Zwischen dem 5. und der Mitte des 6. Jahrhunderts bestand das Regnum der Vandalen und Alanen wie eine Reihe berberischer Territorien im römischen Nordafrika, welches sich in der althistorischen, mediävistischen und archäologischen Forschung zusehends als Testfall für ein besseres Verständnis der Umgestaltung der römischen Welt in Spätantike und Fr…[Read more]

Un estudio del impacto de la obra de Alonso de Espina en la acusación de crimen ritual presuntamente ocurrida en La Guardia tal y como se refleja en los documentos del proceso inquisitorial contra Yucé Franco. Este estudio intenta dilucidar cómo los procesos de comunicación escritos, en este caso las acusaciones de asesinato ritual, fomentan la…[Read more]

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s ur…[Read more]

We must, first of all, ask what a barbarian is or could have been in our sources. There were different kinds of barbarians, based upon the Roman and Greek ethnographic tradition and view of geography. Greek writers defined identities of human societies in the known world and bequeathed ethnonyms. Since the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., these…[Read more]

This essay will show, however, that the text is not linked to diplomas, but belonged to an African version of Prosper’s chronicle. I will propose a new edition, which will put the text back in its original context. Rather than looking for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ texts according to 19th-century categories, I will try to analyze the specific character…[Read more]

Das vandalische Afrika gilt als Musterbeispiel des „Kirchenkampfs“ zwischen homöischen Barbaren und katholischen Römern. Kronzeugen sind Victor von Vita, Fulgentius von Ruspe und Quodvultdeus von Karthago. Etwa 50 Jahre nach dem Ende der Vandalenkönige in Afrika 533 kam es in Spanien zum Ausgleich zwischen Katholiken und Homöern. Die westgot…[Read more]

The Vandal royal title Rex Vandalorum et Alanorum is known from the reign of king Huneric (477-484) from two decrees preserved in Victor of Vita’s History of the Vandal persecution. This catholic polemic pamphlet itself derives from the eighties or nineties of the fifth century. As traditional diplomatics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries c…[Read more]

This paper offers a re‐examination of some problems regarding the coinage of Vandal North Africa. The coinage of this barbarian successor state is one of the first non‐imperial coinages in the Mediterranean world of the fifth and sixth centuries. Based on the fine collection in the Coin Cabinet of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, this art…[Read more]

Abstract and introduction for PhD dissertation, defended and deposited in April 2019.

This study argues for the importance of competitive discourse in placing the study of the ars dictaminis within the cosmopolitan tradition of humanistic Latin literature in the Middle Ages, particularly as it is expressed in the writing of Boncompagno da Signa and Guido Faba at Bologna in the first decades of the thirteenth century. Examining…[Read more]

Seit der frühen Neuzeit standen geschichtsmächtige Gruppen im Zentrum historischer Meistererzählungen. Vor allem die Umgestaltung der römischen Welt zwischen Antike und Mittelalter erklärte man durch die Wanderungen von Völkern, mit Dekadenzmodellen und konstruierten nationalen Charakteren. Meist wurde eine klare ethnische, kulturelle oder gar r…[Read more]

Some gentes–armed social units or peoples such as the Goths, the Franks, the Burgundians or the Vandals–became an intrinsic part of European history. Others like the Heruli, the Sciri, the Gepids and the Rugians played their somewhat vague role, but disappeared from our sources without having had the opportunity to form any stable regnum on…[Read more]

Studying North Africa poses a variety of problems. Historical as well as archaeological research bears the burden of a colonial view on Africa’s past tending to overemphasize its Roman aspects. Berber (Numidian and Moorish) political entities together with Punic (Carthaginian) cities had a long history when Rome entered the African scene. The h…[Read more]

The tale of Óðinn and Rindr is a complex one, but in its version found in the early thirteenth-century Gesta Danorum, we can see how Óðinn’s gender fluidity has become simplified into transvestism. From a being capable of changing gender, Óðinn now simply adopts the disguise of a woman. With this disguise, Óðinn rapes the woman Rindr in order ful…[Read more]

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).

This dissertation is a study of the usury prohibition in rabbinic literature. It focuses on the usury laws in Tannaitic literature, the first formulation of the usury prohibition as a complex and multifaceted judicial norm. I place the Tannaitic usury laws against the backdrop of the economic and cultural norms of the wider world which the Tannaim…[Read more]

Original Abstract:
The sources for the history of Christianity in the early fourth century in the Persian Empire are notoriously sparse. And the sources that are available, such as the Demonstrations of Aphrahat, are vague and difficult to correlate with other sources. Historians of early Christianity have often incorporated these scant sources…[Read more]

A book review of _Symbol and Icon: Dionysius the Areopagite and the Iconoclastic Crisis_ (Wipf & Stock, 2010), which extensively catalogs the severe lack of proper attribution of other scholars’ work in the book.

Gabor Lukacs’ 2008 book on “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery” is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of the introduction of Western science in East Asia. It focuses on two illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery in Japanese, adap…[Read more]

In ancient China, portentology was a “science” in its own right, a specialised field of knowledge developed by rational individuals who endeavoured to fathom the concealed mechanisms at work beneath the spectacles of history and the world at large. This paper focuses on the nomenclature of portents (observed phenomena interpreted as auspicious or…[Read more]