Search

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.

"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.

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’.

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.

Pankaj Jha, Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, 304 pp., ₹1,095, ISBN: 9780199489558.

Humanism combined a set of scholarly skills, admiration for the ancient world, and a sharp critical attitude. The first component of humanism was learning based on the classics. Humanism placed greater emphasis on the classics, it had a much better knowledge of the classics than medieval men, and it emphasized certain texts, such as Cicero's letters and orations, unavailable to medieval scholars. A set of scholarly skills based on an intense admiration and study of the ancient world came next. Paul Oskar Kristeller's definition of the studia humanitatis is valid and useful. He wrote, "By the first half of the fifteenth century, the studia humanitatis came to stand for a clearly defined cycle of scholarly disciplines, namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, and the study of each of these subjects was understood to include the reading and interpretation of its standard ancient writers in Latin and in Greek". Keywords: ancient world; critical attitude; humanism; medieval scholars; Paul Oskar Kristeller

Over the last few years, the Federal Institute for material research (BAM, Berlin) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC, University of Hamburg) have initiated a systematic material investigation of black inks produced from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (ca. fourth century CE–fourteenth/fifteenth centuries CE), aimed primarily at extending and complementing findings from previous sporadic studies. Part of this systematic investigation has focused on Egyptian Coptic manuscripts, and the present preliminary study is one of its outputs. It centres on a corpus of 45 Coptic manuscripts—43 papyri and 2 ostraca—preserved at the Palau-Ribes and Roca-Puig collections in Barcelona. The manuscripts come from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic settlements in Egypt between the Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period (sixth–eighth centuries CE). The composition of their black inks was investigated in situ using near-infrared reflectography (NIRR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). The analyses determined that the manuscripts were written using different types of ink: pure carbon ink; carbon ink containing iron; mixed inks containing carbon, polyphenols and metallic elements; and iron-gall ink. The variety of inks used for the documentary texts seems to reflect the articulate administrative system of the monastery of Bawit. This study reveals that, in contrast to the documents, written mostly with carbon-based inks, literary biblical texts were written with iron-gall ink. The frequent reuse of papyrus paper for certain categories of documents may suggest that carbon-based inks were used for ephemeral manuscripts, since they were easy to erase by abrasion.

The longue duree of the exploitation of Africa’s natural resources is a good index of Africa’s position in the capitalist global economy. From the slave trade in the fifteenth century, through to colonialism in the nineteenth century, to neo-colonialism in the twentieth century, Africa’s natural resources have been the main ligament through which the economies of its countries are integrated into the global economy. Throughout these epochal moments of the history of the capitalist global economy, the continent and its people have been subordinated to the powerful states as a quarry for drawing valuable natural resources for development in their countries. Situated in this historical backdrop, our contribution probes the natural resources-led development discourses which have emerged from the new scramble for Africa in the twenty-first century global order. Making a radical break with the leftist discourses of imperialism and accumulation by dispossession, the new scramble is viewed as auspicious development opportunities for the continent to industrialize on the back of its natural resources. Popular even among African leaders and scholars, this new development thinking suggests a new world order in which the scramble for Africa, as The Economist put it, is benign; with bright prospects of Africans becoming winners. Problematizing this new thinking, this paper draws on Ghana’s oil rush to argue that the position of Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, has not changed. Despite the peculiarities of the new scramble and the twenty-first-century global order, Africa is exploited by extractive imperialism, the dynamics of which are unpropitious of industrialization in resource-rich countries

The study of the post-Byzantine world is now regarded as a field in its own right, separate from Byzantine studies or Renaissance studies. However, the scope of the discipline and the meaning of the term post-Byzantine—its conceptual, geographical, and chronological limits—remain unsettled. For art historians, the term typically refers to certain tendencies (especially in iconography and style) observable in and around one of a few centers of activity or spheres of influence within the Orthodox Christian world, typically identified as Ottoman-held vs. Venetian-held lands, or as Venetian Crete, Mt. Athos, and the “periphery” (i.e., everywhere else). Scholarly attention has also focused primarily on portable icons. Broadening the field to consider more types of objects across the whole geography under scrutiny, we can consider how art and ideas were received and adapted over time and across regions.

The medieval cell doctrine was a series of related psychological models based on ancient Greco-Roman ideas in which cognitive faculties were assigned to "cells," typically corresponding to the cerebral ventricles. During Late Antiquity and continuing during the Early Middle Ages, Christian philosophers attempted to reinterpret Aristotle's De Anima, along with later modifications by Herophilos and Galen, in a manner consistent with religious doctrine. The resulting medieval cell doctrine was formulated by the fathers of the early Christian Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. Printed images of the doctrine that appeared in medical, philosophical, and religious works, beginning with "graphic incunabula" at the end of the fifteenth century, extended and evolved a manuscript tradition that had been in place since at least the eleventh century. Some of these early psychological models just pigeonholed the various cognitive faculties in different non-overlapping bins within the brain (albeit without any clinicopathologic evidence supporting such localizations), while others specifically promoted or implied a linear sequence of events, resembling the process of digestion. By the sixteenth century, printed images of the doctrine were usually linear three-cell versions with few exceptions having four or five cells. Despite direct challenges by Massa and Vesalius in the sixteenth century, and Willis in the seventeenth century, the doctrine saw its most elaborate formulations in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with illustrations by the Paracelsan physicians Bacci and Fludd. Overthrow of the doctrine had to await abandonment of Galenic cardiovascular physiology from the late-seventeenth to early-eighteenth centuries.

Comenius is considered by many scholars to be the father of modern education, a title that he has thoroughly earned. His ideas about universal education for all children foreshadowed modern pedagogical developments, and he dedicated more than forty years of his life to reforming education and society. The question guiding this research was: Why was Comenius so dedicated to reform efforts, and why were his ideas about education so peculiar for his time? Through a review of existing scholarship and Comenius’ own writing, namely the Labyrinth, Didactic, and the Orbis Pictus, it became clear that Comenius was inspired by the millenarian ideology prevalent during the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Europe as well as the effects that the turbulence of the seventeenth century had on his own life. These factors also led Comenius to believe that educational reform was the key to unlocking Pansophy, which would incite the Millennium, the golden age of peace and prosperity that would precede the second coming of Christ and the final judgement of God.

Resumo O ensaio investiga o papel atribuído por John Dewey à ciência e à educação pública democrática na obra Sozialphilosophie. Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 [Filosofia social, Preleções na China 2019/2020] . Concentra-se na interpretação da 15ª preleção, visando a compreender o modo como o referido autor associa ciência e educação, atribuindo-lhes força crítica transformadora a favor de estilos democráticos de vida associada e, consequentemente, contrapondo-as ao conservadorismo autoritário legitimado pelo sistema tradicional de crenças. Estruturado em três partes, trata, na primeira, do limite inerente à tradição; na segunda, reconstrói o núcleo tripartite da autoridade da ciência; por fim, na terceira parte indica alguns limites do pensamento de Dewey e, simultaneamente, sua possível atualidade. Abstract The essay investigates the role attributed by John Dewey to science and democratic public education in the work Sozialphilosophie. Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 [Social Philosophy, Lectures in China 2019/2020]. It focuses on the interpretation of the fifteenth lecture, aiming to understand the way in which the author associates science and education, attributing to them a transforming critical force in favor of associated democratic styles of life and, consequently, contrasting them with the authoritarian conservatism legitimized by the traditional belief system. The essay is structured in three parts. In the first part, it deals with the inherent limit of tradition; in the second, it reconstructs the tripartite nucleus of the authority of science; finally, in the third part, it indicates some limits of Dewey’s thought and, simultaneously, its possible contemporaneity. Resumen El ensayo investiga el papel atribuido por John Dewey a la ciencia y a la educación pública democrática en el trabajo Sozialphilosophie. Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 [Filosofia social, Conferencias en China 2019/2020]. Se centra en la interpretación de la 15ª conferencia, con el objetivo de comprender la forma en que el autor asocia la ciencia y la educación, atribuyéndoles una fuerza crítica transformadora a favor de estilos democráticos de vida asociada y, consecuentemente, contraponiéndolas al conservadorismo autoritário legitimado por el sistema tradicional de creencias. Estructurado en tres partes, trata, en la primera, del límite inherente a la tradición; en la segunda parte reconstruye el núcleo tripartito de la autoridad científica; finalmente, en la tercera parte indica algunos límites del pensamiento de Dewey y, al mismo tiempo, su posible actualidad. Résumé Cet essai examine le rôle que John Dewey attribue à la science et à l’éducation publique démocratique dans son oeuvre Sozialphilosophie. Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 [Philosophie sociale, Conférences en Chine 2019/2020]. Il se concentre sur l’interprétation de la 15ème conférence, afin de comprendre la manière dont l’auteur associe science et éducation, en leur donnant une force critique transformatrice en faveur des modes de vie démocratiques et, par conséquent, en les opposant au conservatisme autoritaire légitimé par le système de croyances traditionnel. Structuré en trois parties, il aborde tout d’abord la question de la limite inhérente à la tradition; dans la seconde partie, l’article reconstitue le triple noyau de l’autorité de la science; enfin, la troisième partie présente quelques limites de la pensée de Dewey ainsi que leur possible actualité.

Morphological and compositional analysis of glass beads from three shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean world has increased our understanding of the chronology and distribution of mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century glass.

This paper is devoted to wall painting in the Middle Ages (ca. late fifth to early fifteenth centuries), with a focus on twelfth to fifteenth century Italy. It is conceived as a critical conflation of diverse methodologies, approaches and research tools, with the aim of investigating the topic from different and complementary perspectives. Historical textual sources provide the interpretive framework for the examination, which is conducted on specific, yet interrelated aspects. Special attention is paid to technical features, including the methods and materials used to produce wall paintings. Data from scientific investigations are incorporated into the discussion with the purpose of elucidating theoretical conceptualizations with material pieces of evidence. A number of selected case studies is presented within the text in order to keep the focus of analysis on the materiality of the paintings, hence avoiding the formulation of abstract concepts in favour of more pragmatic approaches.

This article offers an examination of the seigneurie (heerlijkheid) as an element in the institutional framework of Netherlandish water management. The investigation builds on a recent historiographical trend that questions whether inclusive systems of water management can be tied to ‘proto-democratic’ decision-making in the premodern Low Countries. Focusing on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century river region of the duchy of Guelders, the central question is to what extent lords, ladies, and their seigneurial officials impacted the natural environment of people living in rural regions. Based on a combination of seigneurial accounts and court records, the main thesis is that the aristocratic element formed an ambiguous yet important cog in the late medieval system of water management in Guelders.

Over the centuries, the typographic medium and book printing responded to the political, economic, cultural, and social conditions very sensitively. The author deals with social influences on the development of book printing in Bratislava from the fifteenth century when the first printer is documented in the town. She ponders the reasons for the long absence of typographic activities in Bratislava from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century. Paradoxically, the Reformation gave an impetus to the further development of book printing in Bratislava, as a Catholic printing house was established there in direct response to Reformation printing in Hungary. Therefore, the author also examines the conditions of Reformation printing to which the beginnings of publishing activities are tied in the territory of Slovakia. In the second part of the study, she focuses on Catholic Revival literature published in Bratislava in the seventeenth century, which played an important role in implementing Catholic reforms in Hungary.

New data on the genealogy of the princes of Tarusa in the Synodikon of the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow are compared with rare mentions of representatives of this family in the testaments and treaties of the grand princes of Muscovy from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as other sources. Some researchers suggested identifying the princes of Tarusa in these sources with representatives of other families, i. e. Prince Vasily Ivanovich of Tarusa in the Moscow-Lithuanian treaty of 1449 with Prince Vasily Ivanovich of Obolensk, Prince Ivan Borisovich of Tarusa in the razryad of the Smolensk campaign of 1502 with Prince Ivan Borisovich of Ruza, and Princess Evdokia of Tarusa in the grand princely testament of 1504 with Grand Princess Evdokia, the widow of Dmitry Donskoy. The author demonstrates that the commemoration of the princes of Tarusa in the Synodikon of the Moscow Cathedral of the Dormition provides grounds for a literal interpretation of the mentions of this family between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while the identifications proposed in the literature require unnecessarily risky presumptions.

International audience; A wide circle of historians, lawyers, and secondary school teachers are interested in the Pravda Russkaia. This review analyses the historiographical situation around the study of this important artefact after the publication of The Short Pravda: The Origin of the Text (2009) by Oleksiy Tolochko, in which the author develops the opinion that the Short Pravda appeared later than the Expanded Pravda, which was expressed by prominent linguists and historians (E. F. Karskii, S. P. Obnorskii, A. I. Sobolevskii, etc.) in the first half of the twentieth century but later discarded by Soviet scholarship. By combining various methods from source studies, the author proves that the Short Pravda did not originate as a legal document in the eleventh century, but as a fragment of The Chronicle of Novgorod in the early fifteenth century. The review shows that specialists’ responses to Tolochko’s book are limited to a few journal publications, each of which criticises one or two of separate arguments but does not systematically consider the proposed holistic theory of the artefact’s origin (articles by K. Zukerman, P. V. Lukin, A. A. Gorskii, A. Y. Degtyarev, etc.). Any attempt at summarising the results of the controversy leads to the belief that the discussion is methodologically unsound. The analysis of an article from the Pravda that is taken out of context can lead to opposing interpretations depending on the choice of the parameters preferred by a given author at a given time. Considering the fundamental nature of the Pravda Russkaia for the history of medieval Russia, the reviewer concludes that it is necessary to make an effort (probably a collective effort) towards a systematic analysis of Tolochko’s hypothesis: the traditional isolated study of this most important legal document should be placed within the broader framework of a comprehensive study of the collections in which the short and expanded versions of the Pravda have been preserved.; Источниковедческий статус Правды русской (руской) интересует широкий круг историков и юристов, а также преподавателей средних учебных заведений. В обзоре анализируется историографическая ситуация, сложившаяся вокруг изучения этого важнейшего памятника после выхода в 2009 г. монографии А. П. Толочко «Краткая редакция Правды руской: происхождение текста», в которой автор развивает мнение о вторичности Краткой редакции по сравнению с Пространной, высказывавшееся в первой половине XX в. видными лингвистами и историками (Е. Ф. Карским, С. П. Обнорским, А. И. Соболевским и др.) и позже отброшенное советской наукой. Сочетая различные методы источниковедения, автор доказывает, что краткая Правда возникла не как юридический документ в XI в., а как фрагмент новгородского летописания в начале XV столетия. В обзоре показано, что отклики специалистов на книгу А. П. Толочко сводятся к немногочисленным коротким журнальным публикациям, в каждой из которых подвергаются критике один или два отдельно взятых аргумента автора, но не предпринимается систематического рассмотрения предложенной целостной теории возникновения памятника (статьи К. Цукермана, П. В. Лукина, А. А. Горского, А. Я. Дегтярева и др.). Попытка подвести итоги этой многолетней дискуссии приводит к убеждению о ее методологической несостоятельности. Результаты анализа вырванной из контекста той или иной статьи Правды оказывается возможным интерпретировать в противоположных смыслах в зависимости от выбора источниковедческих параметров, которым данный автор отдает предпочтение в данный момент. Учитывая структурообразующий характер Правды русской для истории Древней Руси, автор обзора делает вывод о необходимости предпринять усилия (которые, вероятно, должны быть коллективными) для системного анализа гипотезы А. П. Толочко, причем предлагается поместить традиционное изолированное изучение этого важнейшего юридического памятника в более широкие рамки всестороннего исследования сборников, в составе которых сохранились Краткая и Пространная редакции.

Snake’s-head Fritillary Fritillaria meleagris L. is a scarce plant of unimproved meadows where it was formerly considered to be a native British species. A review of 593 British sites showed that 80% of British populations were located in other habitats where it had been planted or had established from introductions nearby. Of the 118 populations located in unimproved meadows 53 occurred in floodplain grassland in central and southeast England where it has long been considered to be native. However, recent evidence suggests that it is more likely to be a modern introduction (neophyte). It seems inconceivable that such an attractive plant would have been overlooked in the wild by herbalists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Furthermore, the rapid growth of introduced populations in meadows in Sweden and England has shown that Fritillary populations in Britain could have reached their present size in the 300 years since they were first recorded in the wild. Historical accounts prove that it was being grown for ornament in large gardens in the sixteenth century, from where it presumably escaped along rivers to colonise meadows downstream. Regardless of its status, however, it remains a much-loved and valued component of the British flora and a flagship species for the conservation of floodplain grasslands.

The deer park of Erringden was in existence for 131 years during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The author has meticulously reconstructed the origins, extension, closure and afterlife of t...