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]

This is an Urdu translation of the work “Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law and Non-Muslims”

English translation of Midhat Sertoğlu, İlk Milletlerarası Dili Bir Türk İcat Etmişti, originally published in Hayat Tarih Mecmuası 1 (1966): 66–68

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic…[Read more]

This real-life memoir chronicles the journey of Arousiag Magarian over a four year period as she struggles to survive during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1919). Originally written in a small notebook in Armenian, the authors (Arpi Poladian and Troy E. Spier) have translated and prepared for the reader a version in literary English that hopes to…[Read more]

Rising on the shoulders of the İstanbul Araştırmaları Yıllığı / Annual of Istanbul Studies, the relaunched YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies is now peer-reviewed. Thanks to a reformed advisory board, whose expertise covers all periods and disciplines in the study of Istanbul’s past and present, the journal now sets a much higher academic…[Read more]

2019’da yayımlanan “Nature’s ‘Cosmopolis’: Villagers, Engineers, and Animals along Terkos Waterworks in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul.” In The Seeds of Power: Explorations in the Environmental History of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Onur Inal and Yavuz Köse, 155-183 (Winwick: The White Horse Press, 2019) makalemin, kısaltılarak Türkçe’ye çev…[Read more]

The opening text for the exhibition Hafıza-i Beşer: Osmanlı Yazmalarından Hikâyeler | Memories of Humankind: Stories from the Ottoman Manuscripts, organized by the Istanbul Research Institute, open between October 18, 2019 – July 25, 2020.

Sergi Küratörü/Exhibition Curator
K. Mehmet Kentel

Danısmanlar/Advisors
M. Baha Tanman, Selim S.…[Read more]

The abstract of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended on December 2018 at the University of Washington, with distinction.

Is there a dichotomy between tolerance and free speech? A discussion on free speech, hate crimes, and tolerance within the context of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism, along with the debate within the UK around the governmental definitions for these forms of bigotry.