The medieval poem Cursor Mundi is a biblical verse account of the history of the world, offering a chronological overview of salvation history from Creation to Doomsday. Originating in northern England around the year 1300, the poem was frequently copied in the north before appearing in a southern v...

As part of my regular job as curator of illuminated manuscripts at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (from 2006–2009) I acquired a few items for the collection. A manuscript written in the vernacular from the Meuse valley, near Roermond or Venlo, with numerous prints pasted into it (and not ripped or cut...

Historical knowledge is commonly believed to be a logical project that builds upon itself by successive generation. Problematically, this theory of history serves as a foundational feature of twenty-first-century historical methodology. The impact of modern historiography of the early medieval past...

[EN] This paper evaluates the possible impact of the early medieval pandemic known as the “Justinianic plague” as one of the factors that shaped the mountain ecosystems in the Spanish Central System of the Iberian Peninsula. For this purpose, we focus on two high-resolution, radiocarbon-dated natura...

The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive aft...

The notion of the denomination of a ratio dominates the theory of proportionality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It appears in different contexts, arithmetic treatises, editions of the Elements, treatises on the theory of proportions, etc. The most complete outlook on this notion can be fou...

International audience French Epigraphists in recent decades regularly recognize the importance of studying the external characteristics of an inscription; however they still have a hard time giving them the proper place in the analysis of medieval epigraphic texts. Nevertheless the approach of a pa...

In Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350, Anselm Oelze offers the first comprehensive and systematic exploration of theories of animal rationality in the later Middle Ages. Readership: Everyone interested in medieval philosophy and psychology in general, as well as the history of the...

Justice was administered in the name of the king by his judges before the French revolution. Criminal decisions were not founded on the judges’ own findings. They were theoretically based on a tripartite classification of proofs according to their probative value: the statutory proofs theory. Is the...

From Byzantium to the Low Countries: via Italian cities such as Venice or Siena, through Crete, or Burgundy, or by way of Germany and Eastern Europe, what are the roads followed by icons and art objects in their passage from East to West? How was the Platonic-Byzantine concept of the image received...

With the development of research in economic history, historians are now testing the hypothesis that maritime networks and port cities contributed to the phenomenon of European integration. This essay applies a holistic approach to discuss how the city of Lisbon, located outside the privileged setti...

“La Grande Brenne”, a 520 km² fish farming region situated in “Indre”, is a wetland of major ecological interest. Our goal is to add some information about the history of fishponds, its territory, its population and about the relationships between its society and its environment which have led to th...

Revue French History "Animals in French History" Juin 2014, vol. 28, n° 2 Introduction Peter Sahlins and Chris Pearson French History 2014 28: 153-156 [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF] [Request Permissions] Articles Man as rabid beast: criminals into animals in late medieval France Jolanta N. Komornicka F...

International audience “Archaeology of the Lake Regions of Chad” (ArRéLat) is a Franco-Chadian research and education project. It is designed to develop archaeological research in Chad, by relaunching fieldwork and contributing to the training of a new generation of Chadian archaeologists. The proje...

The aim of this paper is to apply Arnold van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s conceptual scheme of the rite of passage to medieval and early modern visions of the hereafter. Most of the visionary accounts (e.g., Drythelm’s Vision, Thurkill’s Vision, St. Patrick’s Purgatory) share a great deal of similar...

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Tübingen invites applications for a position in the Department of History, Medieval History section, as a Professor (W1, tenure track) of the History of the Medieval Middle East and the Mediterranean to commence as soon as possible. The holder of this p...

By Yan Liu In 647, an emissary from Gapi, a kingdom in northern India, presented a plant called “yu gold aromatic” (yu jin xiang) to the court of Tang (618-907). The foreign herb flowered in the ninth month of the year, with the shape of a lotus. The color of the flowers was purplish blue, and their...

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[EN] This study describes a detailed analysis through communicative and structural parameters of great spectacles in the late medieval ages, focused on the procession of Corpus Christi in Valencia. It exposes the essence of an event that transformed the whole city into a place of representation. The...

In The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews the author explains how Christians with Jewish ancestry went within less than forty years from having a leading role in the foundation and development of the Society of Jesus to being prohibited from membership in it. Readership: All those interested in con...

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Devotion to iconic religious figures, though being as old as Christianity itself. Furthermore, it can range from being deeply personal and intense (Kasten, 2014; Mayblin, 2014; Ganzevoort, 2008; Jansen & Kuhl, 2008; Ghezzi, 2007; Martin, 2006; Ellsberg, 2006), to superficially tangential and ephemer...