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In medieval Passion cycles represented in Czech, Slovak (former Hungary), and Polish murals dating from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries one may observe a number of-gestures which appear in respective scenes starting from the Entry into Jerusalem and ending with the Entombment (laying in the sepulchre). The most significant gesture in the entry scene is the outstretched hand of Christ riding a donkey. It is the language of gesture used since antiquity, transmitted through Byzantine and Italian art (including Giotto’s Entry into Jerusalem in his Arena Chapel frescoes), and transferred into art north of the Alps.

This chapter concentrates on England during and immediately following the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is well known that Chaucer himself dealt extensively with the sacrament of penance in his Parson's Tale. The chapter focuses on the works of John Burgh and William Lyndwood and concludes with a brief review of their connection to Chaucer's works. Both men were writing for an English audience, but they were abreast of the latest Continental commentators. For an understanding of their ideas of penance, it will be useful first to review the authorities upon which they drew. The chapter then looks at a sequence of important works from the mid-12th century and early 13th century that treated penance and confession and that acquired significant glosses. Keywords: fifteenth century; Geoffrey Chaucer; John Burgh; penitential theology; William Lyndwood

In the fifteenth-century Liberty of Bruges, a rural castellany in the county of Flanders, a bounty system was established to promote the elimination of wolves. Prize money made the wolf not only an unwanted but also an actively tracked animal, a combination that resulted in its wholescale slaughter. Researchers who have previously examined these bounties believed that they were primarily part of a system of pest control. They did not realise, however, that the inhabitants who came forward to claim the bounty killed wolves not to clear the Liberty of Bruges of vermin but for entirely different reasons, which depended on the context in which encounters with wolves occurred. In this text, I use the records concerning the bounty system established by the Liberty of Bruges to understand the complex relationships between humans and wolves in this fifteenth-century castellany. I first introduce the long series of records; thereafter, I attempt to identify reasons for killing wolves in the Liberty of Bruges and the contexts in which such killings occurred.

Fifteenth-century Italian urban and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate the laity’s conspicuous consumption of dress, sometimes resulting in canon law petitions for exemption on the grounds of custom. By exploiting an ambivalent definition of custom according to status, wealthy men and especially women successfully sidestepped regulation. Critics of luxury such as the Franciscan Observants, who encountered similar arguments in confession, countered this permissive understanding of custom with alternate criteria for determining proper dress tied to the morality of the economic behavior that made luxurious dress possible. Overlapping definitions of custom drawn from canon law and moral theology thus provided both fashionable people and their confessors a way to negotiate and contest their status.

Most polyphonic compositions of the fifteenth century have at least one voice which begins without rests. The exceptions usually use the rests to create a musical upbeat, potentially motivated by t...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a long and reliable run of information, and we transform this into annual time-series of prices. We employ a regime switching model that allows for boom and crash episodes to characterise and test for bubble dynamics. The results are consistent with the presence of periodic, partially collapsing speculative bubbles in the market for agricultural land, but there is no such evidence in the context of messuages. Our findings demonstrate that the medieval English property market shares important features with its contemporary counterpart, for instance with the recent so-called ‘barn bubble’.

"Research on late-medieval religiosity in Central and Western Europe has shown that religious books were not only possessed, but also read, and sometimes even copied or disseminated by laymen. The need for a better definition of the relationship between the laity and the religious text leads to the formulation and intensive discussion of concepts such as devotional reading, culture of religious reading, or vernacular theology. Several examples of works that belonged to late-medieval Transylvanian laymen suggest the opportunity and, at the same time, the need to ask whether similar dynamics of pious behaviour can be discussed in their case. In order to provide a convincing answer, this study proposes an analysis of these books from at least three perspectives: theme, language, formal characteristics. The most interesting information is offered, however, by property notes, which suggest that the devotional potential of the book was not activated by reading, but rather by donation. By offering solutions to the everyday necessities of ecclesiastical institutions, these gifts were designed to ensure personal salvation as well. In order to support this hypothesis, I will also address another category of sources from which mentions regarding this kind of donations can be recovered, i.e. last wills. Keywords: religious books, devotional practices, pious donations, last wills, laity "

This study of the communication of the Livonian Branch of the Teutonic Order with the king of Denmark and the Grand Duke of Lithuania focuses on diplomatic cooperation between the Order’s Livonian and Prussian branches. Though the Grand Master largely represented the Livonian Master in communication with the Danish king during the first half of the fifteenth century, this took place because the Danish king preferred to communicate Livonian matters to the Grand Master. In the second half of the century, the king addressed the Livonian Master directly and the Grand Master lost his role as a mediator of communication between the king and the Livonian Master. The communication with the Grand Duke of Lithuania can be described as forming a triangle, where both the Grand Master and the Livonian Master were in frequent correspondence with the Grand Duke and would represent each other if needed. The second half of the fifteenth century saw a tendency toward excluding the Grand Master from communication between the Livonian Master and the Grand Duke, probably due to the diverging political goals of the Prussian and the Livonian branches of the Order. As a concluding generalization, one can say that cooperation between these two branches of the Teutonic Order in diplomatic correspondence was largely determined by the preferences of their partners in communication as well as by the compatibility of their respective political stances.

In its first section, the article examines the creation of two major Sufi institutions, the khanqāhs of Shaikh Jalāluddīn Tabrīzī (d. 1225) known as Badi dargā h and Shaikh Nūr Quṭb Ālam (d. 1410) as Chhotī dargā h. Further, for the smooth functioning and maintenance, the rulers of Ilyas Shahi dynasty and other independent rulers of Bengal endowed rent-free lands to the respective khanqāhs presently known as Bāis Hazārī and Shash Hazārī waqf estates. The present study also attempts to look into a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the sanads concerning with these grants were confirmed and continued by the Mughal emperors, Nawab Nazims of Bengal and British officials that testify to the importance of the place during the pre-colonial times. The extensive property enjoyed by the mutawallis of these dargā hs continued till date. The focus of the article in its second section, on the historical changes of these waqf estates basing on official records from these institutions, court proceedings of the litigations, historical works by the mutawallis and other connected histories. This examination is followed by a discussion of the gradual decline of these institutions and subsequent patronage for the education and other measures of welfare for the society.

Nowadays, there are many applications of text mining over corpora from different languages. However, most of them are based on texts in prose, lacking applications that work with poetry texts. An example of an application of text mining in poetry is the usage of features derived from their individual words in order to capture the lexical, sublexical and interlexical meaning, and infer the General Affective Meaning (GAM) of the text. However, even though this proposal has been proved as useful for poetry in some languages, there is a lack of studies for both Spanish poetry and for highly-structured poetic compositions such as sonnets. This article presents a study over an annotated corpus of Spanish sonnets, in order to analyse if it is possible to build features from their individual words for predicting their GAM. The purpose of this is to model sonnets at an affective level. The article also analyses the relationship between the GAM of the sonnets and the content itself. For this, we consider the content from a psychological perspective, identifying with tags when a sonnet is related to a specific term. Then, we study how GAM changes according to each of those psychological terms. The corpus used contains 274 Spanish sonnets from authors of different centuries, from 15th to 19th. This corpus was annotated by different domain experts. The experts annotated the poems with affective and lexico-semantic features, as well as with domain concepts that belong to psychology. Thanks to this, the corpus of sonnets can be used in different applications, such as poetry recommender systems, personality text mining studies of the authors, or the usage of poetry for therapeutic purposes., 24 pages, 3 figures, 17 tables

The completion of the construction of the foundation of socialism in the USSR means that the Leninist question of "who - whom" has been resolved against capitalism, in favor of socialism completely and irrevocably both in the city and in the countryside this is how the current stage of the 17th Party Conference determined. anniversary of October, reinforced this definition.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, successive archbishops of Salzburg attempted to consolidate their power and implement ecclesiastical reforms by means of commissioned printed liturgical books. Achieving uniform worship, however, proved difficult. In editions of the Missale Salisburgense, the revised musical mass prefaces required typographically challenging red notation. The addition or omission of coloured notes by printers and users reveals that the technical limitations of printing together with variable performance practices hindered liturgical uniformitas.

The positive impact of daylight on various forms of life is well understood. The daylight conditions a person experiences inside a building strongly depend on the character of the glazing. Contemporary windows maximize the transmission of visible daylight. In post-medieval times glassmakers were confronted with less pure materials. Driven by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation they were at the same time challenged by the demand for increased daylight. Luckily, technological evolutions allowed the production of thinner windows. It is currently an open question if glassmakers in the (Southern) Low Countries during the booming economic period from the fifteenth to seventeenth century made use of the interplay between material and fabrication properties to bring light into the darkness. Therefore, this paper links the impact of glass purity and production technique to light transmission for a well-diagnosed group of excavated glass window pieces from the castle of Middelburg-in-Flanders and a set of roundels, all dating back to between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and explores what factors have influenced this technological improvement. A non-destructive approach making use of UV–vis–NIR absorption spectroscopy unveiled that the more recent material is less pure compared to the older dated material but that light transmission was maximized due to the applied production technique.

This article examines the motif of the epic hero being raised by an animal foster parent in late medieval texts. This long-established commonplace, most famously exemplified by the Roman she-wolf, was a familiar theme in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when ancient history was much in vogue, and miniatures depicting Romulus and Remus abounded. Although animal suckling, particularly by goats, was a common medieval practice, the literary figure of the animal foster parent only gained a firm foothold in vernacular medieval texts in the late Middle Ages, when it became the topos of numerous epic-style narratives. After having established the success of this motif by examining several examples from the canon of gestes tardives, this essay goes on to study the fourteenth-century epic text Tristan de Nanteuil, in which two child figures, Tristan and his half-brother Doon, are wrenched from their parents and raised by strangers. This text establishes both a parallel, and a competition, between human and animal foster parents. By way of a conclusion, the essay focuses on the deliberate sidelining of the animal foster parent-theme in the late romances. Acclaimed, debated and ultimately rejected, the animal foster parent in late medieval literature seems to have been a generic marker of epic, rather than romance literature.

Late medieval and early modern diplomats and intermediaries drew on the authoritative language of prophecy, a language that conveyed divine threats to the current order, or divine sanctions of a new world. Because apocalyptic discourse has the capacity to conjure affective associations through its redemptive potential, its use in a diplomatic context seems to have been aimed at shaping the way individuals perceived the issues at hand. Based on a number of case studies from both Christian and Islamic contexts, this contribution renders it clear that it was precisely these cultural and political commonalities that made prophecy a recognizable political and diplomatic discourse. As a totalizing religio-political discourse, prophecy articulated the aspirations of a multitude of competing universalizing imperial projects that were emerging in the fifteenth century, which required diplomatic mediation.

The article aims to present the main features of the character of the Morlachs living in the Venetian Dalmatia during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries. The research approach focuses on Venetian sources, published and unpublished, therefore the portray of the Morlachs built up in this study is an external one. According to it the Morlachs appear as nomadic people who develop occasional or permanent activities in the Venetian hinterland of Dalmatia. Either they are presented by the sources as shepherds, soldiers, immigrants, merchants, criminals or in many other situations, the Morlachs became agents of coexistence in the permeable area of the Venetian-Ottoman border. This is why, one of the ideas promoted by this study is that the survival of the Morlach`s presence in Dalmatia was assured by the political instability.

An exhaustive analysis of the very last words drafted by one of the most powerful noblewomen of the fifteenth century, Duchess Aldonza de Mendoza (d. 1435), reveals that her project to transform the Hieronymite monastery of Lupiana into a pantheon might have been connected to the birth of a child outside her marriage, more precisely, to a son who had remained hidden until the moment of Aldonza’s death. The aim of this study is to offer a new reading of the Duchess’s mausoleum, a pantheon planned to showcase her lineage by focusing exclusively on the female line. Further, this paper rediscovers two panels of the lost main altarpiece of the monastery of Lupiana commissioned by Aldonza de Mendoza and proposes an allegorical portrait of the Duchess represented as the wife of Pontius Pilate. Aldonza’s project reveals itself as crucial for understanding the self-fashioning mechanisms employed by late medieval women, as well as the ways in which visual culture was used in the shaping of female memorial programmes.

This article examines the history of the child murder libel – the claim that Jews abducted and murdered Christian children for religious or magical purposes – in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492. After analysing the documentary evidence and the number of alleged cases from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, this article seeks to answer the following questions: Are the medieval Iberian child murder libel narratives just bland retellings of narratives found elsewhere in Europe, as has been argued, or did they develop peculiarities that set them apart?

The paper deals with the particular linguistic variety spoken by some servants in Stefano De Franchi’s comedies (1714‒1785). After briefly hinting at some fundamental aspects of his production (§1), we examine the text of his comedies (§2) and analyze the servants’ language. This variety presents numerous traits which do not belong to Genoese (§3), some others which will spread in the urban variety only between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (§4) and many others which had been expelled from it between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (§5). Finally (§6), the linguistic analysis of Gerusalemme Liberata’s Genoese translation (1755) will allow us to order chronologically the linguistic relics of §5.

Resumo: A colonialidade do poder, do saber e do ser se perpetuam no imaginário moderno através do avanço da mercantilização massiva sobre as plantas, a terra, a água, o conhecimento. Esse processo, que se inicia no século 15, com a constituição da América, avança desde então sobre os territórios e os conhecimentos dos povos que foram colonizados. Nesse sentido, analiso um acontecimento que ocorreu no ano de 2014, no Encontro da Região Sul de Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais, em Curitiba, Paraná, no qual se estabeleceu um embate cosmopolítico sobre um projeto de transformação dos saberes tradicionais em patentes. Essa proposta envolveu, por um lado, agentes do Estado, do mercado e da ciência, que almejavam convertê-los em fonte de lucro, e, por outro, os povos e comunidades tradicionais para quem esses conhecimentos são coletivos e circulam entre si, compondo seus modos de existência. Abstract: The coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being has been perpetuated in the modern imaginary through the advance of the massive mercantilism of everything. That process, which started in the fifteenth century with the discovery of America, has spread since then throughout territories and knowledge from the peoples who were colonized. In this regard, I analyze an event that occurred in 2014, at the Conference of the Southern Region for Traditional Peoples and Communities, in Curitiba/Paraná, in which a cosmopolitical conflict took place, regarding a project to transform traditional knowledge into patents. This initiative involved, on one side, the State, Market and Science, all aiming at transforming them into sources of profit, and on the other side, the traditional peoples and communities for whom this knowledge is collective and circulates freely among them, composing their modes of existence. Resumen: La colonialidad del poder, del saber y del ser se perpetúa en el imaginario moderno por medio del avance de la mercantilización masiva de todo. Este proceso, que se inició en el siglo XV con la constitución de América, avanza desde entonces sobre los territorios y sobre los conocimientos de los pueblos que fueron colonizados. En este sentido, analizo un hecho que tuvo lugar en 2014, en el Encuentro de la Región Sur de Pueblos y Comunidades Tradicionales, en Curitiba, Paraná, en el que se estableció un embate cosmopolítico sobre un proyecto de transformación de los saberes tradicionales en patentes. Esta propuesta involucró agentes del estado, mercado y ciencia, quienes anhelaban convertirlos en fuentes de lucro, en contraposición a los pueblos y comunidades tradicionales, quienes defendían que sus conocimientos son colectivos y circulan entre ellos, componiendo sus modos de existencia.

Migration and admixture history of populations have always been curious and an interesting theme. The West Coast of India harbours a rich diversity, bestowing various ethno-linguistic groups, with many of them having well-documented history of migrations. The Roman Catholic is one such distinct group, whose origin was much debated. While some historians and anthropologists relating them to ancient group of Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, others relating them for being members of the Jews Lost Tribes in the first Century migration to India. Historical records suggests that this community was later forcibly converted to Christianity by the Portuguese in Goa during the Sixteenth Century. Till date, no genetic study was done on this group to infer their origin and genetic affinity. Hence, we analysed 110 Roman Catholics from three different locations of West Coast of India including Goa, Kumta and Mangalore using both uniparental and autosomal markers to understand their genetic history. We found that the Roman Catholics have close affinity with the Indo-European linguistic groups, particularly Brahmins. Additionally, we detected genetic signal of Jews in the linkage disequilibrium-based admixture analysis, which was absent in other Indo-European populations, who are inhabited in the same geographical regions. Haplotype-based analysis suggests that the Roman Catholics consist of South Asian-specific ancestry and showed high drift. Ancestry-specific historical population size estimation points to a possible bottleneck around the time of Goan inquisition (fifteenth century). Analysis of the Roman Catholics data along with ancient DNA data of Neolithic and bronze age revealed that the Roman Catholics fits well in a basic model of ancient ancestral composition, typical of most of the Indo-European caste groups of India. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis suggests that most of the Roman Catholics have aboriginal Indian maternal genetic ancestry; while the Y chromosomal DNA analysis indicates high frequency of R1a lineage, which is predominant in groups with higher ancestral North Indian (ANI) component. Therefore, we conclude that the Roman Catholics of Goa, Kumta and Mangalore regions are the remnants of very early lineages of Brahmin community of India, having Indo-Europeans genetic affinity along with cryptic Jewish admixture, which needs to be explored further.

Following the Fourth Crusade, one of the Frankish states that were established in former Byzantine territories was the Principality of Morea, in the Peloponnese. A strict hierarchy consisting of the prince, the barons, and the fief-knights quickly implemented a feudal system and imposed it on the locals; towers were erected and settlements were relocated. Fieldwork in the Patras area, in the northwestern Peloponnese, has focused on identifying the implementation of the feudal system on the level of the barony and that of the fief. Data are drawn from surface surveys and from historical records, including Ottoman tax registers. Spatial analysis in GIS is used to examine the role of the towers in the economic and social life of the subordinate settlements and how the exercise of power manifests itself in the landscape.

This article focuses on Maḥzor Vitry, a work considered the major source of the liturgical rite, laws, and customs of the lost Jewish communities of northern France and, more broadly, constituting a landmark of intellectual creativity in medieval Franco-Germany. Compiled sometime in the second half of the eleventh century by Simḥah ben Samuel of Vitry (d. 1105), one of Rashi’s (1040/1–1105) closest disciples, the original manuscript of the Maḥzor Vitry is now lost. However, thirteen copies of the work, dated between the mid-twelfth and the second half of the fourteenth century, are still preserved in public and private collections worldwide. The only surviving work of its kind (from the school of Rashi) to combine liturgy and law, this dual-natured work can be regarded as a liturgical-halakhic compendium, rather than a traditional maḥzor. The aim of this study is to examine the corpus of extant manuscripts, describing their legal content and textual transmission, as well as their internal organization. In addition, it will consider unrelated addenda from a gamut of literary genres that were appended to these manuscripts from the first half of the thirteenth century onwards. A sample list of eight comparable liturgical-halakhic compendia from Franco-Germany (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) are also briefly described, demonstrating that the dual and encyclopedic nature of these liturgical-halakhic compendia are not limited to Maḥzor Vitry and, therefore, can be viewed as a highly popular genre, used by the rabbinical and intellectual elite of medieval Franco-Germany.

The replacement of rents in kind by payments in money is considered by many historians as a marker of the commercialization of the economy and thus of its modernization. The case of medieval Normandy does not confirm this development, however: the sources testify to a common use of money since the end of the eleventh century, but also to the persistence until the fifteenth century of payment in kind, including in the field of credit. The article examines the case of the Caen region, for which there is abundant evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of annuities purchased with money from peasants in exchange for annual repayments in grain. This system allowed a significant transfer of monetary value to the countryside, while guaranteeing the supply of urban markets and welfare institutions. Although these contracts were usually secured by pledges on plots of land, they did not lead to the expropriation of peasants, but rather promoted the growth of credit markets in the countryside.

The existence of football has paved the way for this study to find the football registers types. This linguistic part explains about language and the usage. The researcher implemented the theories of register from Biber and Conrad (2009) and Biber and Finegan(1994). This investigation uses the interviews via whatsApp to gather the data from 5 participants. These people were the alumni from university located in Yogyakarta. After the information of interview is got, the researcher analyzed it. The results showed 16 types as follows. First finding is actions. Second result shows positions. Third finding reveals places. Fourth result is championships. Fifth finding is supporters types. Sixth result reveals clubs. Seventh finding shows tools. Eighth result has business in football. Nineth finding is referee types. Tenth result indicates impacts of fouls. Eleventh finding is special matches. Twelveth result shows times. Thirteenth finding reveals honorifics. Fourteenth result has name. Fifteenth finding is impacts of less achievements. Sixteenth result has formations.

The article looks at the transfer of knowledge between Judaism and Christianity in the Renaissance, a period characterized by the encounter of different cultures and belief systems. In particular, it will focus on the Christian Kabbalah, which channels various philosophical and sapiential traditions into a universal, and at the same time, plural vision of wisdom. This convergence of ideas resulted, on the one hand, in the elaboration of translations, adaptations, and vulgarization of Jewish texts and, on the other, in the development of new interpretations. This is a characteristic of the collected writings of Pierleone of Spoleto, which involved the transformative communication of Jewish translators and the creative reception of Christian humanists. Of these manuscripts, we will examine the annotations concerning the sefirot, which are an excellent example of the reinterpretation of Jewish thought through a typically humanistic perspective.

The heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of the most problematic residues of the Polish past. After World War II, Poland lost its so-called Eastern Borderlands, which meant a break with a specific state tradition, the most important link of which was the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The potential and significance of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains an important topic of Polish identity discourse. One of the issues addressed in that context is the imperial character of that state. The importance of this issue goes beyond the space of historiographic debates. It also concerns the place and role of Poland in the world from both historical and contemporary perspective. A common element of various narratives around the national-state status is myth. Myth is a story told for the needs of a specific social group, but it also refers to some of the supra-class conditions that could be described as the ontology of national being. Thanks to this, it can be treated as one of the tools used to study not only self-perceptions of the community, but also the interactions that occur between these self-images and real determinants of the community’s status. According to the author of the article, postcolonial studies create a possibility of integrated research on Polish imperiality, since they combine a number of different competencies necessary to comprehensively cover this broad topic. The sphere of national mythology is combined from a postcolonial perspective with a vast sphere of social facts and real-life conditions.

This article studies the use of what was known as grana (carmine dye from cochineal insects) in Western Andalusia during the fifteenth century. Through the value of grana which was used to obtain the precious red pigment for dyeing wool and silk, we will reflect on the connection between the ecosystem where this natural resource was collected, the peasants, the governance of cities and towns, as well as the role of the market.

espanolLa nocion de tributo justo, convertida en concepto clave del pensamiento fiscal bajomedieval, hubo de marcar la orientacion de la politica hacendistica de los nacientes Estados monarquicos, como sugiere una iniciativa desarrollada por la realeza castellana en el transito de los siglos XIV al XV, basada en el proyecto de consecucion de nuevas rentas a traves de la busqueda de minas y tesoros. Para ello, se parte de tres documentos del Archivo General de Simancas, que, aunque carecen de fecha, cabria situar hipoteticamente durante el reinado de Enrique III de Castilla (1390-1406), los cuales son contextualizados en el marco de la politica fiscal de la monarquia castellana y de las lineas de accion politica del tercer Trastamara. El estudio permite sugerir el interes de Enrique III por impulsar nuevas fuentes de renta, mas alla del incremento de los tributos, como garantia de una actuacion acorde al ideal regio bajomedieval. EnglishThe notion of fair taxation, which became a key concept in late-medieval fiscal thought, marked the focus of taxation policies in the new monarchical states, as suggested by an initiative developed by the Castilian royalty from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries. This initiative was based on a project to acquire new revenue by searching for mines and treasures. To this end, three documents from the Archivo General de Simancas are used as a starting point and although they are not dated they can be hypothetically traced to the reign of Enrique III of Castile (1390-1406). These documents are contextualised within the framework of the Castilian monarchy’s fiscal policy and of the course of political action of the third Trastamara king. The study suggests Enrique III’s interest in boosting new sources of revenue, beyond increasing taxes, as a measure to guarantee his political leverage in line with the royal ideal of the late Middle Ages.

Sifting through business accounts and public records, this article demonstrates the involvement of Medici Bank in the military industry of the fifteenth century, shedding new light on the final yea...

The island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands was first settled by people from northern Africa in the first millennium BC and then colonized by Spain in the late fifteenth century. This colonial le...

The location, size, and structure of the farmlands and hydraulic systems built by the Indigenous inhabitants of Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain, remain unknown. This hampers our ability to understand how they organized agricultural production and how European settlers transformed local landscapes to build commercial plantations in the late fifteenth century. This paper combines an analysis of archival sources with the study of agricultural landscapes and practices to identify and describe the fields that were employed by the first colonists of Aguimes and Temisas, and to derive information about the location, design, and management of the pre-Hispanic farmlands.

The first illustrated manuscript on architecture was produced in the fifteenth century by a sculptor turned architect, known as Filarete (1400–1469). Written as a dialogical narrative, taking place...

In the article “Settlement on Lusignan Cyprus after the Latin Conquest: The Accounts of Cypriot and other Chronicles and the Wider Context” the narratives of various chronicles of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries on settlement in Cyprus in the years following the Latin conquest, from the end of the twelfth to the early thirteenth century, will be examined and compared. The details provided by the chronicles, where the information given derived from, the biases present in the various accounts, the extent to which they are accurate, especially in cases where they are corroborated or refuted by documentary evidence, will all be discussed. The chronicles that will be referred to are the thirteenth century continuation of William of Tyre, that provides the fullest account of the settlement of Latin Christians and others on Cyprus after the Latin conquest, the fifteenth century chronicle of Leontios Makhairas, the anonymous chronicle of ‘Amadi’ that is probably dateable to the early sixteenth century although for the section on thirteenth century Cypriot history it draws on earlier sources and the later sixteenth century chronicle of Florio Bustron. Furthermore, the Chorogra a and the Description of Stephen de Lusignan, two chronicles postdating the conquest of Cyprus by the Ottoman Turks in 1570, will also be referred to on the subject of settlement in thirteenth century Cyprus. By way of comparison, the final part of the paper examined the extent to which the evidence of settlement in other Mediterranean lands derives chiefly from chronicles or from documentary sources. In conclusion, it can be stated that the various accounts of settlement on Cyprus following its cession to King Guy of Jerusalem in 1192 show differences in terms of the value of the fiefs, the geographical regions from which the settlers came and the types of properties which were granted to them. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem resembles Cyprus in that the source material for early Latin settlement is narrative, not documentary. But this is not the case for the Venetian Crete and the Hospitaller Rhodes, where the source materials recording the arrival of the first Latin settlers are wholly documentary., Artykuł „Osadnictwo na Cyprze Lusignanów po podboju łacińskim: analiza kronik cypryjskich i innych w szerszym kontekście” stawia sobie za cel przebadanie i porównanie relacji z różnych kronik z XIII do XVI wieku, dotyczących osadnictwa na Cyprze po podboju łacińskim, czyli od końca XII do początku XIII wieku. Omówione zostaną również szczegółowe informacje zawarte w tych kronikach, zarówno pod kątem rozbieżności, które są wynikiem uprzedzeń i stronniczości, jak również pod względem wiarygodności, która zostanie zweryfikowana na podstawie dostępnych źródeł z epoki. Źródła narracyjne, o których mowa, to XIII-wieczna kontynuacja kroniki Wilhelma z Tyru, która dostarcza najpełniejszego opisu osadnictwa łacińskiego i innego na Cyprze po podboju łacińskim; XV-wieczna kronika Leontiosa Makhairasa; anonimowa kronika znana jako „Amadi”, którą można prawdopodobnie datować na początek XVI wieku, chociaż w części dotyczącej XIII-wiecznej historii Cypru czerpie z wcześniejszych źródeł; kronika Florio Bustrona z XVI wieku; dwie kroniki Stefana z Lusignan – „Chorografia” i „Opis Cypru”– obydwie datowane na okres po podboju Cypru przez Turków osmańskich w 1570 roku.W końcowej części artykułu zbadano, w jakim stopniu informacje o osadnictwie na innych terenach śródziemnomorskich pochodzą z kronik, a w jakim ze źródeł dokumentowych. Podsumowując, można stwierdzić, że różne relacje o osadnictwie na Cyprze po przekazaniu wyspy w 1192 roku Gwidonowi z Lusignan (Guy de Lusignan), królowi Jerozolimy, wykazują różnice pod względem wartości lenn, regionów geograficznych, z których przybyli osadnicy, oraz rodzajów posiadłości, które zostały im przyznane. Łacińskie królestwo Jerozolimy przypomina Cypr pod tym względem, że baza źródłowa dotycząca wczesnego osadnictwa łacińskiego oparta została na materiałach narracyjnych, a nie na dokumentach. Inaczej mają się sprawy w przypadku weneckiej Krety i Rodos pod władaniem Zakonu Szpitalników – tam informacje o przybyciu pierwszych osadników łacińskich zawarte są w całości w źródłach dokumentowych.

During the investigation of the Research Group Señoríos Medievales Segovianos in the Archive of the Diocese of Segovia an unusual document was digitized. It was a building license for Bishop Juan Arias Dávila to improve University facilities. This document was written in a different script: The Calligraphic Courtesan Script. related to traditional Courtesan script; this document was written in an especially clear writing style not connected with the usual cursive gothic styles in Castilla. This article tries to connect this clearness in the writing style with the presence of Juan Parix from Heidelberg in Segovia, who brought the first Spanish printing press to Segovia.

Estudio del Hostal y la Casa adscrita a Blanca de Trastámara, infanta de Navarra y, tras su matrimonio con Enrique de Castilla en 1440, princesa de Asturias. Figura escasamente atendida por la historiografía, para la elaboración de este trabajo se ha reunido una importante documentación de archivo, en su mayor parte inédita, que ha permitido conocer los espacios de servicio curiales que atendieron a la joven princesa desde su niñez y profundizar en las intrigas que en su entorno se desarrollaron en el marco más amplio de las complejas relaciones políticas que Castilla, Navarra y Aragón mantuvieron durante la primera mitad del siglo XV.

In a recent article, Kunz and Mills (2021) report 10 drawn, a speo finished, turquoise blue, IIa40 beads manufactured in Venice and recovered from three late precontact sites in the Alaskan Arctic. They argue that these beads date to the fifteenth century, predating Columbus's arrival in the Americas. This conclusion is certainly in error because beads of this type were not manufactured prior to approximately AD 1560. The historical and archaeological evidence for this dating is substantial. Additionally, the elemental and radiocarbon evidence presented by Kunz and Mills (2021) supports a late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century date for these beads.

Petrarch’s letter de Ascensu Montis Ventosi has long served as the founding document of “renaissance humanism”. Since thebeginning of renaissance studies in the mid-nineteenth century, the letter has become almost a talisman for summoning the new, secular spirit of humanism that spontaneously arrived in Italy in the fourteenth century, took hold of the hearts and minds of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and led to cataclysmic cultural, religious, and political changes in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This reading, still common among non-specialists, especially in the English-speaking world, is overly simplistic and ignores Petrarch’s profound debt to classical and Christian tradition, obscuring the fundamentally religious character of the letter. This article examines how scholars came to assign the letter so much importance and offers an interpretation that stresses Petrarch’s continuity with tradition and his desire to revitalize rather than reinvent the traditions of Christian scholarship and contemplation.

The selection of research methods depends on many factors, including a number of finds, their state of preservation, and research problems discussed. In the archaeological studies of the medieval leather objects each stage of the research process is important: from recovering a source from cultural layers, securing and conserving a find, to analysing formal features and preparing detailed typologies, what ultimately leads to an attempt to recreate selected historical issues. In this article it is presenting a method for studying medieval archaeological finds made of leather (mainly footwear). It is an attempt to find research methods for presenting the development line of the medieval shoemaking in the period from the turn of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth century until the end of the fifteenth century. In the case of large assemblages consisting of hundreds, or even thousands of objects, obviously finished items and their components come to the fore. In such cases, the rest of objects referred to as ‘fragments’, ‘pieces of leather’, ‘unidentified objects’ are usually marginalised. In the studies of economic phenomena, however, products cannot be perceived as less important, because each of them might be a valuable source of information, depending on questions asked. The hierarchy of importance of items (or only their features) should change with the research progress and with the issues examined.

This article examines codicological evidence for the presence of an illustrated Persian cosmography (‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt) (British Library Add 23564) at the fifteenth-century Bahmani court (1347–1...

This paper examines MS D. 92 of the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras/Chennai, which contains the works of ‘Iyani, a late fifteenth century Shirazi poet and historian. ‘Iyani had migrated to the Deccan, and wrote in Persian in the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528), receiving the patronage of both Sultan Mahmud Shah (r. 1482–924) and Habib al-Din Muhibballah, a descendant of the Sufi saint Shah Ni‘matallah Vali of Kirman. The paper investigates ‘Iyani’s works, which comprise qasidas, ghazals, ruba‘iyyat and two mathnavīs, the Jangnama-i Shahrukh and the Fathnama-i Mahmud Shahi. The latter, recording the defeat of a rebellion led by the Abyssinian commander in Gulbarga, Dastur Dinar, sheds new light on the political and factional environment in the final stages of Bahmani rule. ‘Iyani’s works represent a new source for the cultural, literary and political history of the fifteenth century Deccan. Postprint

The Portuguese engagement with the continent of Africa following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was framed, among numerous conditions, as a crusade (Portuguese: cruzada). However, crusading influences on Portuguese expansion are often sidelined in favour of economic motives. Unlike North and north-east Africa's connected histories with the Crusades (1095–1291) and the continual role of crusading in the following centuries, the fifteenth century offered a new arena. Kongo's adoption of Christianity in the late fifteenth century was the first time that an African power can be viewed as engaging in crusading ideology as a Latin Christian power. Significantly, Kongo was converted by Portuguese missionaries who were undertaking their own crusade. Yet, the crusading influence on Kongo's early development of its Christianity has hitherto been overlooked in Africanist scholarship. Similarly, the situation in Kongo remains a lacuna in Crusades scholarship too. This article calls for a closer discussion between the histories of Africa and the Crusades through the case of Kongo and comparative African examples, such as Benin and Ndongo, to highlight the need to better connect these histories.

This article reviews the changing reception of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma between the fourteenth century and modern times. I argue that the book had little influence...

The port of Leixões was built in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the Douro port in North Portugal. Despite the importance of the Douro port in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (during the age of discoveries) and later in the eighteenth century with the port wine trade, it had several restrictions – namely, geomorphic and hydrodynamic features. The first studies of the new port of Leixões date back to the fifteenth century, but it was in the eighteenth century that a strong effort was made to deliver a viable alternative to the Douro port. Due to the magnitude of the work, it was considered one of the biggest engineering works of the nineteenth century. A diversity of structures are addressed, from vertical rock/concrete quay walls to piled quays and dolphins, pointing out the problems and describing the solutions. This work aims to describe the construction of the second most important port of Portugal, whose docks were totally excavated on the mouth of the River Leça, and its developments in over 120 years, focusing on the main geotechnical problems met and their mitigation. In fact, harbour geotechnics could learn from this outstanding engineering experience, and the Leixões port may contribute to that knowledge.

The concept of justice came to be transformed in the medieval era in the Latin West, particularly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, due to ongoing shifts in the political and institutional fields. Monarchies became institutionalized due to the influence of debates proposed by the University of Bologna generating the construction of a legal culture systematizing the concepts and criteria for the exercise of justice without abandoning the relationship between these theories and the social context to which it was destined. Municipal representatives came to play an increasingly important role in events such as the rise of the Joanine Dynasty in Portugal (1383-5) and their aspirations and worldview would be sought out as one of the currencies of exchange for the granting of support, reflected in the legislation and in the legal collections developed by descendants of John I of Avis, such as the Alfonsine Ordinations. This constituted a space in which private rights overlapped with the Common Law emanating from the royal court and which crystallized a tendency towards Portuguese legal singularity promoting the hierarchization of the sources of law available in Latin. This work is developed from historical criticism applied to documentary content, Las Siete Partidas del muy noble Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio, Livro das Leis e Posturas, and the Ordenações Afonsinas.

Byzantine civilization did not know the printed book: it was a civilization of manuscripts and manuscript books (codices) made of papyrus, parchment, and paper. The ancient Greeks bequeathed to the Byzantines the word Logos (in multiple meanings – word, speech, mind, reason, supreme principle, the divine creative power, the word of God, the word as the bearer of life and light), as the greatest treasure. The Rhomaioi (Byzantines) polished the skill of use of words and the ability to persuade with words to their full glory. However, the use of words within Byzantine civilization flourished completely and reached its apogee in literature. An important feature of the Greek language in Byzantine times (the period from the fourth to the fifteenth century) is diglossia, i.e. the existence of two different varieties of a language used under different conditions within a community – a high, socially prestigious form, used for writing, and a low, simpler, everyday spoken form. For Christians, a sensitive issue was the attitude towards the ancient pagan heritage: they accepted what did not conflict with their dogmas, and rejected the rest. Today, there are about 55,000 Greek manuscripts in the world, of which about 40,000 are Byzantine. In order to be distributed to readers and preserved from decay, manuscript books were being transcribed in scriptoriums, in which not only monks but also secular people of various professions were working. Books were very expensive. There were public, imperial, patriarchal, monastic, and private libraries, with not large collections of manuscripts. As Byzantine civilization was approaching its decline, the migration of Greek manuscripts from Byzantium to the Latin world of Western Europe began. In that way, the great heritage of ancient civilization was preserved and transferred to European countries.

Locally made ceramics from Islamic sites in Ethiopia have been neglected in most archaeological studies, which tend to privilege imported Middle Eastern and Chinese/Southeast Asian ceramics. An assemblage of the local ceramics from the important trading site of Harlaa, in eastern Ethiopia (mid-sixth and fifteenth centuries AD), is the subject of this article. The study emphasizes the value of these ceramics as chronological markers, and for understanding regional and long-distance contacts, cultural innovations, processes of Islamization, and foodways.