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]

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]

Review of Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014-2014

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]

It is often claimed that the mortuary traditions that appeared in lowland Britain in the fifth century AD are an expression of new forms of ethnic identity, based on the putative memorialisation of a ‘Germanic’ heritage. This article considers the empirical basis for this assertion and evaluates it in the light of previously proposed ethnic con…[Read more]

Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for t…[Read more]

The architectural evolution of the Louvre between the 15th and 17th centuries is characterized by systematic attempts to distinguish the building within the broader context of French styles. In the 15th and early 16th centuries, this is achieved by producing grander and more elaborate versions of the contemporary French architectural solutions.…[Read more]

This article offers ten reasons, why historians should blog.

In this article, we argue that scholarly blogs are appropriate modern platforms for open access publishing and a dynamic alternative to online journals. We use the blog ‘Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte’ that has become a major player in the field of medieval studies as an example for a successful scholarly blog,…[Read more]

Synopsis of those monasteries that were dissoluted during secularization, from which manuscripts came into possession of the former Court Library of the landgraves of Hessen-Darmstadt (now: University and State Library Darmstadt).

The works of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) intrigue readers approaching them from various angles… Here, my aim is modest: to highlight passages in Bembo’s literary texts which exploit the erotic lexicon so popular in his day.