Research into grammaticalization has an established genealogy, which records the birth of the term “grammaticalization” in more or less its present-day sense with Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), but recognizes an intellectual lineage extending back to at least the Enlightenment. Among the immediate predecessors of Meillet, Georg von der Gabel…[Read more]

“Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript,” with Susan Kim, in Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections: Essays on the Monster in Culture, ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press E-Book, 2008)

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2018. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources. So pervasive was this reflexive identification that the language of the monstrous occurs not onl…[Read more]

This article focuses on the images and texts on page 3 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, in which Lucifer foments rebellion, falls, and, as Satan, is bound to the mouth of hell. The bottom third of the page contains an image of falling angels, Satan, and the hellmouth. Above that image and to the left is written “hER SE,” Old English for…[Read more]

Monstrous iconography was a major, even central, element of the visual arts throughout the entire medieval period, Early Christian through late Gothic, east and west, north and south. There are few—if any—medieval cultural traditions that do not rely on monstrous imagery for vital cultural functions. Within this catchall category, often def…[Read more]

This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris’s Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir j…[Read more]

The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up…[Read more]

The Vercelli map, bluntly put, is in very poor shape (Tav. VIII). The map was found by Carlo Errera in 1908, while he was «putting in order the archive of the Chapter of Vercelli: Nobody before had paid attention to it, because it was inventoried by a hand of the eighteenth century as an old sketch of a synoptic picture»1. It has survived the p…[Read more]

I want to touch the Middle Ages. I want to hold all of the works of art in all the museums. I want to turn the pages, not by touching a screen or mouse in the Brit- ish Library’s Turning The PagesTM app, but by touching vellum in the British Li- brary’s reading room. I want to open and close the wings on altarpieces, to feel ivories warm in my han…[Read more]

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain’s location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world’s holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography,…[Read more]

University courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this volume offers the key primary readings on monsters from ancient times to the present day. Each work is preceded by a critical…[Read more]

BEACHES GIVE AND TAKE, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. The ocean offers monsters— whales and whirlpools—but when a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment: words, sounds, breath, water…[Read more]

Discover the history and specificity of French Business Schools, while delving into some related governance issues

Claudia Ruitenberg’s recent work on democratic education has spurred an important debate.1 On the one hand, philosophers of educa-tion such as Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, and more recently Tomas Englund, draw from John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas to claim that democratic education should be rooted in deliberative competence, consensus pr…[Read more]

Catalogue of the Exhibition held in Pisa in October 2015.

On the baconian metalinguistic reflection in his work Novum Organon

This brief blog post discusses qualitative methods for identifying horizontal processes in the evolution of sign language handshapes in manual alphabets using phylogenetic network methods.

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin A…[Read more]

Self-monitoring as a personality attribute is given particular attention by researchers in order to understand employee performance and productivity in the organizational context. Numerous studies focused on the impact of self-monitoring from individual employee perspective with limited focus on the impact of the organization’s performance. H…[Read more]