This module will deal with the study of a few texts written in Medieval and Early Modern Europe related to Witchcraft, Heresy and Inquisition. The main purpose of this course is to consider how some patterns and stereotypes in the European cultural history of the past use to appear also in our current times. The outline below gives the general…[Read more]

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

This articel identifies the German cookbook in the manuscript Solothurn, Zentralbibliothek, Cod. S 490 as a copy of a ‘Küchenmeisterei’-print (from 1487 or later).

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

Early medieval literate culture, dominated by Christian monks and clerics, was focused on interpreting biblical texts and correlating them with a theological system devised in patristic times and late antiquity. Central to biblical exegesis was the fourfold method that distinguished the literal (or historical) sense of Old Testament narratives…[Read more]

This article studies the relationship between love and violence in Celestina. It departs from Octavio Paz’s essay La llama doble, in particular, the difference be- tween eroticism and love, and the acknowledgement of a dark and destructive side within sexual desire. It concludes that desire is the main driving force of the plot in Celestina and t…[Read more]

‘Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift’, ‘Ambrasser Heldenbuch’, ‘Rostocker Liederbuch’, ‘Hausbuch des Michael de Leone’, ‘Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch’, ‘Alsfelder Dirigierrolle’, ‘Bamberger mathematisches Manuskript’ …, there are many established names for medieval German manuscripts. Their proper names consist of nominal phrases and the heads…[Read more]

A brief report on an MA course on Tolkien taught at Leiden University

Bibliography of research on bishops in Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian-Salian Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as comprehensive and comparative studies of this period, as long as either of the aforementioned geographical entities is covered.

The book chapter looks at the additional information given in the twelfth century itinerary made by the Icelandic monk Nikulás of Munkaþverá and includes a German translation of the itinerary.

The book chapter analyses how bishops saw their role in succession struggles of tenth and early eleventh centuries Germany.

The book chapter looks at the role of bishops in the German royal successions of 984 and 1024.

This article shows how I have been lately combining my research in the cultural
history of the Spanish Middle Ages and Early Renaissance with the TV show Game
of Thrones for teaching purposes. I have been able to design a capstone seminar to
attract students interested in the popular medievalising TV fiction, proving them
than most of the…[Read more]

This article explores the changes to the legal status of Scots in ‘English Ireland’ after the advent of the Scottish Wars of Independence (c.1295). There appears to have been a drastic change in status as the Scots in Ireland were not explicitly labelled before 1295, but were afterwards and they were arrested on sight usually. It is also peculiar…[Read more]

This paper examines two issues: misconceptions concerning English law in high medieval Ireland; and the invention and mutation of an exceptio (objection) in court which was based on a fabrication. The plea, or defensive claim, was that the plaintiff in a court case was an unfranchised Gael (Hibernica/Hibernicus) and therefore could not sue a civil…[Read more]

While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (ḥajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. This chapter introduces one of the most important and yet least-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary r…[Read more]

This is an Accepted Manuscript, for an article forthcoming in Antiquity (2019), and remains subject to pre-publication type-editing and proofing. Please cite as James M. Harland, ‘Memories of Migration? So-called “Anglo-Saxon” Burial Costume of the 5th Century AD,’ Antiquity 93 (2019). A link to the final publication at Cambridge University Press…[Read more]

This article examines how the Persian prison poem (habsiyāt) incorporated Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples into its poetics. By tracing how Khāqāni of Shirvān (d. 1199) brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities (ahl al-zemma), I offer a new perspective on…[Read more]

Architecture Space and Society Research Centre, Birkbeck (University of London) Friday 1st March 2019
Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conquest-and-construction-tickets-55022443610

Two late medieval manuscripts have been rediscovered in the library of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar in 2018. The paper gives, for the first time, a complete codicological and paleographical analysis of both manuscripts, presents a medieval owner and, last but not least, identifies the works contained in both codices.