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Muslims have been studying reports about their Prophet to distinguish accurate reports from spurious ones from the time these reports arose. This discipline was fully developed by the last part of the second century of the Hijra and the first part of the third century. Seventh/thirteenth century scholars gave it a formal expression while in the ninth/fifteenth century the discipline found final form. The elegance of the formalized form of the discipline obscures some of the nuance in the works of the critics of the second and third centuries. Contemporary hadith scholars have re-discovered some of this nuance by revisiting these works. I end this article with a brief comment situating their work.

The study investigates the role of the Monti di Pieta in Italy and in the Kingdom of Naples from the fifteenth to the twentieth century in promoting the development of contemporary microcredit. The object of the research is to run, through the archival sources and regulations promulgated by the Church, a historical analysis on the evolution of the financial instruments, modern features of the operations and microcredit institutes of the contemporary age. The letter identifies a crucial role of the Monti di Pieta in the provision of credit to the poor as a form of contrast to usury and local development.

Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a ‘light touch’ of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Black Death was severe, perhaps no less severe than other parts of western Europe; that serious plagues continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and that the Black Death and recurring plagues spread over vast territories—including the countryside. The previous conception of a ‘light touch’ of plague in the Low Countries was created by the overprivileging of particular urban sources, and a failure to account for the rapid replenishment of cities via inward migration, which obscured demographic decimation. We suggest that the population of the Low Countries may not have recovered faster than other parts of western Europe but instead experienced a greater degree of post‐plague rural–urban migration.

A well†known debate on the Renaissance economy was held in this journal in 1962–4 between Roberto S. Lopez and Harry Miskimin on one hand and Carlo M. Cipolla on the other. More than half a century later, this topic can be reconsidered in the light of much wider information on the late medieval/early modern Italian economy. Using data on population, urbanization, prices, wages, and GDP, this article outlines the macroeconomic trends in central and northern Italy in the age of the Renaissance (1350–1550). The frequent plagues during the early Renaissance—that is, between 1348 and 1450—decimated the population, probably causing more deaths than in other European countries. Hence resources per worker increased and labour productivity, incomes, and standards of living improved remarkably. A favourable economic environment thus seems to have been a pre†condition for the Renaissance in culture, art, and politics and the spread of new kinds of consumer demand. From the middle of the fifteenth century, living standards gradually worsened and eventually reached the low levels that had prevailed prior to the Renaissance.

The article focuses on the view of the Mediterranean in early geopolitical writings. Through this lens, it looks at the space metaphors and imaginative geographies that defined the core meanings of the Middle Sea over the last 200 years. The author discusses the role that the Enlightenment philosophy of history had in the shaping of classical geography. Moving on similar grounds, early geopolitical writers believed in the ‘force of history’ as a generator of spatial order. They used episodes of the Mediterranean past as a parable for the spatial articulation of contact, conflict and power in the overall ‘process of civilization’. In their writings recurs an idea, which resonates also in later key texts regarding the same maritime space. It is the idea of a ‘greater Mediterranean’ that after the fifteenth century was destined to gain worldwide importance thanks to transoceanic expansion. In doing so, geographers, historians and philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Middle Sea into a metaphor for the universal mission of Europe and the West.

This is the second of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th-century political history of the so-called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th-century Syro-Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, defined as ‘Mamlukization’, may help to better account for change and for contemporary laments that “things aren't what they used to be.” Part I explained how Mamluk scholarship has only recently managed to overcome a traditional tendency to view the sultanate's political history as a long process of divergence from an idealized system based on military slavery, raising new difficulties. Part II endeavors to develop an alternative perspective, inspired by scholarship that connects ways of thinking about power and politics by authors as diverse as Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) and Pierre Bourdieu (d. 2002). This perspective makes it possible to reconsider 15th-century Syro-Egyptian political changes within the particular analytical framework of state formation, of similar patterns of political and governmental growth in late medieval and early modern Europe, and of the appearance of a new Mamluk political order.

This is the first of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medi- eval Egypt and Syria, on 15th-century political history of the so-called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th-century Syro-Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, defined as ‘Mamlukization’, may help to better account for change, and for contemporary laments that “things aren’t what they used to be.” In “Part I — Old problems and new trends”, we begin by examining the state of the field of 15th-century Mamluk political history, before laying out the new perspective of ‘Mamlukization’ in Part II. Part I explains how Mamluk scholarship has only recently managed to overcome a traditional tendency to view the sultanate’s political history as a long process of divergence from an idealized system based on military slavery, raising new difficulties. We conclude that there remains a need to replace this decline paradigm with a more useful conceptual framework. If something profound indeed was taking place in the 15th century, something that is not usefully considered “decline,” then what was it?

It is a common assumption that the title of supreme priesthood or pontifex maximus is included in the official papal titulature, and it has been supposed that the Roman bishop adopted it from the Roman emperor in late antiquity. In fact, however, it was probably not until the fifteenth century that the designation was first used by the papacy, and it has continued to be part of papal representation ever since. The title was deeply rooted in the Roman imperial past. At several stages in papal history the papal agency felt the need to draw back (again) on this ancient, traditional title and managed to successfully (re-)introduce the title by anchoring it in the cultural biography of the papacy.

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing power parity held in Europe during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Using single series and panel unit root and stationarity tests and cointegration analysis on ten real exchange rates between 1383 and 1411, we show that the parity relationship held for the pound sterling and some of the Florentine florin series individually and for almost all of the groups that we investigate. Our findings add to the weight of evidence that trading and arbitrage activities stopped real exchange rates deviating permanently from fair values. This research extends the results reported in other studies back more than 600 years.

The St Bavo's Cathedral tower in Ghent, Belgium, is currently under restoration. This tower was built during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries over a period of 73 years, using Eocene white stone. Restorations over the last two centuries introduced different Jurassic limestones from the Paris Basin. Documentation of these interventions, however, is very poor for the period before the twentieth century, and documentation on the original construction is non-existing. Nevertheless, the use of the different stones in their historical context forms a typical example of the historical mindset on the use of white stone, representative for Ghent and by extension northwestern Belgium.

Between the eleventh century and mid-thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European ‘bullion famine’ of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s.

Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. In this article, four main issues are examined. What is the nature of the Court of Common Pleas evidence (section I)? What were the three main forms of credit offered by Londoners—unsecured cash loans, sales of goods on credit, and written instruments called bonds (section II)? What is yielded by decadal analysis of Londoners’ extension of credit in the fifteenth century—making direct comparisons with Nightingale's published Statute Merchant and Staple data (section III)? What defines, in modern economic terms, the claim of so-called ‘monetarist’ historians that credit was actively withdrawn during the depression, and how is this verified by the actions of London creditors (section IV)? It is concluded that the records of the Court of Common Pleas provide the detailed evidence monetarist historians have previously lacked both to prove that Londoners actively withdrew credit during the fifteenth century and to demonstrate that they employed pure equilibrium credit rationing in order to do so.

This study aims to shed light on Taino polytheism and its imprint in the Antillean geographic space and the unitary and differentiated development of its religious beliefs and representations, by means of mythic substitution and iconographic hybridisation, as a result of the multinatural perspectivism (animism) shared with its South American relatives and indigenous transculturation processes. It will also show the implications of a revised interpretation of the archaeological heritage based on a comparative approach using the available Caribbean ethnohistoric records (dated from the fifteenth century, mostly, like the mythological passages recorded by friar Ramon Pane) and contemporary lowland Amerindian ethnography along with the iconographic analysis of Taino imagery in context, an area in which the pioneer linguist Jose Juan Arrom made the first advances, but his work now demands review.

This article presents new archaeological data concerning the Greater Angkor region, home to successive capitals of the medieval Khmer Empire from the ninth to fifteenth centuries ad. Angkor is recognized as one of the most extensive low-density urban complexes of the pre-industrial world. One of the most striking features in the landscape of Angkor is the enormous assemblage of hydraulic infrastructure, including two artificial reservoirs each covering around 15 km2. However, in parallel to this massive, state-level system of water management, we also see evidence at Angkor of a smaller-scale system of household or community ponds in the urban core. These were described by the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor in the late thirteenth century ad. His account includes the important information that each cistern was used by one to three families. The validity of this historical account can now be assessed using a precise map of the archaeological landscape that was created in 2012 using airborne laser scanning (‘ALS’ or ‘LiDAR’, light detection and ranging). The LiDAR data allow us to arrive at new insights into the demography of medieval Angkor. Using an algorithm for semi-automatic pond detection in the ALS-derived data it was possible to map over three thousand cisterns and from this to make inferences about population density in central Angkor. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This chapter places the study of English pronunciation within its historical context. After an initial section on the evidence for the history of English sounds, it addresses the issue of historical explanation in sound-change, with reference to three case-studies: the phonemicisation of voiced and voiceless fricatives, the emergence of the West Saxon sound-change known as Breaking, and the Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of the extent to which sound-changes can be explained.

Portugal was the first and the most enduring of all European colonial empires, beginning in the fifteenth century with the establishment of a commercial domain in the East and lasting until 1974, when the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal paved the way for decolonization in the African colonies. Despite the formal end of the empire, a national imperialistic representation of the history of the country persists, immune to postcolonial critique and widely disseminated through school curricula, public discourses, and propaganda. The period known as the “Eastern Empire” came to capture the Portuguese collective imagination as the golden age of Portuguese history, embodying a self-representation of Portugal – which remains until today – as a country of “Discoveries” rather than as a colonizing center. This chapter argues that the resilience of the established view of Portugal's imperial past is strongly dependent on a preferred mode of representation which is materially and visually based. It looks at the Museu do Oriente (Museum of the Orient) in Lisbon in an attempt to understand how the Portuguese national past is imagined and affected in the museum space through the presence of objects. Keywords: affect; art and aesthetics; museum objects; Portuguese Empire; Portuguese nationalism; postcolonialism

Agrippa von Nettesheim's De Nobilitate et praecellentia fœmini sexus (1509) is one of the most revolutionary manifestos of the Renaissance, since it not only sets out to demonstrate the superiority of the feminine over the male sex but does so through the cabalistic methods introduced by Johannes Reuchlin in De Verbo mirifico (1494). According to such teaching, the essence of all creatures was to be found in their Hebrew names, bestowed on them by God: so while Adam signifies ‘earth’, Eve's name is linked to the name Yahweh itself, and means ‘life’. Thus God had spoken, and so all further arguments employed by Agrippa – exegetic, moral, aesthetic, legal, medical and other discourses – gain strength from that decisive foundational argument. Agrippa's entire system of proof, not merely his principal argument, is thus diametrically opposed to scholastic tradition: all conventional authorities, from Aristotle onwards, are systematically ignored. Thus Agrippa joined in the querelle des femmes, ignited in the fifteenth century, and adopted many of its arguments in favour of women, but he importantly strengthened them with medical and cabalistic arguments. His work is the first Renaissance treatise whose methods derive so extensively from humanistic-cabalistic principles.

This article is a study of women's continued involvement in healthcare practice in German Imperial towns and cities between the fifteenth century and the mid eighteenth century. It contextualizes the defamatory rhetoric against women healers found in printed books and publications, corrects the distortions of juridical administrative sources, and modifies the frequent complaints of medical corporations. Comparing the sources produced by hospital administrators and by other administrative agencies with the practice notes of a physician allows us to see women's day-to-day medical tasks in institutions and households, their shared competencies and networks, as well as their role in facilitating the flow of medical information. Moreover, female practitioners belonging to different social and cultural strata, who fulfilled varying levels of medical tasks, become visible by analysing institutional sources in conjunction with more private records documenting the intersection of domestic healthcare with treatment offered by certified practitioners. Contrary to what administrative and hospital records suggest, the handwritten daily notes of the Nuremberg physician Johann Christoph Gotz do not indicate a devaluation of female medical expertise in the early modern period; on the contrary, the information of learned women from mercantile or academic families became part of the process by which medical knowledge was created.

The preliminary results of excavations conducted at Nahal Be'erotayim West, an abandoned Bedouin campground in the Negev desert, Israel, indicate that multiple tents were pitched in this location in different periods and at different times of the year. The recovered artefacts and architecture provide a means to identify gender and seasonality in the archaeological record, respectively. Radiocarbon dates from an ash layer and two hearths offer evidence of intermittent occupation from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century AD, and chronologically diagnostic artefacts also indicate occupations from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

This essay examines Andrea Mantegna's later stylistic preoccupations in light of late fifteenth -and early sixteenth- century debates both on the arts (the "paragone") and on literary language (the "questione della lingua"). It is argued that the particular hardness or sculptural quality remarked upon by his contemporaries, as well as by later critics and historians, may be seen as both an affirmation of art's capacity to endure, and as a deliberately artful (artificial) pictorial language. In this way it is comparable in function and effect to the classic model of Tuscan prose advocated by Pietro Bembo. The visible artifice of Mantegna's style thus places it in opposition to the universally pleasing, 'natural' language of art advocated by Leon Battista Alberti in the earliest years of Mantegna's life, and by Leonardo da Vinci during his final decades.

Freshwater game-angling is a growing tourism phenomenon creating modern, increasingly global, spaces of consumption where performances are acted out in varied destinations. These performances uphold sporting traditions dating from fifteenth century England, cemented in the Victorian era. This paper demonstrates how and why freshwater angling has grown to become one of the largest leisure activities. It questions whether game-angling tourism has become a profound ecotourism, drawing insights from sociology and geography to explore how game-angling tourism traverses the society/nature dualism. It finds that angling tourism is a compelling, relatively undiscovered, vehicle for understanding our passion for consuming the natural world.

Contemporary (post-1945) liberalism functions analogously to Roman Catholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of Western civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the United States and the Renaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. All who reject official “doctrine,” however, are rendered liable to violent suppression. In this, papal Catholicism and American liberalism display an ultra-conservative outlook; but they also evince a powerfully millenarian streak, as evidenced by their dual proclamations of the “end of history” and their zealous missionary responses to macro-historical events in the final decades of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. For ideologues of both regimes, those events speak to an ultimate harmony of truth and value that only serves to entrench their own dogmatism. This, however, has dire consequences when it comes to war, as can be seen in the “crusading” character of contemporary liberal warfare. Ultimately, the Renaissance papacy proves unable to maintain its monopoly on Christian doctrine; and one has to wonder if a similar fate may befall America's perceived role as the champion of liberalism.

This article reflects empirically on the early history and evolution of the US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution (USIECR) to analyze how and why this public entity not only has survived in an ever-changing political environment but also has succeeded in shaping a robust environmental conflict resolution field. The authors use Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1981) competing values framework, as well as theories about organizational birth and early evolution, as lenses through which to view this organizational birth and evolution. Project data derive from sixty interviews carried out in the early years of USIECR, as well as archival materials, government documents, and participant observation. The authors conclude that a balanced approach to strategic leadership from early planning phases to adolescent reauthorization resulted in success and set the stage for the accomplishments that USIECR celebrates on its fifteenth birthday, an occasion for all government-based environmental conflict resolution programs to reflect on their own strategic approaches for achieving success.

The earliest image of an Australasian parrot by a European artist predates the arrival of Vasco de Gama's fleet at Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498. This article focuses on that image – a small but significant detail in Andrea Mantegna's Madonna della Vittoria, completed in Mantua in 1496. Although Mantegna's altarpiece has been the subject of attention in modern scholarship, the significance of the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo has not been explored. In this article, I consider why Mantegna would have included parrots in his altarpiece and the symbolic significance of the cockatoo's position in the composition. I also explore the intriguing issue of how a creature native to regions generally considered to have been beyond Europe's trading reach in 1496 could have appeared in a Renaissance artwork. The Sulphur-crested Cockatoo in the Madonna della Vittoria provides a unique opportunity to place fifteenth-century Italy in its global context. Its presence not only confirms the interests and purchasing power of Mantegna and his patrons, the Gonzagas, it reveals the complexity and range of South-East Asian trading networks prior to the establishment of European trading posts in the region.

Historians have recently begun to explore premodern academic violence and this study is the first survey of violence at Italian universities between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It seeks to address a series of questions. How frequent was violence? What forms did it take? What motivated it? What were the responses of the authorities? Examining these issues increases our understanding of masculinity and academic, social, and national identities in this period. It also throws light on the nature of justice in the Italian states.

The development of the Italian Renaissance nude is fundamental to the western art tradition, yet little attention has been paid to how Renaissance audiences understood images of naked people. This article uses previously unconsidered documents to argue that there was a shift in the understanding of nakedness over the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries which was related to the voyages of discovery, particularly to Sub-Saharan Africa. The article considers contemporaries’ perceptions of nakedness as related to human potential and the development of a “Renaissance anthropology”, looking first at images of Adam and Eve, and then considering the impact of fifteenth-century travellers’s tales of naked natives on the perception of nakedness. The focus then shifts to two renowned images: Pisanello’s drawing of a naked woman commonly called Luxuria, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s engraving, The Battle of Naked Men. These previously puzzling works can be understood as commenting on the ‘uncivilized’ and ‘animalistic’ qualities of the naked non-European natives who were ripe for Christianisation.

The Jewish nose has often been an object of parody in art and literature, most notably in examples of anti-Semitic content from Fascist Germany. Early anthropologists devoted no little energy to the topic in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. They distinguished the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Semitic’ nose from straight, aquiline, flat, and snub noses by its being ‘hooked’. A major study on the Jewish nose, referring to these early essays of largely German origin and to their usually racist arguments, is Sander L. Gilman's ‘The Jewish Nose’. But, to date, there is no literature on the Jewish nose in art works of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Nor is there any on the Jewish nose in relation to music for the same or any other era. The present article opens, by way of introduction, with a few words on Jews as delineated in early painting. In continuation, it discusses a typical, yet hitherto neglected graphic example of the Jewish nose as satirized in a work from the early modern era. It concludes with a review of various attempts of composers, at the time, to simulate the sonic qualities of Jewish nasalized speech in works of music.

Across Europe after 1400, calls for reform echoed through the ranks of nearly every major religious order. They emerged and took root independently in ways as diverse as the late-medieval religious and political landscape itself, yet also shared a range of common aims and characteristics. Collectively known as the Observant Movement, these efforts at reform produced some of the most important religious figures of the middle ages (Catherine of Siena and Savonarola, Bernardino of Siena and John of Capistrano, Jimenez de Cisneros, Thomas of Kempen, even the young Observant friar Martin Luther). They also reflected and inspired much that became central to late medieval religion and culture. Our textbooks, surveys and scholarly overviews long neglected the Observant story. But the last few decades of research have begun to remedy that neglect, bringing Observant reform to the center of a range of current scholarly concerns. This article surveys the emergence of that recent work, and some of its major themes: the connections between religious life and the histories of women and the laity; Observant preaching and teaching and their connection with humanism, as well as with the persecution of witches, Jews and others; the links between Observant reform and the later histories of the Reformation and the Atlantic world. It concludes with a consideration of the challenges and opportunities for future scholarship.

The account of Sir Richard Guldeford's pilgrimage, printed in 1511, is just one of over 500 surviving medieval accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage. In many ways conventional, it nonetheless bears a number of distinctive features. Its presentation of first-person detailed eyewitness testimony in conjunction with judicious use of source material, innovative treatment of travel balanced with sober and restrained piety, and eschewal of some of the more fabulous aspects of pilgrimage literature, all make it an important example of the vogue for sober piety in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England. It provides evidence of critical engagement with debates surrounding pilgrimage and related aspects of religious practice such as indulgences and the cult of relics, and it is an important example of new approaches to the writing and publishing of the literature of pilgrimage and travel. Richard Guldeford, royal courtier and civil servant, did not write the account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but it emanated from the Guldeford family's interests in fashionable humanist learning and reformist religious sensibilities. The text's innovations and tensions are representative of wider shifts and deeper fault-lines in late medieval religious culture prior to the enormous religious changes of the Reformation, and are further evidence of the ways in which pre-Reformation orthodox religious culture was neither homogeneous nor unchanging. Above all, it offered a reformed and rehabilitated practice of the Jerusalem pilgrimage at a time when pilgrimage was increasingly vulnerable to attacks from both orthodox and heterodox critics.

Throughout much of human history, population - characterized, above all, by its size - was a distinctly minor determinant of geopolitical weight and power in relations between peoples. Indeed, when differences were measured in terms of political organization, social cohesion, and technological and military prowess - as expressed by the ill-defined but nevertheless wellunderstood modern concept denoting the level of economic development population size mattered very little. The modern age, if we date it from the fifteenth century, provides convincing illustrations of this proposition. European countries with relatively small populations, like the Netherlands, Portugal, or Belgium, could with relative ease acquire geographically distant possessions, greatly exceeding the mother countries in size of territory and population. And a small, and by today's standards underpopulated, European island, England, became the center of a vast empire with large colonial populations over which the sun never set. What mattered was not relative demographic size but superior technology and institutional and organizational structures. In some instances expansion was of course facilitated by relative demographic weakness in some of the territories not yet conquered. A handful of British settlers could take possession of a near-empty North American continent. Czarist Russia became a country stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. But in conflicts between nations of comparable levels of development, population became an increasingly important factor. During the Napoleonic wars, the relative size of the populations that could be mobilized was a crucial determinant of the outcome. In determining what happened in Moscow two hundred years ago this year, the relative size of the populations that could be mobilized was crucial. Within Western Europe, some fifty

This article reconsiders Britain's Suez Canal share purchase of November 1875. By means of close consideration of high politics and utilizing a range of overlooked sources, it proposes that a number of myths have arisen. It suggests that the role of the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, has been exaggerated in the existing historiography, as has the resistance of his foreign secretary, the fifteenth earl of Derby. This obscures cabinet-level debates in which there was a more sophisticated assessment of – and debate about – foreign policy objectives than has hitherto been presented. Accounts of the purchase have also tended to see it as the first sign of a new policy, that of an extended British commitment in Egypt. It is suggested here that such a commitment was, rather, the unintended consequence of a pragmatic policy. Instead, the intention was quite the opposite: to control and minimize British entanglements in the east.

This study explores the meaning of the eighteenth century for sub-Saharan African historiography. The period is understood as an extension of changes initiated with the collapse in 1591 of the West African Songhay empire and the presence of the Portuguese on the coast of West Central Africa at the end of the fifteenth century. The end of the long eighteenth century is delimited by the British occupation of Cape Colony, the end of the British slave trade and the jihads in central Sudan. This long eighteenth century is marked by the transatlantic slave trade and its effects on African societies.

This paper considers two bone boxes in the VA their sides depict scenes associated with courtly love, such as jousting and hunting, while a more obscure scene of Beating the Pear Tree, is interpreted as denoting fertility. This combined imagery suggests that the objects in this group should be understood in the context of love rather than gaming. It is proposed that they are marriage boxes, made for a non-elite market (like those associated with the Embriachi), and that their chequerboard bases are purely decorative.