Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.) and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son, Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal…[Read more]

When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon’s goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on t…[Read more]

Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating”…[Read more]

The use of the term “community” in historical studies continues to present problems for many medievalists. Myriad studies have emphasized the inadequacy of the term when describing medieval society. Microstudies of manors and villages, especially in the English context, by historians Barbara A. Hanawalt, J. Ambrose Raftis, and Sherri Olson (am…[Read more]

Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her w…[Read more]

The history of homicidal insanity in the courts of law of medieval England.

Given the hurdles one faced in trying to stay healthy in later medieval England, it should come as no surprise that the medieval English placed a premium on competent medicine. As Carole Rawcliffe has argued, “medieval life was beset by constant threats to health arising from poor diet (at both ends of the social spectrum), low levels of h…[Read more]

Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners’ increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an o…[Read more]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the sol…[Read more]

In the late 1420s, Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni initiated a major building campaign to reform the Benedictine monastery of the Florentine Badia. Designed to provide its community with an orderly space in which to pursue the Benedictine Observance, the compound rises around the so-called Orange Cloister, long considered to be an early work of Bernardo…[Read more]

Early seventeenth century lute improvisation — a phrase that by its mere utterance may cause debates full of uncertainties, fears and fantasies. What is proper improvisa-tion? How did they do it 360 years ago? In this article I seek to revive a systematic prac-tice of teaching ornamentation and improvisation from the Renaissance scholars — i.e…[Read more]

Informed Play presents a conceptual understanding of tone production based on extensive historical research on primary sources, modern literature and handbook reviews, physical and psychological perspectives as well as on technology. As the first volume in English to discuss and contextualise the topic of tone production on Early Modern lute…[Read more]

Informed Play presents a conceptual understanding of tone production based on extensive historical research on primary sources, modern literature and handbook reviews, physical and psychological perspectives as well as on technology. As the first volume in English to discuss and contextualise the topic of tone production on Early Modern lute…[Read more]

En su edición del Romancero del Cid de 1871, un compendio de todos los romances del Cid disponibles en versiones impresas de los siglos XVI y XVII, Carolina Michaëlis incluyó un apéndice para demostrar la vitalidad de la tradición cidiana en pleno siglo XIX. Michaëlis escribe: “Para muestra del género de romances populares que aun hoy dia en A…[Read more]

En su edición del Romancero del Cid de 1871, un compendio de todos los romances del Cid disponibles en versiones impresas de los siglos XVI y XVII, Carolina Michaëlis incluyó un apéndice para demostrar la vitalidad de la tradición cidiana en pleno siglo XIX. Michaëlis escribe: “Para muestra del género de romances populares que aun hoy dia en A…[Read more]

Data set of measures from Galileo Galilei’s Compasso Geometrico e Militare and comparison of the weights of substances with data in Kepler’s table of specific gravities in MesseKunst Archimedis. Data associated with a forthcoming article in Early Science and Medicine, titled “Johannes Kepler and the Exploration of the Weight of Substances in the…[Read more]