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.

"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 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.

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’.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EnglishAfter a brief excursus on the Italian «living saints» who acquired a reputation for sanctity between the second half of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a clarification of the historiographical concept of «living saints», the essay presents the hitherto unexplored case of the Dominican tertiary Maddalena Panatieri da Trino (1443-1503). While living in a small town in Monferrato, a rich land located in the Piedmont region, Maddalena was reported to the Marquis Guglielmo viii Paleologo for having prophesied his victory in a tournament held in France. Later venerated by the prince, who considered her a mother, the life of the blessed Magdalene was composed by Girolamo da Milano op following the example of the hagiographic legend of Blessed Osanna of Mantua, after the passage of Monferrato to the Gonzaga dukedom in the thirties of the sixteenth century. italianoDopo un breve excursus sulle «sante vive» italiane vissute tra il secondo Quattrocento e il Cinque­cento e una precisazione del concetto storiografico di «sante vive», il saggio presenta il caso fino ad ora non approfondito, della terziaria domenicana Maddalena Panatieri da Trino (1443-1503). Mentre viveva in un piccolo centro del Monferrato, ricca terra situata nella regione del Piemonte, Maddalena si segnalo al mar­chese Guglielmo viii Paleologo per aver profetizzato la sua vittoria in un torneo tenutosi in Francia. Venerata in seguito dal principe, che la considero una madre, la vita della beata venne composta da Girolamo da Mi­lano op sull’esempio della leggenda agiografica della beata Osanna da Mantova, dopo il passaggio del Mon­ferrato al ducato dei Gonzaga negli anni Trenta del Cinquecento.

This article examines the Bengal–China connections between the Ilyās Shāhī and Ming dynasties in the early fifteenth century across the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea. It traces how law played a central role in the cultural geography and diplomatic vocabulary between individuals and communities in foreign lands, with their shared understanding of two nodal points of law. Diplomatic missions explicate how customary, regional and transregional laws were entangled in inter-imperial etiquette. Then there were the religious orders of Islam that constituted an inner circle of imperial exchanges. Between the Ilyās Shāhī rule in Bengal and the Ming Empire in China, certain dimensions of Islamic law provided a common language for the circulation of people and ideas. Stretching between cities and across oceans the interpolity legal exchanges expose interesting aspects of the histories of China and Bengal.

espanolEste articulo se centra en el analisis de los mecanismos de creacion y reclamacion de areas de uso colectivo en la Edad Media, a traves del caso de los devasos de Ciudad Rodrigo. Se trata de un conjunto de espacios destinados preferentemente al pasto del ganado y a la recoleccion de lena, a los que tenian acceso los habitantes de la villa de Ciudad Rodrigo y los vecinos de las aldeas adyacentes (comarcanos). El uso combinado del registro arqueologico y de las fuentes escritas, aplicado a los siglos xi al xv, ha permitido observar los medios de reclamacion de los derechos comunales sobre esos espacios. Se plantea la hipotesis de que se utilizaran inicialmente estrategias de sacralizacion mediante enterramientos que vinculaban el territorio a los antepasados que mas tarde se construyeran para ese fin edificaciones con funciones religiosas, pequenas iglesias que no fueron parroquias. Esta utilizacion de lo sagrado coexistio con la progresiva identificacion de los devasos como propiedades concejiles como consecuencia de la afirmacion del poder del concejo de Ciudad Rodrigo. EnglishThis paper focuses on the analysis of the ways which areas of collective use were created and claimed in the Middle Ages, through the case of the devasos of Ciudad Rodrigo. They were lands used preferentially to the grazing of cattle and to the collection of firewood; the inhabitants of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo as well as the neighbours of the villages that surrounded those areas had rights of entitlement to access. The means of claiming communal rights over those spaces between eleventh and fifteenth centuries have been studied thanks to a combination of archaeological record and written sources. The main hypothesis is the use of a claiming strategy based on sacralisation. First, burials linked the territory to the ancestors during early Middle Ages, and after the construction of buildings with religious functions, small churches that were not parishes, would have been a key to preserve the commons. Those politics of the sacred coexisted with the progressive identification of the devasos as properties of the council as a result of the affirmation of the power of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.

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

The particularities in the political development of medieval Anatolia after the arrival of the Seljuq Turks in the eleventh century resulted in a singular scenario in which a long but steady process of Islamization transformed medieval Anatolia with the majority Christian population into a mostly Muslim territory by the end of the fifteenth century. However, this process of conflict and accommodation affected not only the different religions present in the peninsula but also those confessions that coexisted and competed with each another within each of these religions. The religious diversity of the 13th to 15th cent. Anatolia has also reflected its textual production. Several significant works on kalam and fiqh, in addition to a variety of Sufi texts, were produced during this period. These works often deal with dogma, practices or traditions of their religious confession. But, generally, they do not offer much information on other religious confessions. The manuscript held at the Bibliothèque National de France (Supplément Turc 1120) contains a work which has been identified by Osman Turan as the Fustat al-‘adala and attributed to a certain Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Khatib. The uniqueness of this work is that a part of it is occupied with describing the different ‘heresies’ that were present in Anatolia at the time when the author lived, which appears to be during the lifetime of the last Seljuq Sultan of Rum, Ghiyath al-din Mas‘ud (d. 1308 AD). This introduction will look at this manuscript from both a codicological and thematic perspective. On the one hand, I will discuss certain aspects related to the production of the codex, its authorship and potential patronage. While on the other, the section on heresies contained in the text will be examined to explore what this work can tell us about the religious environment of medieval Anatolia.

A 15th century Tibetan biography offers a rare glimpse into the life of the Tibetan princess Chokyi Dronma (1422–1455), who experienced marriage, childbirth, the death of her daughter and eventuall...

The ʾAgur—a relatively obscure and occasionally derided Jewish legal compendium of the late fifteenth century—represents the first halakhic work truly of the printed age, in that it was not simply a printed manuscript, a book that utilized the production value of the printing press without changes to its substance or presentation, but rather an original text, written by its author during his lifetime, to be precisely suited for the opportunities presented by print. Jacob Landau, the author, was wholly aware of the cultural ramifications of print and adapted his work to these new circumstances and possibilities. He created a text that could be used by both scholars and nonscholars and would appeal to a variety of geographically specific traditions. It was also the first Hebrew book to contain haskamot, which later were commonly used and even required in some Jewish communities. As the first halakhic book printed during its author's lifetime, justification was necessary for its very existence.

In matters of eucharistic theology, John Wyclif (d. 1384) is best known for his rejection of the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation. There were many reasons why Wyclif came to regard this doctrine as fundamentally untenable, such as the impossibility of substantial annihilation and the illogicality of accidents existing apart from subjects, but chief among them was his deep dissatisfaction with the prevailing interpretation of Christ's words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” the words of institution required to confect the sacrament in the Mass. Wyclif insisted that getting this proposition right was essential for a correct understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. This article presents Wyclif's position on this matter within the context of later medieval scholastic discussions in an effort to lend clarity to his larger understanding of eucharistic presence. The article will then trace the reception of Wyclif's ideas to Bohemia at the turn of the fifteenth century, with special attention given to the Prague master Jakoubek of Stříbro. One finds that Wyclif, and then later Jakoubek, developed new and effective means of conceptualizing the conversion of the eucharistic elements, thereby expanding the ways in which one can affirm Christ's presence in the consecrated host and the salvific effects of that presence for faithful communicants.

As a polymath in fifteenth century Central Asia, Jāmī’s (1414–92) works were widely circulated around the Muslim world. From a global perspective, Jāmī and his prose works achieved outstanding recognition in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper follows the author’s previous research on the introduction of Jami’s works in China, seeking to answer the question of what it was that made Jāmī a legend in China and how this came about. By focusing on the transmission and transformation of Jāmī’s two Persian Sufi prose writings as they moved from Central Asia into China, the article concludes that two groups of people played a role as transcultural agents in this process; these were individual Sufi travelers and the Muslim intellectuals

The study focuses on questions relating to the deaths of professors of the Utraquist university in Prague from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century (cause of death, funerals, estates, forms and means of commemoration, etc.). It is based on sources of official provenance as well as on certain egodocuments and literary, iconographic, and material sources. Because from the Middle Ages they most commonly served as the final resting places of university masters, attention is also devoted to the Corpus Christi Chapel in New Town, Prague, and the Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town, Prague.

This paper elucidates and analyses one of the Muslim intellectual heritage in Indonesia which is phenomenal and cosmopolitan, what is called Islam Nusantara (Islam of the Archipelago). When reading the history of the arrival of Islam in Archipelago, most of the scholars studying Archipelago Islam agreed that Islamization of this area was conducted in a peaceful way. They assimilated and complemented each other to become what is called “citizen of the world”. Derridas called this as a model of universal hospitality or guiding principle to protect people from wars. As a religion of peace, Islam is cosmopolitan. This is proved by the fact that Islam is a religion which includes races and nations. This feature is marked by Nine saints (Walisanga) as Javanese unique agents in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, taking interactionist approach between Islam and local culture. This in turn creates Indonesian Islamic civilization which is called today “Islam Nusantara”, Islam without such obstacles as culture, religion, and nation, Islam with a peaceful face that respects humanity and emphasizes tolerance and empathy to human beings.

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence of the earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond the seas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeed these forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition of Western colonial and imperial rule over what were previously independent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslim societies, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditional African peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof, and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Western industrial might. It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that led to the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the direction and flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam. With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people living under a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identity against whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistanis were part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in 1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent need to recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial rule seemingly derailed from the tracks of human history. In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on the understanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in 1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its very creation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...

In this book, Andrew Devereux examines the political, legal and theological arguments that informed Spanish projects of conquest and expansion in the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Med...

This article examines the relationship between practical expertise, political power, and social mobility in fifteenth-century China. Practices and concepts from that period have been reinterpreted in recent debates on Useful and Reliable Knowledge (URK), showing that elite intellectuals and politicians were concerned with the role of crafts and technology, that is, their usefulness for the imperial state. In this article I show how a rhetoric of useful work contributed to the disappearance of practitioners in state politics and their growing invisibility in historical records by the mid-Ming period.

The author's concept floodplain in V. Rutkivsky's novel „Dzhuras of Cossack Shvaika” is analyzed in the article. It is proved that this concept is manifested on the plot, composition, space-time, character and image levels. Leaving at its core a common meaning, the concept floodplain acquires uncharacteristic meanings. In the author's picture of the world, they appeal to both geographical space of Ukraine and its history, mean a new historical force that begins to form in the late fifteenth century and stands on the defense of Ukrainian lands, indicate a gradual change of cyclical thinking to linear, the emergence of a historical person with a new self-identification. V. Rutkivsky shows the psychological mechanisms of Ukrainians self-determination in the context of social and political relations, which determines the cognitive model of political behavior’s motivation. Characters are grouped on a locative basis: concept floodplain correlates with Cossacks, their antagonists are associated with the concept of the steppe. Loci with which the warring forces are associated, determine the different ways of fighting: Cossacks are in no hurry to go to the steppe, and Tatars bypass floodplain. The attitude to floodplain marks characters, plays a characterological role. Floodplain play a key role at compositional level, as shown by the titles of the chapters: „Court in the floodplains”, „Battle in the floodplains”. The culmination of the novel is transferred by the author to the now „own” territory for the Cossacks – in the floodplain, where they win. The concept floodplain used by the writer to create the figurative structure of the novel, including metaphors, place metonyms, antitheses, hyperbole, sarcasm, chiasm.

Freedom House's latest Freedom in the World report found that 2020 marked the fifteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom, with countries where freedom deteriorated outnumbering those where it improved by the largest margin since the negative trend began Authoritarian governments exploited the covid-19 pandemic to consolidate power and crack down on dissent, and international democratic norms continued to erode, contributing to armed conflicts and impunity for human-rights violations Grassroots protest movements encountered harsh repression in many settings, dimming hopes for reform, while major democracies such as the United States and India experienced further setbacks, with the latter dropping into the Partly Free category for the first time in decades Nevertheless, Free countries generally proved more resilient than their Partly Free and Not Free counterparts, and ordinary people around the world persisted in demanding the benefits of democratic governance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Democracy is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

The anonymous ballade Ariere tost is one of the most chromatic songs from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, featuring a variety of accidentals matched only by the more widely-known...

In der vorliegenden Studie verbinden sich kulturgeschichtliche und analytische Erwagungen zum »art-song reworking« im spaten 15. Jahrhundert. Am Beispiel verschiedener Malheur me bat-Bearbeitungen von Agricola, Josquin und Obrecht werden vor allem inhaltliche Aspekte der Bezugnahme auf die Chanson-Vorlage thematisiert. In einem imaginaren Dialog mit einem vergangenen ›Expertenhorer‹ steht dabei die Frage im Vordergrund, auf welche Weise der Schopfer der betreffenden Chansonmessen bestimmte Eigenarten der zugrunde liegenden Vorlage in seiner Bearbeitung hervorkehrte, abschwachte oder gar zuspitzte. The present article combines both cultural-historical and analytical reflections on »art-song reworking« of the late fifteenth century. Using the example of several reworkings of Malheur me bat – from Agricola, Josquin, and Obrecht – references are discussed primarily from the point of view of the content. In an imaginary dialog with »expert listeners« of the past, the question is raised, in which manner the composer of the respective chanson masses either highlighted, weakened or exaggerated specific idiosyncrasies of the underlying original.

This article examines the manuscripts into which compilers bound Dominican letters of spiritual direction in fifteenth-century Italy. It argues that manuscript compilers sought to model Observant Dominican sanctity after Jerome's late antique practice of writing letters of spiritual direction to women. The paper aims to contribute to the growing conversation around the development and spread of an Observant Dominican identity by demonstrating that compilers modeled Observant beati after Jerome's authoritative persona in order to argue for the ancient precedent of the reformers’ often controversial agendas, chief among them their active ministry to women.

espanolNuestro objeto de estudio �desde un punto de vista historico, sociologico, simbolico, psicologico y literario� es uno de los personajes femeninos mas fantastico y enigmatico de finales del siglo xv y principios del xvi: Areusa, una de las prostitutas de La Celestina y ante todo un simbolo de lo que la mujer representa para una parte de la sociedad. Es nuestra intencion diseccionar la figura de Areusa y ver que modelo de mujer simboliza dentro de la sociedad de finales de la Edad Media y principios del Renacimiento, desde el analisis de su caracterizacion como personaje literario. EnglishOur object of study �from a historical standpoint, sociological, symbolic, psychological and literary� is one of the most fantastic female characters and enigmatic late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Areusa, one of the prostitutes of La Celestina and above all a symbol of what women represent for a part of society. We try to dissect Areusa and see which model symbolizes women for the society of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, from the analysis of its characterization as a literary character.

Book Review

The army of Batu Khan’s 1241 invasion of Central and Eastern Europe was the first, highly unfortunate encounter between Poland and the Mongol empire. The defeat at Legnica, the death of Prince Henry the Pious, and the collapse of his line’s reign in the Duchy of Silesia not only delayed the unifica­tion of Poland by decades, but in practice it also eliminated the Silesian Piasts from effective competition for the future Polish union. It was only the death of Ogedei Khan that forced Batu Khan to return with his army to Mongolia and that saved Poland and Hungary from a prolonged enslavement that was the fate of Ruthenian duchies. The subsequent Mongol invasions of Poland at the turn of 1260 and 1288 only deepened the process of economic decline and destruction of Poland. The defeat suffered by the Mongols in the battles with the Egyptian Mam­luks and the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 made the West lose interest in establishing political relations with the Mongols. In Eastern Europe, the western domain of the Mongol Empire, the so-called Golden Horde, grew in strength, and began playing a significant role in the politi­cal life of the entire region. The peak of its power was in the first half of the fourteenth century during the reign of Oz Beg and Jani Beg khans. From the second half of the fourteenth century faltering of the Golden Horde began. In the fifteenth century it was transformed into the so-called Great Horde. The Grand Prince Ivan III of Muscovy’s Great Stand on the Ugra River against Khan Akhmat’s Great Horde in 1480 was a Muscovite triumph. Poland, how­ever, lost one of its few allies in the east. The Polish King Alexander Jagiellon’s failure in 1502 to support the last Khan of the Great Horde, Shah-Akhmad, made way for the destruction of the Great Horde by Ivan III’s ally, the ruler of the Crimean Khanate, Menli I Giray. The fall of the Great Horde meant a symbolic end of shared history between Poland and Mongolia, which had begun with the invasion Mongol in 1241. For Russia, it was the final confirmation of its dropping its sovereignty to the Tatars. For the Crimean Khanate, which de facto broke off previous relations with the former Mongol empire by destroying the Great Horde, meant, however, that it become part of a new, emerging political and economic governance in Eastern Europe.

A wide array of reliquaries was found when the Five-story Stone Pagoda of Muryangsa Temple in Buyeo-gun, Chungcheongnam-do Province was dismantled for repairs in 1971. Among them were five Buddhist sculptures that were stolen in 1989. Some of these were returned to the temple in 2001 and others in 2017, thus enabling in-depth study of these sculptures. This paper proposes production and enshrinement dates for four of the sculptures and offers suggestions for the characteristics of enshrining Buddhist sculptures inside pagodas during the hypothesized periods. To clarify the enshrinement status, the paper first reconstructed the dismantling and repair process of the Five-story Stone Pagoda of Muryangsa Temple and identified where each reliquary was placed inside the pagoda. When the dismantling and repair process was reconstructed, it was revealed that the reliquaries must have been enshrined either when the pagoda was constructed or when it was repaired. Through a stylistic comparison with Gilt-bronze Seated Amitabha Buddha Triad and Gilt-bronze Seated Bodhisattva, the paper dates them to the early Goryeo period and the fifteenth century, during the Joseon Dynasty. Since no additional records on repairs or written prayers have been found inside the Five-story Stone Pagoda of Muryangsa Temple, it is difficult to define the objectives of the repair of the pagoda or the enshrinement of the reliquaries. However, by dating the Buddhist sculptures enshrined within the pagoda, this paper shows that it was repaired in the fifteenth century. It also examines Buddhist events held at Muryangsa Temple, including the engraving of various Buddhist scripture woodblocks. Moreover, by researching the patrons who participated in the Buddhist events, the paper presumes that the Muryangsa pagoda was repaired in the fifteenth century when the Buddhist sculptures were enshrined inside. It further relates the objectives of enshrining the Buddhist sculptures inside the Muryangsa pagoda to the spread of the faith that Geumgangsan Mountain was a Buddha Land where Dharmodgata Bodhisattva resided and to patronage from the Joseon royal family.