of the past millennium and through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with precipitation increasing during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to yield the wettest conditions of the past 1,000 years. Comparison with other long-term precipitation reconstructions indicates a large-scale intensification of the hydrological cycle coincident with the onset of industrialization and global warming, and the unprecedented amplitude argues for a human role.

Role of basal ganglia: Vesalius and Piccolomini distinguished subcortical nuclei from cortex and white matter in the 16th century. Willis' mistaken concept in the late 17th century that the corpus striatum was the seat of motor power persisted for 200 years and formed the basis of mid-19th-century localizations of movement disorders to the striatum (chorea by Broadbent and Jackson, and athetosis by Hammond). By the late 19th century, many movement disorders were described but for most no pathologic correlate was known. Tremor: Descriptions of tremors progressed from Galen's definition in the 2nd century; to Galileo's physiologic tremor in 1610; separation of involuntary movements during action and at rest in the 17th and 18th centuries by de la Boë Sylvius and van Sweiten; description of Parkinson's disease by Parkinson, discrimination of the rest tremor of Parkinson's disease from the intention tremor of multiple sclerosis by Charcot, and recognition of familial...

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Did the Crusades trigger significant intellectual
activity? To what extent and in what ways did the
Latin residents of the Crusader states acquire
knowledge from Muslims and Eastern Christians?
And how were the Crusader states influenced by
the intellectual developments which characterized
the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries?
This book is the first to examine these questions
systematically using the complete body of evidence
from one major urban centre: Acre. It reveals that
Acre contained a significant number of people
who engaged in learned activities, as well as the
existence of study centres housed within the city.
This volume also seeks to reconstruct the discourse
that flowed across four major fields of learning:
language and translation, jurisprudence, the study
of Islam and theological exchanges with Eastern
Christians. The result is an unprecedentedly
rich portrait of a hitherto neglected intellectual
centre on the eastern shores of the medieval
Mediterranean.

Jeanne de Penthièvre (c.1326–1384), duchess of Brittany, was an active and determined ruler who maintained her claim to the duchy throughout a war of succession and even after her eventual defeat. This in-depth study examines Jeanne’s administrative and legal records to explore her co-rule with her husband, the social implications of ducal authority, and her strategies of legitimization in the face of conflict. While studies of medieval political authority often privilege royal, male, and exclusive models of power, Erika Graham-Goering reveals how there were multiple coexisting standards of princely action, and it was the navigation of these expectations that was more important to the successful exercise of power than adhering to any single approach. Cutting across categories of hierarchy, gender, and collaborative rule, this perspective sheds light on women’s rulership as a crucial component in the power structures of the early Hundred Years’ War, and demonstrates that lordship retained salience as a political category even in a period of growing monarchical authority.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. Jn 1:1-4 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively. The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.

Leprosy, a chronic human disease with potentially debilitating neurological consequences, results from infection with Mycobacterium leprae. This unculturable pathogen has undergone extensive reductive evolution, with half of its genome now occupied by pseudogenes. Using comparative genomics, we demonstrated that all extant cases of leprosy are attributable to a single clone whose dissemination worldwide can be retraced from analysis of very rare single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The disease seems to have originated in Eastern Africa or the Near East and spread with successive human migrations. Europeans or North Africans introduced leprosy into West Africa and the Americas within the past 500 years.

before Christ to about anno Domini 1300. These people were prehistoric ancestors of the modern Pueblo cultures of the Colorado Plateau. Paleoenvironmental research based on alluvial geomorphology, palynology, and dendroclimatology permits accurate quantitative reconstruction of annual fluctuations in potential agricultural production (kg of maize per hectare). The archaeological record of Anasazi farming groups from anno Domini 200-1300 provides information on a millennium of sociocultural stasis, variability, change, and adaptation. We report on a multiagent computational model of this society that closely reproduces the main features of its actual history, including population ebb and flow, changing spatial settlement patterns, and eventual rapid decline. The agents in the model are monoagriculturalists, who decide both where to situate their fields as well as the location of their settlements. Nutritional needs constrain fertility. Agent heterogeneity, difficult to model mathematically, is demonstrated to be crucial to the high fidelity of the model.

This article serves as an introduction to the new journal Endowment Studies ( ENDS ). Besides laying out the scope and goals of the periodical, it also charts the broader arc of historical scholarship on endowments. More specifically, the development of the research on foundations is summarized in four fields, namely Medieval Studies, Byzantine Studies, Islamic Studies and Indology. Furthermore, a general vocabulary for the core features of foundations is also proposed.

Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English's proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, '-ed', to signify past tense. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.

From the late Middle Ages onwards, many regions of Western Europe experienced heightened levels of inequality in the distribution of land, caused in many cases by the consolidation of property in the hands of various interest groups.What happened to those unfortunate rural groups (often impoverished) who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? The aim of this paper is to explore then the demographic and settlement effects of land consolidation on pre-industrial rural communities.In the literature, a common connection has been drawn between land accumulation and strong population decline or stagnation in the countryside. Features associated with this downward demographic trend include high unemployment and a paucity of opportunity for work, impoverishment, settlement collapse, and a general trend of movement (permanent or temporary) towards the city in search of work. However, this outcome was not always inevitable as demonstrated in this paper. In that sense, while land consolidation may in many cases have been the motor which set in motion outward migration towards the cities, depopulation could have been avoided or limited within certain pre-industrial societies; as some societies may have been inherently more resilient than others. Thus, in this paper, a basic hypothesis is tested that land consolidation may have had a divergent impact on population trends in the countryside, which was closely dependant on the arrangement of rural societies themselves. Here two cases of peasant expropriation, land consolidation and a transition to a rural economy dominated by large farms are contrasted, and the divergent impact on population trends is analysed. In other words, this paper considers the capacity of different rural economies to maintain and retain its labouring (and now landless) population – a test performed by comparing two historical cases in the Northern part of the Low Countries.

The notion of an ‘Indian feudalism’ has predominated in the recent historiography of pre‐colonial India. This notion, in its different interpretations, has West European feudalism as the model for reference. At times the close resemblance of Indian feudalism to this model has been emphasised, while on other occasions its divergence from it has been given prominence. The manorial regime and the role of trade provide the points of departure for comparison in all such arguments. In this article the validity of ‘Indian feudalism’, whichever way it is defined, is questioned. The author compares the processes of agricultural production in medieval Europe and medieval India in terms of the respective ecologies and social structures and suggests a basic dissimilarity between them such as would make any comparison futile. He argues that unlike the structured dependence of the entire peasantry upon the lords in medieval Europe, pre‐colonial Indian society was characterised by self‐dependent or free peasant production.

Het eindwerk dat wij hebben gemaakt kadert in het behalen van het diploma bachelor in de verpleegkunde. We hebben het in dit werkstuk over het ontwikkelen van een competentieprofiel voor psychiatrisch verpleegkundigen die werkzaam zijn binnen een mobiel crisis team (mct). Dit onderwerp werd ons aangereikt door het UZ Gent. Gezien er een vraag is naar competente medewerkers is een functieprofiel op maat van de mct verpleegkundige aangewezen.

Medieval Black Death is believed to have killed up to one-third of the Western European population during the 14th century. It was identified as plague at this time, but recently the causative organism was debated because no definitive evidence has been obtained to confirm the role of Yersinia pestis as the agent of plague. We obtained the teeth of a child and two adults from a 14th century grave in France, disrupted them to obtain the pulp, and applied the new ''suicide PCR'' protocol in which the primers are used only once. There were no positive controls: Neither Yersinia nor Yersinia DNA were introduced in the laboratory. A negative result is followed by a new test using other primers; a positive result is followed by sequencing. The second and third primer pair used, coding for a part of the pla gene, generated amplicons whose sequence confirmed that it was Y. pestis in 1 tooth from the child and 19͞19 teeth from the adults. Negative controls were negative. Attempts to detect the putative alternative etiologic agents Bacillus anthracis and Rickettsia prowazekii failed. Suicide PCR avoids any risk of contamination as it uses a single-shot primer-its specificity is absolute. We believe that we can end the controversy: Medieval Black Death was plague.

In recent decades a variety of approaches have been adopted to wring as much meaning as possible out of medieval chronicles and narrative histories. Moving past the use of these texts merely as source material to reconstruct the history of the Middle Ages, scholars have begun to focus to an increasing extent on topics such as authorial intention, social and political function, audience, and textual transmission. This essay charts the development of new approaches to medieval historiography, focusing on: 1) the analysis of fictional elements in history; 2) the relationship between politics and history; and 3) the return to manuscripts as primary sites of historical communication.

What influence did climate have on disease in Late Antiquity? Natural archives of pre-instrumental temperature indicate significant summer cooling throughout the period. The coolest stretch spanned the 6th and 7th c., and corresponds startlingly to the appearance of the Justinianic Plague in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on principles from landscape epidemiology, this paper marries textual evidence for disease with palaeoclimatic data, in order to understand how gradual and dramatic climatic change, the 535-50 downturn especially, may have altered the pathogenic burden carried in Late Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to the Justinianic Plague, but the potential impacts of a changing climate on malaria and non-yersinial, non-plague, epidemics are not overlooked.

We review the history of bipolar disorders from the classical Greek period to DSM-IV. Perhaps the first person who described mania and melancholia as two different phenomenological states of one and the same disease was the Greek physician of the 1st century AD, Aretaeus of Cappadocia. The modern concept of bipolar disorders was born in France, with the publications of Falret (1851) and Baillarger (1854). Emil Kraepelin, however, in 1899, unified all types of affective disorders in 'manic-depressive insanity'; in spite of some opposition, Kraepelin's unitary concept was adopted worldwide. In the 1960s, however, the rebirth of bipolar disorders took place through the publications of Jules Angst, Carlo Perris, and George Winokur, who independently showed that there exist clinical, familial and course characteristics validating the distinction between unipolar and bipolar disorders; in addition, they verified several of the corresponding opinions of the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard school. The concept of unipolar and bipolar disorders has further advanced in the last three decades: landmark developments include the renaissance of Kraepelin's mixed states and of Kahlbaum's and Hecker's cyclothymia and related affective temperaments, the concept of soft bipolar spectrum (Akiskal), and the distinction of schizoaffective disorders into unipolar and bipolar forms.

This article evaluates 165 studies from various disciplines, published between 2000 and 2019, which in different ways link past climate variability and change to human history in medieval and early modern Europe (here, c. 700-1815 CE). Within this review, we focus on the identification and interpretation of causal links between changes in climate and in human societies. A revised climate-society impact order model of historical climate-society interactions is presented and applied to structure the findings of the past 20 years' scholarship. Despite considerable progress in research about past climate-society relations, partly expedited by new palaeoclimate data, we identify limitations to knowledge, including geographical biases, a disproportional attention to extremely cold periods, and a focus on crises. Furthermore, recent scholarship shows that the limitations with particular disciplinary approaches can be successfully overcome through interdisciplinary collaborations. We conclude the article by proposing recommendations for future directions of research in the climatic change-human history nexus.

Topographic, semantic and factual research demonstrates the existence of the commune in the city of Angers. Then, after having examined various urban communities, the importance of the popular charity is emphasized in the formation of large-scale communities, as a foundation for the commune in the multinuclear city. I1 convient de mettre tout au d6but le texte suivant qui d6crit la ville d'Angers au milieu du XIIe si6cle, puisqu'il nous donne des renseignements tr6s pr6cieux non seulement sur le paysage de la ville, mais aussi sur les institutions urbaines. Civitas igitur Andegavensium, antiquorum industria montis in edito collocata, consistit in moenibus vetustissimis, gloriam fundatorum recensens, in quadris lapidibus, modernorum parcitatem accusans, in tenaciori cemento, sabuli condiendi peritiam penitus deperiisse praetendens. Pars urbis hominum manu facta munitior vergit ad nothum. Natura loci pars inexpugnabilis respicit ad occasum; quoque latus occidentale vicinatur australi, domus surgit spatiosissima, digna satis in nomen transire palatii si thalami, regio sumptu, regia disciplina, regio moderamine recenter exstructi, non excrescerent in immensum, hinc ad aquas praeterfluas, hinc ad montana vitibus conservata prospectum habentes. Rursus ut civitas multo capacior millia hominum concurrentia sub una confoederatione concluderet, monetem postitum in vicino populis ad inhabitandum exposuit; quorum si fortunam attendimus, felicius incolunt suburbana quam urbem. Hironori MIYAMATSU is in charge of Occidental Economic History at Kurume University. He began with the study of the medieval history of Poitou, especially the problem of castellanies. After three years research in France, he received his doctorate (3rd cycle) for a dissertation on boroughs and burgesses in medieval France, and later he published several articles on the same subject. At present he is concentrating on an approach to popular mentalities through the cartularies, and after that he will return to his primary thesis on Poitou.

The first 100 years of the Dominican order witnessed the transition from a small group of men dedicated to preaching against the Albigensian heresy in southern France, to a transnational order with thousands of members affecting nearly every area of Latin Christendom. This essay is a short bibliographical overview of the state of Dominican studies for the first 100 years of their existence. It touches briefly upon the foundation, the idea of poverty, University study, preaching, inquisitions, female spirituality, and the Dominican relationship to the papacy. It offers a look both at the necessary sources for a study of the Dominicans, as well as a look at new directions in scholarship about the order.

Animals and products derived from different organs of their bodies have constituted part of the inventory of medicinal substances used in various cultures since ancient times. This article reviews the history of healing with animals in the Levant (the Land of Israel and parts of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, defined by the Muslims in the Middle Ages as Bilad al-Sham) throughout history.

Apart from an early case report from China (13th century) and later artistic contributions, the ®rst observations on insects and other arthropods as forensic indicators were documented in Germany and France during mass exhumations in the late 1880s by Reinhard and Hofmann, whom we propose recognizing as co-founders of the discipline. After the French publication of Me Âgnin's popular book on the applied aspects of forensic entomology, the concept quickly spread to Canada and the US. At the time, researchers recognized that the lack of systematic observations of forensically important insects stood in the way of their use as indicators of postmortem interval. General advances in insect taxonomy, and ecology helped close this gap over the following decades.