Throughout the medieval period, the ‘Inner Seas’ linking Scotland, the Hebrides, and the north of Ireland represented a confluence and crucible of identity. The region’s myriad islands served as stepping stones in a maritime network across which people, property, and perceptions travelled freely and purposefully. Encompassing three main theme…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is a repository of texts spanning more than a millennium of Jewish history, including thousands of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts now held in collections around the world. Among these are fragments from at least 25 separate Qur’an manuscripts in Arabic script, all of which lack any traces of Hebrew writing. Their…[Read more]

For over a century and a half, the assorted activities of viking hosts in and around the site of Dorestad have been subject to careful deliberation and debate, increasingly illuminating the early Scandinavian influence on this regional riverine landscape. Nevertheless, the material evidence for a ninth-century viking presence inside the settlement…[Read more]

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted…[Read more]

An overall view of the use of personal and adverbial pronouns in a 15-c. long text in verse witten in Catalan, “Espill” by Jaume Roig. Personal and adverbial pronouns are studied by themselves as well as in combination.

The modern names for the Hebrew vowels (qameṣ, pataḥ, segol, ṣere, ḥiriq/ḥireq, ḥolem, shuruq/shureq, qibbuṣ/qubbuṣ) are derived from a variety of medieval sources. The pair of qameṣ and pataḥ are the oldest, both having evolved in the earliest stages of Masoretic analysis of vocalisation. The remaining names are products of three different…[Read more]

Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods to disambiguate the vocalization of important texts, especially the Bible. The earliest step in this process was the implementation of the Syriac ‘diacritic…[Read more]

Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most studies of Syriac dots either neglec…[Read more]

Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts with complete vocalisation are rare, a problem which makes reconstructing the pronunciation of the medieval language challenging. This study presents an edition of a Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes from the Cairo Genizah with full Tiberian vocalisation. This manuscript exhibits noteworthy features of dialectal…[Read more]

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and…[Read more]

MS T-S Ar.5.58 is a translation glossary from the Cairo Geniza that contains a list of Judaeo-Arabic glosses for Hebrew words from the biblical book of Samuel. These Arabic words are fully vocalised with the Tiberian Hebrew pointing system, providing more precise phonetic information about the scribe’s native Arabic dialect than could be e…[Read more]

Discusses the fragmentary poem Inna hinada at the end of Lebor na hUidre

Book review

Peter Shoeffer’s book-list is usually dated to the year 1470. The author challenges this dating, however, supplying a detailed analysis of the content of the list and suggested when it was printed and under what circumstances.

Francesca Romana

Jordanes’ Romana

This article discusses the limitations and advantages of using ›asceticism‹ as a universal category and as a hermeneutic tool in the study of late antique religious life and comparative studies of religious communities. It first explores the roots and the history of the terms ›asceticism‹, ›Askese‹ and ›ascétisme‹ arguing that they originate f…[Read more]