This text consists of the ‘lectio praecursoria’ given at the defense of my doctoral dissertation “The Good Noblemen Who Conquered the Kingdom: Islam, Historiography, and Aristocratic Legitimation in Late-Medieval Portugal”. This dissertation deals with aristocratic historiography and political legitimation in late-medieval Portugal (late…[Read more]

This article investigates several discussions of “chemistry,” understood as an analysts’ category referring to theories and practices dealing with the structure and transformation of matter. By reading these texts (a treatise defending kīmiyāʾ by al-Fārābī, the famous passage from Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ on transmutation, Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwā…[Read more]

article + 6 photographs from the Manuscriptistan Project

This blog post gives an overview of the Camden Material and Colour Guide. The guide provides property owners of heritage buildings in the Camden Heritage Conservation Area with tips and hints on restoration and conservation of their houses. The guide provides colour schemes on building exteriors and interiors by housing styles between 1840 and…[Read more]

As educators, we are all familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy and the way it progressively maps the cognitive activities involved in learning and constructing knowledge. Too often, however, we educators who work in writing-focused curricula ask our students to work in the higher-order cognitive domains of analysis and creation without necessarily giving…[Read more]

Teaching the fundamentals of writing composition shouldn’t be boring. It should be active, engaging, and EMPOWERING! Most students, whether they consciously articulate it or not, want to vanquish their writing anxiety. They want to develop confidence in their ability to compose and revise strong prose that will help them thrive in coursework and…[Read more]

In courses that end in summative final exams or capstone projects, it can be challenging to get students to pull back and identify the learning that they’ve done across an entire unit or semester rather than only focus on the learning they’ve undertaken most recently. As part of our larger sequence of active-learning-based lesson plans designed to…[Read more]

Las luchas por el territorio ocurren en localidades específicas, con expresiones únicas. Sin embargo, nunca es sólo una mina, un relleno sanitario, un gasoducto, un tren, una refiniería; detrás de estos proyectos existen diversas escalas en las que el mercado mundial conecta la maquinaria, gran industria, comercio y las regiones de sacr…[Read more]

Sinabi ni Ramon Reyes: Kung ituturing nating relihiyon ang pangunahing dimensyon ng tao kung saan iniuugnay niya ang sagrado, sa “lampas,” sa nagbibigay ng batayan at pinakahuling kahulugan ng kanyang pang-araw-araw na pag-iral, kung gayon ang mga animistikong paniniwala at gawain ng ang mga unang Pilipino ay magiging kuwalipikado bilang…[Read more]

The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic as a historical category. The present article shifts away from asking what pre-modern alchemy “really” was, to asking how medieval scholars writing in Greek and Arabic thought about the practice of treating and combining naturally occurring substan…[Read more]

Mesmerism provided Edgar Allan Poe with a framework in which to reimagine logical and poetic rigor.

Erica Hill emphasizes, “Their thoughts and actions established and maintained relationships with prey animals and may be more productively conceptualized as dynamic social behaviours embedded within the context of daily life than as privileged ritual acts.”
It would appear readily apparent that in many different ways spiritual and religious bel…[Read more]

Erica Hill emphasizes, “Their thoughts and actions established and maintained relationships with prey animals and may be more productively conceptualized as dynamic social behaviours embedded within the context of daily life than as privileged ritual acts.”
It would appear readily apparent that in many different ways spiritual and religious bel…[Read more]