History
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2 days agoHow DNA forensics is transforming studies of ancient manuscripts
Tim Stinson's curiosity about DNA in ancient manuscripts led to the emergence of a new field in manuscript studies.
Grammarly is now offering 'expert review' of your work by living and dead academics. Without anyone's explicit permission it's creating little LLMs based on their scraped work and using their names and reputation.
The Household and Wardrobe Accounts are English records that document the daily needs of the king and his family. This book serves as a guide to these sources, showing how they can be used and what valuable insights they offer into medieval government.
It started with a book launch in 2021. I'd been living in London as a social media journalist when I asked my then-publication's culture editor to send me to one of these exclusive-sounding events, as 1) I'd never been and 2) I just really wanted to be a person who "has a book launch to go to." Thankfully, there was one that exact day-and he put my name on the list for the release of Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome. Huzzah.
Renais­sance artist Albrecht Dür­er (1471-1528) nev­er saw a rhi­no him­self, but by rely­ing on eye­wit­ness descrip­tions of the one King Manuel I of Por­tu­gal intend­ed as a gift to the Pope, he man­aged to ren­der a fair­ly real­is­tic one, all things con­sid­ered.
If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun.
Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Mag­yar, which is spo­ken and writ­ten in Hun­gary, ranks among the hard­est Euro­pean lan­guages to learn. (The U.S. For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute puts it in the sec­ond-to-high­est lev­el, accom­pa­nied by the dread­ed aster­isk label­ing it as "usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.") But once you mas­ter its vow­el har­mo­ny sys­tem, its def­i­nite and indef­i­nite con­ju­ga­tion, and its eigh­teen gram­mat­i­cal cas­es, among oth­er noto­ri­ous fea­tures, you can final­ly enjoy the work of writ­ers like Nobel Lau­re­ates Imre Kertész and Lás­zló Krasz­na­horkai in the orig­i­nal. Alas, no degree of mas­tery will be much help if you want to under­stand a much old­er - and, in its way, much more noto­ri­ous - Hun­gar­i­an text, the Rohonc Codex.
CHARM is built around a large-scale survey of material connected to three major writing centres-Turku, Naantali, and Viipuri-in the 15th century. By comparing charters and book fragments together, the researchers aim to map how writing practices were adopted, modified, and localised, and what that meant for society and administration in a region that was then part of the Swedish realm.
This is a book about a book: the small, cropped, somewhat ragged but brightly illustrated volume now known formally, and rather forbiddingly, as British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. The fame and beauty of its four Middle English poems have given it sobriquets beyond the shelfmark, however, which are more familiar and intimate: it is also the Gawain-Manuscript or, as I will call it, the Pearl-Manuscript.
When universities began to emerge in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they soon became important centres of knowledge. Their libraries could hold hundreds of books, and many of the most valuable volumes were kept under close control - sometimes even chained to desks. We have few details about how medieval university libraries operated, but a revealing set of rubric headings survives from the University of Angers in western France.
In this paper we investigate whether infant and childhood feeding practices influenced the imbalanced adult sex ratio reported in medieval Europe from historical and osteological evidence. First, we examine hypotheses for the observed imbalanced sex ratios in Europe and the evidence presented to support these hypotheses. We then use stable isotope analysis (δ13C and δ15N) of incremental dentine in 64 first molars from adults at three medieval sites (Aulla, Badia Pozzeveri, and Montescudaio) in north-western Tuscany (11th-15th c. CE).
This open-access book brings together more than thirty essays on languages and the ways they develop, interact, and influence one another. Its main focus is the Middle East, where Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic long existed side by side and often overlapped in everyday use, scholarship, and culture. In line with Geoffrey (Khan)'s commitment to the maximally accessible dissemination of research, this Festschrift has been published in both open-access digital editions and affordable printed formats.
In this volume, the authors aim to provide a truly global overview of the 14 century, with each region given approximately the same space. It is obviously impossible to cover every event in every country of the world in a single volume, just as you would not be able to visit every city in every country if you traveled around the world for a year.
This project will focus on the Camaldolese hermits' proposal for achieving what they considered to be the most crucial task in the repair of the church, eliminating Islam and all Muslims. Our study will begin with an examination of the recipient of the Libellus, Giovanni de' Medici, who would become Pope Leo X. Next will be an exploration into the backgrounds of Paolo Giustiniani and Pietro Querini,
A conversation with Jana Matuszak, a Sumerologist, and Petra Goedegebuure, a Hittitologist, about the prospects for the survival of smaller academic disciplines that require specialized language skills. What critical mass of experts is needed? How can these fields be combined with others?
Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).
Eleanor Janega is one of the most well-known historians of the Middle Ages, widely recognised as the host and co-creator of several history series on HistoryHit TV and the podcast Going Medieval. She is also a prolific writer and public educator, bringing medieval history to a broad audience through her engaging books, articles, and media appearances. With a keen focus on medieval society, gender, and power structures, Janega challenges popular misconceptions and makes the past accessible with wit and scholarly depth.