One of the most astonishing scenes in Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha occurs when the priest and the barber, in order to counteract the mental deterioration of their friend Don Quijote, decide to burn his books about chivalry and knighthood, which, in their opinion, were driving Don Quijote to insanity.
The priest and the barber d…[Read more]

For a long time, metaphors have played an important role in depicting language history. In this study, we contrast early metaphors on language history, such as the family tree or the wave model, with recent metaphors that were popularized after the quantitative turn, such as forests of trees or phylogenetic networks. Speculating about metaphors…[Read more]

This article examines the working life of Frank Maybank (1901-94), a self-described Australian trade unionist on the Central African Copperbelt. Maybank was in many ways a worker of the world, he lived and worked in several countries and did all manner of jobs. The job he held the longest was General Secretary of the whites-only mineworkers’ u…[Read more]

This article analyzes the reception and reactions in the Chilean political
debate to the so-called “Prague Spring”, especially in the National Congress, in
August 1968. Methodologically, the historical study consults primary sources,
documents from the Historical Archive of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and press of the time, new…[Read more]

1970 wurde die Schwarzenbach-Initiative nur knapp verworfen. Sie war der Auftakt zu einer bis heute anhaltenden Reihe von «Überfremdungsinitiativen», die Generationen von Menschen mit Migrationsgeschichte traumatisiert haben. In diesem Buch sprechen Zeitzeug:innen der Schwarzenbach-Initiative über ihr Leben im Provisorium. Sie erzählen von prek…[Read more]

Historically, tourism in Wales was invigorated by the reinvention of mountain scenery during the Romantic period when travellers gained new perspectives of the terrain from higher ground. It is also during this period that inns and guesthouses began keeping visitors’ books in which guests evaluated their surroundings and their hosts’ good ser…[Read more]

This article analyses orthographic variation in the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos. Despite the general consistency in spelling found in Linear B texts from all sites, variation was in certain cases both permissible and entirely normal, even within the work of a single writer. Examining the patterns of orthographic variation…[Read more]

The text on Nestor’s Cup (750-700 BCE) is not Greek as many claim but is actually Alphabetic Akkadian. Its three-line text is a debate about the cause of a drought. The first line blames the life network goddess Ayu and her eagle vultures while the second line blames emotion magic with its owls (like the Athenian owl). Alphabetic Akkadian was t…[Read more]

The chapter discusses recently developed computational techniques providing concrete help in addressing various tasks in historical language comparison, focusing specifically on those tasks which are typically subsumed under the framework of the comparative method. These include the proof of relationship, cognate and correspondence detection,…[Read more]

España, a finales del siglo XVIII, todavía era un imperio colonial. El comercio con las provincias de ultramar estimulaba la venida de irlandeses, prusianos, suecos, holandeses, marselleses y sobre todo ingleses, que fundaban Casas de Comercio con españoles. Pero con la aparición de Napoleón en la escena europea, Inglaterra impuso el “blo…[Read more]

Jorge Insunza Becker (21 de abril de 1936-17 de marzo de 2019) fue uno de los principales dirigentes del Partido Comunista chileno desde los años 60. Ingresó a las Juventudes Comunistas en 1954. En 1962 fue promovido al Comité Central del PC y desde 1965 fue parte de su Comisión Política, aquella que encabezó el triunfo de Salvador Allende de 19…[Read more]

This graduate seminar approaches the urban and rural landscapes of peninsular Italy from the Early Iron Age until the Gothic Wars, with the goal being to examine key points of intersection (and departure) between the spheres of ‘town’ and ‘country’. In adopting an holistic approach to these categories that are often juxtaposed, the seminar…[Read more]

This chapter attempts to analyze the historiographical debate around agency/structure, especially focused on two current historians, Mary Fulbrook and Peter Burke. Likewise, the conception and relationship of the State within the historiography of the Cold War, seen from the perspective of structure/agent, is presented as a case study. In sum,…[Read more]

Cyprian’s Epistle 63 represents the earliest extant account of the proper meaning and administration of the eucharistic cup. Against a group of Christians who were taking only water, Cyprian argues that wine is necessary for the ritual to be effective. While there has been much discussion surrounding the biblical references marshaled by Cyprian t…[Read more]

Humankind, for Gregory of Nyssa, was poisoned through a primordial act of eating the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. As a result, the toxin of sin and death has been blended into the body and soul of each person, dispersing itself throughout the component parts of their nature. If eating and drinking initiated the spiritual and physical…[Read more]

Review of Douglas Boin’s Coming Out Christian in the Roman World

Review of Seducing Augustine, by Virginia Burrus, Karmen MacKendrick, and Mark Jordan (2010)

Heroes and Demons entered the northern Mediterranean culture between 600 and 500 BCE when the culture was transforming from the magical Ancient Pagan Paradigm to a lordified Paradigm which forced deity personification making them lords in a royal pantheon instead of powers. This caused an explosion in the number of deities and other divine realm…[Read more]