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.

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 ...

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...

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.

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.

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.