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This volume presents the doctoral research of the author, a driving force in early medieval numismatics. In it, Abramson contends that the kingdom of Northumbria, at least in the ninth century, pos...

Work on the use of documents in the Middle Ages has now accepted that written record-keeping in Europe did not collapse with Roman rule, to be replaced only by orality and memory, but continued thr...

It is somewhat rare to be able to analyze the membership of an early medieval women's religious community in any detail. Sant Joan de Ripoll, which operated from the late ninth century until 1017 at modern-day Sant Joan de les Abadesses in Catalonia, provides not just this opportunity but the even rarer chance to evaluate the nuns’ command of writing, by means of a single original charter of 949 that several of them signed autograph. This article argues that the signatures of these nuns indicate that they had in fact been taught to write before joining the nunnery. They are thus a source for female lay, rather than religious, literacy in this time and area. Consolidating this, the article provides a prosopography of the known nuns derived from the other charters of the nunnery's part-surviving archive, including tracing some of their careers beyond the 1017 dissolution of the house. This shows that the members of the comital family who had founded the house and provided several of its abbesses were not otherwise frequent among the nuns; rather, the nunnery recruited from the local notables in its neighborhoods, to whose interest in female literacy these signatures therefore testify. Such support could not prevent the closure of the house, however, and the article closes with a reflection on the agency available to the nuns in a political sphere dominated by male, secular interests.

The maximum energy to which ions are accelerated in the interaction of a high power laser pulse with a thin foil target scales with the laser intensity, with a power-law that varies with the acceleration mechanism and laser pulse parameters. For fixed laser energy and pulse duration, maximizing the intensity by focusing to a smaller focal spot does not, however, necessarily result in higher-energy ions. For the case of relatively thick foil targets, it has been shown that self-generated magnetic fields and unfavourable changes to the temperature and divergence of the fast electron population injected into the target can result in lower-energy sheath-accelerated ions compared to that expected from intensity scaling laws. We report results from an investigation of the influence of laser focusing on ion acceleration in the ultrathin target regime, for which high energy protons have been achieved by our group [1]. We compare the interaction physics resulting from the use of f/3 and f/1 focusing geometries. Although f/1 focusing (achieved using a focusing plasma optic) produces a smaller nominal laser focal spot size and thus higher nominal peak intensity, more efficient ion acceleration to higher energies is achieved with the f/3 geometry for the case of expanding ultrathin foils undergoing relativistic self-induced transparency. Particle-in-cell simulations reveal that self-focusing in the expanding plasma produces a near-diffraction-limited focal spot, resulting in up to an order of magnitude higher focused intensity in the f/3 case. We also report on the extent to which this intensity enhancement is expected in the case of the short-pulse, ultrahigh-intensity regime that will soon be accessible using multi-petawatt lasers. The study is published in reference [2]. [1] A. Higginson et al., Nature Communications 9, 724 (2018) [2] T. P. Frazer et al., Phys. Rev. Research 2, 042015(R) (2020)

Laser-driven proton acceleration from ultrathin foils is investigated experimentally using F/3 and F/1 focusing. Higher energies achieved with F/3 are shown via simulations to result from self-focusing of the laser light in expanding foils that become relativistically transparent, enhancing the intensity. The increase in proton energy is maximised for an optimum initial target thickness, and thus expansion profile, with no enhancement occurring for targets that remain opaque, or with F/1 focusing to close to the laser wavelength. The effect is shown to depend on the drive laser pulse duration.

The “World of Medieval Islands” project invites the questioning of the category of island from medieval evidence, and coincided with another project of the author’s that was undertaking a similar exercise with medieval frontiers. Combining these two research areas, this article investigates two island, or island-like, zones that were situated at the edges of early medieval polities, primarily (though variably) of Umayyad al-Andalus, and compares their situation so as to elucidate what about their geopolitical situation made them island-like and how steady that likeness was. Working through the historiographies of the Balearic Islands, which shifted from Byzantine to Islamic control through a variably evaluated transition period, and of the Muslim settlement at La Garde-Freinet, Provence, from inception to extermination, the article concludes that what was island-like or indeed frontier-like about both areas was not continuous, and that the category “island” is historically contingent and subjective, despite its apparent geographic concreteness.

The production of intense X-ray and particle sources is one of the most remarkable aspects of high energy laser interaction with a solid target. Wide application of these laser-driven secondary sources requires a high yield, which is partially limited by the amount of laser energy absorbed by the target. Here, we report on the enhancement of laser absorption and X-ray and particle flux by target surface modifications. In comparison to targets with flat front surfaces, our experiments show exceptional laser-to-target performance for our novel cone-shaped silicon microstructures. The structures are manufactured via laser-induced surface structuring. Spectral and spatial studies of reflectance and X-ray generation reveal significant increases of the silicon K α line and a boost of the overall X-ray intensity, while the amount of reflected light decreases. Also, the proton and electron yields are enhanced, but both temperatures remain comparable to those of flat foil targets. We support the experimental findings with 2D particle in cell simulations to identify the mechanisms responsible for the strong enhancement. Our results demonstrate how custom surface structures can be used to engineer high power laser-plasma sources for future applications.

A blog without an audience is no more than a constrained word processor; the point of blogging is surely to find an audience. But how can we go about gauging the audience that is attracted? Can it be measured or assessed, can it be courted, can it be deterred? Is the audience a blogger gets the one they want? This article looks, through the lens of the author’s experience with an academic blog on medieval history, at these questions and concludes that although the largest portion of the audience remains invisible, unengaged and perhaps accidental, the members of the audience of a successful blog who do interact and respond are the real necessity for a fruitful collaborative space that benefits readers as well as authors.

The end of the Carolingian dynasty shortly after the death of King Lothar III (954–86) has tended to overwrite that king’s considerable activity in his reign. This is especially evident in the counties of the old Spanish March, now mostly parts of Catalonia, as they came under renewed pressure from the caliphate of Cordoba. This article examines three counts of this area circa 981, when one of them received a letter from Lothar, and finds each of them using a different strategy to justify their possession of what had once been regalian rights. By examining changes in their representations, it goes on to show that the rulers here relied on royalist ideological arguments sufficiently to enable a king to make his voice heard at their courts even in the very last years of the Carolingian era

Important aspects of social history can sometimes be lost in legalisms. A long debate, recently continued in EME, has studied the right of aprisio claimed by those who took over wasteland on the frontier of the future Catalonia. This paper argues that previous treatments of the term have conflated many separate factors and misunderstood what aprisio actually was in practice. When studied at ground level it seems that, despite the role given to immigrant settlers by historians, landholders by aprisio need not have been newcomers, but locals using new rules for otherwise normal land clearances.

Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de les Abadesses, post-Visigothic Catalonia's first known nunnery, left a sufficient documentary record to permit in-depth study of her method of rule, which included taking her comital brothers to court for her rights. Closer study of these acts suggests that her rule was part of a family strategy, whose change by a younger generation was to undo many of her efforts to secure Sant Joan's independence. Her rule included not only aggressive territorial aggrandizement but the reshaping of the locality's history in a way which has endured until this day.

Writing History in the Digital Age began as a “what-if” experiment by posing a question: How have Internet technologies influenced how historians think, teach, author, and publish? To illustrate their answer, the contributors agreed to share the stages of their book-in-progress as it was constructed on the public web. To facilitate this innovative volume, editors Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki designed a born-digital, open-access, and open peer review process to capture commentary from appointed experts and general readers. A customized WordPress plug-in allowed audiences to add page- and paragraph-level comments to the manuscript, transforming it into a socially networked text. The initial six-week proposal phase generated over 250 comments, and the subsequent eight-week public review of full drafts drew 942 additional comments from readers across different parts of the globe. The finished product now presents 20 essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) if and how digital and emergent technologies have changed the historical profession.

This article has been published open access as per the agreement between Universidad de Salamanca and Wiley., [EN]The past few decades have witnessed great change in the study of the early Middle Ages in the Northern Iberian Peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese historiographies have moved away from older grand narratives such as ‘Recon-quest and Repopulation’, which traced a centuries-long process encompassing the ultimate victory of Christian-ity over Islam and the construction of distinct nations or national societies. The basic tenets of these and other essentialist approaches to a period traditionally seen as the cradle of Spain and Portugal have been questioned and now superseded by a clearer awareness of the territorial diversity characterising the 8th to 11th centuries. Yet the ballast of both nationalism and regionalism has obstructed meaning-ful comparison amongst the Iberian regions to date. Draw-ing on the work of the research group EarlyMedIberia, this article argues for a new trans-regional approach to Northern Iberia, looking beyond political and geographical boundaries to consider the whole in a comparative light, and stressing the commonalities between regional and local societies. It does so by providing an overview of the extant charter material from before 1100 (indicating the principal editions) and by reviewing the major historiography. The conclusion proposes a closer assessment of the differences and similarities amongst regional historiographies, based on a more nuanced understanding of how they have been moulded by the specificities of the charter corpus in each region, as the first step towards a more integrated, contextualised, and rigorously comparative approach to the early Middle Ages in Northern Iberia., Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), Ayuda Ramón y Cajal, Grant/Award Number: RYC2020-030272-I/MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), Project NASD, Grant/Award Number: PID2020-112506GB-C44/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103; European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation Programme, Grant/Award Number: 850604; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), Grant/Award Number: PID2020-115365GB-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), Project ECOLOC, Grant/Award Number: EUR2021-122009/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), Project ARPAMED, Grant/Award Number: PID2020-119365GA-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103, Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCLE

Skillful use of original sources teases out the networks of power and association in what was to become Catalonia.