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Jaume Huguet (c.1412-1492) was the most prominent painter in Barcelona in the late fifteenth century. His work, along with much painting in the Crown of Aragon in this period, was notably decorative with extensive use of gilded surface ornament. This tends to be seen as a backward-looking feature, out of step with the more ‘progressive’ developments in Italy and the Netherlands. This article explores the subtleties that emerge if we set aside such received criteria and take this painting tradition on its own terms. Concentrating on panels from the retable of St Vincent from the parish church of Sarria, now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the retable of St Bernardino and the Guardian Angel in the cathedral museum, the article argues that Huguet's work reveals a set of sophisticated practices based on an acute awareness of the possibilities of the materials used and achieving effects unavailable in a more rigorous painterly illusionism.

Summary This article discusses the interlinkage of medicine and the miraculous in the healing actions of living saints, based on the canonisation dossiers of St Francesca Romana (1440–53) and St Francesco di Paola (1512–17). These documents include a large number of miracles performed by saints during their lifetime, and in a large proportion of these cases, the holy person administered some kind of medical substance to an infirm devotee before or while performing the miracle. While the commissioners of canonisation inquests had to determine that the cure was of a miraculous origin, it appears that for the devotees the medical and miraculous acts were an inseparable part of the same continuum. Occasional conflicts arose with medical professionals, but the living saints also collaborated with them. The connection of a medicating saint and a miracle-performing saint is thus an essential aspect of the medical pluralism of late medieval and early modern societies.

The annual United Nations (UN) summit on climate change took place on 2–15 December in Madrid, Spain. The meeting venue changed from Santiago to Madrid a month earlier due to unfolding social unrest in Chile. The summit, also referred to as Chile/Madrid Climate Change Conference, included the twenty-fifth Conference of the Parties (COP-25) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); the fifteenth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP-15); the second Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA-2); and meetings of their subsidiary bodies.

An otiose stroke in scribal practice is a mark whose linguistic signification is obscure—yet such strokes abound as calligraphic additions to certain letters in English manuscripts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. This article seeks an explanation for the deployment of certain apparently otiose strokes, whose careful and persistent execution suggests a deliberate purpose in deployment. The vernacular production of the Carthusian scribe William Darker (working c.1481–1512) is chosen as an exemplum, and four common strokes in his work whose function is deemed ambiguous are examined in detail. Statistical and contextual analysis of the deployment of these strokes reveals semantic behaviours and patterns of use that suggest the marks had significant meaning for the scribe: though they do not necessarily function as abbreviations, they appear to bear linguistic meaning, and act with some consistency as signals of vowel length, pronunciation, and morphology. While these ‘otiose’ strokes remain resistant to full explication, the patterns here uncovered suggest a scribal intention to encode linguistic information via the conscious placement of calligraphic marks.

This article examines the military and political impact of the battle of Agincourt in France and the way in which this defeat was remembered up until the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The English presented their victory as a sign of God’s support for Henry V and his claims in France, but the French preferred to understand their defeat as a divine punishment for their sins. This led to debate about who had incurred God’s wrath, as civilians blamed soldiers, soldiers blamed their aristocratic leaders, and partisans for the Armagnac and Burgundian factions blamed one another. But most French commentators attempted to bridge these divisions, or at least to minimize the damage by attributing the disaster to the actions of foolish young hot-heads and to cowards. This avoided the need to name and shame specific noblemen, but also meant that only the most traditional lessons were highlighted from this defeat.

This paper shows how Islamic astronomy played a significant role in the education of one of the most important Christian figures in the history of culture between eastern and western Europe, promoter of a crusade against the Ottoman Turks, namely Cardinal Bessarion (1400/1408–72). While the Byzantine polymath has generally been considered a purist of Ptolemaic astronomy, his interest in Islamic astronomy can be traced back to his youth and persisted throughout his life, as is testified by several sources from his manuscripts collection. It is misleading therefore to consider him a ‘purist’ of Ptolemy. The paper provides a survey of the texts of Islamic astronomy among the manuscripts of Bessarion’s estate. These are compared to Ptolemaic astronomy in order to assess the importance of Islamic astronomy within the framework of Bessarion’s collection. The results shed new light not only on Bessarion’s astronomical interests, but also on the reception of Islamic astronomy in non-Islamicate contexts in the fifteenth century, such as the late Byzantine Empire, Rhodes, Crete, Venice, and European humanism.

The Medici of Florence have long been acknowledged as possessing the largest collection of Chinese porcelain in the fifteenth century, but this article reveals that in fact Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara had the largest such collection in Italy at this time. In fifteenth-century Europe, porcelain came not directly from China but rather through trade and diplomacy with foreign courts, so that its peregrinations gave rise to entangled histories and reception. Taking porcelain as a case-study, it is argued here that examining collecting through the lens of trade and diplomacy provides new interpretations of – and demands new approaches to – the history of collecting.

This article examines what a group of medieval conversation manuals designed to teach spoken French to the English – the manières de langage – can tell us about the use of spoken French within late medieval England. Beginning with the observation that several of the manières dialogues are set in England, it argues that the manières model the French required to interact with three groups of in-coming French-speakers on English soil: travellers, merchants and artisans, and agricultural labourers. The approach pursued complements previous studies of the manières, including my own, which have established their fitness for preparing English learners of French to use French on the Continent. At the same time as the argument addresses the topics of French pedagogy and French acquisition in late medieval England, it thus also contributes to developing understandings of late medieval English multilingualism and of intercultural contact within late medieval England.

This paper explores the gentry response to disease and illness in the fifteenth century. It examines the private letter collections of the Paston, the Stonor and the Plumpton families through a comparative methodology. The first section, focusing upon disease terminology in the letters, explores the diagnostic understanding of these families. Analysis of incidences of particular diseases, such as malaria and sciatica, is used to demonstrate their comprehension of illness through symptomatic observation. The second section examines the methods used for treating disease, analysing the various remedies used by the families. Important emphasis is placed upon the choice between using medical professionals and home healing. Finally, the role of female family members is assessed, determining whether it was medicinal matriarchs or male physicians who dominated in the sphere of family medicine. Ultimately this paper will uncover the complex and sophisticated ways gentry families managed and treated disease in this period.

This article examines a particular set of texts in an early fifteenth-century religious anthology composed by the Yorkshire gentleman Robert Thornton. Together with other religious prose and verse, Thornton copied a number of Middle English and Latin texts, on the subject of devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, into the folios of what is now Lincoln Cathedral MS 91. The article demonstrates the uniqueness of this set of Holy Name texts in late medieval England, both in terms of individual items and the combination of material. Some of these texts, namely those written by the English mystic Richard Rolle, were controversial in their treatment of the Name of Jesus, and contained claims for which some of Rolle’s followers were criticised by the early fifteenth century. I argue that their controversial content does not easily accord with scholarly characterisations of Thornton’s collecting impulses as conservative and spiritually unambitious. The article also discusses how Thornton copied other, more conservative, statements, that aimed to control Rollean Holy Name enthusiasm; in this case by that other great English mystical writer, Walter Hilton. I argue that this juxtapostion of enthusiastic and cautious statements points to practices of compilation and religious reading that were profoundly dialogic, bringing contradictory material together for use by Thornton’s household in their daily devotions that opened up a range of possible practices. Examination of the other religious texts within Lincoln MS 91 suggests some likely responses to the Holy Name material that Thornton copied. The article finishes with discussion of Thornton’s literary networks and how the diaologic nature of his literary practices would have involved complex social relationships with a range of clerical and lay agents. It asks how Thornton’s own agency might have worked in collaboration with clerical advisers who sought to guide, but did not control, his reading.

This article is the first detailed examination of the English parishes and knights' fees tax of 1428, based upon parliamentary and exchequer material. It demonstrates that the house of commons insisted upon granting this novel tax, in place of a more financially burdensome fifteenth and tenth, during the financial crisis of 1427–8. The parishes and knights' fees tax was efficiently administered, notwithstanding some local complications, although its yield was not commensurate with the scale of the crown's financial needs by the late fourteen-twenties. This provides a unique insight into the origins of the well-documented late Lancastrian fiscal crisis.

Thomas Hunt may be described as the first publisher of printed books in Oxford. He was also one of the four official stationers to the medieval university. This note assembles the known facts of Hunt’s career. The paper was found among the papers of the late Professor Malcolm Parkes and is published posthumously.

Book review of The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458-1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy, by Emily O’Brien (Toronto Buffalo London: Toronto U.P., 2015; pp. xi + 335. £65.00).

In October 2002 more than ninety historians and other academics gathered in Atlanta to attend “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies.” That Emory University conference, held in conjunction with a touring exhibition of lynching photographs that had attracted considerable publicity, was, to many participants, an important watershed in the study of the history of American lynching. Twenty-five panels of scholars explored collective violence in the United States from a wide range of angles; the variety and extent of inquiry evident at the conference signaled that the study of lynching and racial violence had reached a scale and depth that would have seemed unrealistic even just ten years earlier. As the fifteenth anniversary of the conference approaches, it seems appropriate to assess how lynching scholarship has developed over the last several decades, to measure the current strengths and weaknesses of the field, and to examine where future scholars might best direct their energies in grappling with the role of collective violence in the varied American regions where it took root during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also an opportune moment to reflect on what the phenomenon of lynching—that is, informal group killing—can reveal about the historical processes of state, social identity, and cultural formation in the United States and in global cultures.1 I began studying American mob violence twelve years before the Emory conference; an undergraduate senior thesis on lynching in Missouri grew into a doctoral dissertation on the relationship of lynching to the criminal justice system across the United States. The flowering of lynching scholarship over the following decade could not have been fully anticipated in 1990, as the history of mob violence was obscured in relative oblivion. The

Traditional approaches to the collecting of ancient gems tend to be iconographic or to form part of patronage studies. This article, instead, pursues how the culture of the copy associated with antique gems and coins can be related to broader practices around copies in religious and secular contexts in the fifteenth century. It argues that the collection of both original antiquities and their copies brings to the fore issues around reproducibility in the early modern age, which both differ from and compare to concerns around mechanical reproduction in the modern age. Access to, and possession of, original gems was restricted, but copies across media gave individuals the opportunity to know these small collectible items through chains of touch and representation. By considering the role that copies played in the collecting culture of the fifteenth century, this article draws attention to the materiality and sociability of the copy, pursuing issues around substitution, transmission, and temporality.

This note makes the case that the unique copy of the late medieval devotional work, Myrour of Recluses , which survives in BL MS Harley 2372, was owned by John Trus alias Taylor, warden of Browne’s Hospital in Stamford.

In the decades after 1200 the kingdom of Denmark developed a corpus of provincial laws written in Danish for the three major legal provinces. With the legislation for the eastern province of Scania as a starting point, this article shows how the writing down of the law led not only to the creation of a legal language but to a written vernacular language in general. It was not until the fifteenth century that written Danish was found outside of texts; charters and narrative until that point had been written in Latin.

In his 2001 review essay of three survivor accounts of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), Sody Lay criticizes Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) for historical and cultural inaccuracies, calling Ung’s testimonial text “a sensationalization and over-dramatization of the Killing Fields experience” (“Cambodian” 173). Lay not only accuses Ung of consciously manipulating her story for “the sake of making a buck,” but he also questions her status as a Cambodian: “Given Ung’s lack of memory and her apparent disdain for everything Khmer, it is not only ironic but misrepresentative for her book to be subtitled ‘a daughter of Cambodia remembers’” (181). The Khmer Institute Web site, which Lay co-founded and for which he serves as Executive Director, has published scathing reviews of Ung’s book with similar accusations regarding historical inaccuracies and cultural inauthenticity. One group of reviewers examines a section in First They Killed My Father in which the Ung family takes a trip in the early 1970s to Angkor Wat, pointing out that such a trip was impossible because the area was a battle zone at that time. The reviewers then note that Ung miscalculates Cambodia’s Angkorian period (from approximately the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) when she wrote that “Angkor Wat was built by powerful Khmer kings as monuments of self-glorification in the ninth century and completed three hundred years later” (Ung 67), reducing this seven-hundred-year period to half of its length. The reviewers conclude: “A true ‘daughter of Cambodia’ would not be so careless as to provide such blatantly incorrect information about these [Angkor Wat] temples, as they are an integral part of Khmer heritage and pride” (Hor, Lay, and Quinn). However, such harsh criticism does not take into account the impact on survivors such as Ung of losing family members, being separated from their homeland, and struggling with a new language and culture in an attempt to build a new home thousands of miles away from Cambodia, in a place with unfamiliar customs and rituals. Furthermore, not every Cambodian American has had identical experiences. In attempting to make sense of this controversy, we must explore how to take Lay’s charges into account while still valuing Ung’s memoir. This essay begins with a discussion of the Lay-Ung controversy in the context of the Cambodian diasporic community, paying close attention to the politics of representation and our need for multiple and diverse representations. Teri Shaffer Yamada’s work on Cambodian American autobiography informs the discussion of Ung’s First They Killed

The modern, scientifically based disapproval of artificially sweetened foods was matched, Newhauser argues, by the moral disapprobation of sweeteners in the late Middle Ages, particularly in the works of John Gower. In this wide-ranging essay, Newhauser traces both the changes in diet among the peasantry that resulted from their greater spending power following the Black Death and the growing use of sugar as a sweetener, particularly among the wealthy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as demonstrated both by commercial records and by the cookery books of the time. For both Langland and Gower, the peasants' emulation of the tastes of their social superiors was one of several signs of the breakdown of society. For Gower as for others, sweetness has a double valence, often used in descriptions of the Virgin, for instance, but also depicted as an enticement to sin. Gower's most consistent use, Newhauser claims, is the latter, "an expression of the deception utilized by evil or the self-deception of the sinner" (755), for instance in MO 505-16, where "sweetness" applies both to the devil's rhetoric and to the temptations of the flesh. And the desire for sweet foods is one of his most common images for the corruption of the contemporary clergy, as Newhauser illustrates with passages from MO, VC, and CA, including this passage from Prol. 325-27, "Delicacie his swete toth / Hath fostred so that it fordoth / Of abstinence al that ther is," that is evidently the first use of the term "sweet tooth" in the English language. [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1].

According to Allen, between 1500 and 1750, a “great divergence” among countries in the level of wages occurred in Europe. Italian real wages were already among the lowest in the late medieval and early modern age. Their relative level diminished even more from the seventeenth century. An analysis of prices and wages in Italy and England does not support this view. Actually, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Italian real wages were either higher than in England (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) or more or less equal (sixteenth and seventeenth). It was not until the eighteenth century that England began to overtake Italy. However, the disparity in wages before 1800 was modest. It increased fast from then onwards. Due to the still poor knowledge of GDP in pre-modern economies, research on economic disparities among countries deals mainly with recent periods. Long-term series of prices and wages can allow, however, comparisons among some pre-modern European economies. In 2001, R. Allen analysed economic disparities in prices and wages among several European countries over a period of six centuries. His opinion was that, while in the late Middle Ages, differences among the levels of wages were modest, the divergence “observed in the midnineteenth century was produced between 1500 and 1750 ”( Allen 2001 ,p .411). The series of wages presented by Allen have become standard measures of the performance of pre-modern European economies and have been used to compare European and non-European economies (Allen et al. 2011) and to speculate on late medieval trends

The medieval French Melusine romances, which recounted the legend of the fairy serpent's foundation of the illustrious Lusignan dynasty, enjoyed wide popularity across western Europe from the late fourteenth century onwards. This essay examines a collection of manuscript fragments of the prose Roman de Melusine located in the Upton House Bearsted (UHB) Collection in Warwickshire. It argues that the UHB fragments, and implicitly the original manuscript from which they derived, occupy a unique position among the surviving corpus of over thirty prose and poetic Melusine manuscripts. By contextualizing the fragments against extant manuscripts and editions, this essay posits a close textual and iconographic affiliation between the UHB manuscript fragments and early French and German editions of the Melusine romances. The multilingual phases of literary transmission that I suggest informed the production of the UHB manuscript in turn contributed to the exceptional illustrative program extant in the fragments. In particular, the fragments depict Melusine and the aesthetic of the merveilleux in a manner that echoes that of their German predecessors but is original among their French counterparts. By tracing the bibliographic ancestry of the UHB fragments, this essay offers fresh insight into the complex cycles of multilingual transmission, production, and reception that shaped the Melusine romances in both manuscript and printed culture at the end of the fifteenth century.