Was King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ seen as a failure by his contemporaries? The study looks at sources that were written during and immediately after Æthelred’s reign in order to see if the king was criticised or blamed for the misfortunes in the conflicts with the Danes. The most important authors to be considered are Ælfric of Eynsham and Archbish…[Read more]

This is a case study on how the positioning of bishops in succession struggles had effects on the dioeceses. It looks at the dioeceses of Worms and Cologne during the three royal successions of Otto III (984), Henry II (1002) and Conrad II (1024).

The article follows the contours of a conversation with Fulvio Aurora, Paolo Fierro and Edoardo Turri, three members of the Italian health activist organization Medicina Democratica, which will also function as the backbone of our account of the initial radical
impetus and the later demise of the Italian public health system, the Servizio…[Read more]

This is the uncorrected proofs version of my review for Peritia of three volumes by Alexander O’Hara:
with Ian Wood (trans), Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast;
(ed.), Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe;
Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Community in the Seventh C…[Read more]

The Abbey of St. Gallen was the foremost centre for the study of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville in the Carolingian period. Not only can more than twenty early medieval manuscripts transmitting material from the Etymologiaebe associated with Carolingian St. Gallen, but its scriptorium also produced two scholarly redactions of Isidore’s e…[Read more]

Throughout the medieval period, the ‘Inner Seas’ linking Scotland, the Hebrides, and the north of Ireland represented a confluence and crucible of identity. The region’s myriad islands served as stepping stones in a maritime network across which people, property, and perceptions travelled freely and purposefully. Encompassing three main theme…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is a repository of texts spanning more than a millennium of Jewish history, including thousands of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts now held in collections around the world. Among these are fragments from at least 25 separate Qur’an manuscripts in Arabic script, all of which lack any traces of Hebrew writing. Their…[Read more]

This research work is an investigation into the reception of anti-smoking advertisements
that make use of “fear appeals”. The objective of the research is to bring audience
perceptions, interpretations and making sense processes of such advertising campaigns to
the limelight. Instead of measuring effects or effectiveness of anti-smoking mes…[Read more]

This study examined the communication avenues for combating breast cancer in Orba, a rural community of Enugu State, Nigeria. To accomplish this goal, 200 women from the community were sampled. The results revealed that 87% of the respondents were aware of media messages on breast cancer; however, 74.5% and 65% respectively, claimed that they had…[Read more]

Representation, primarily understood as ‘presence’ or ‘appearance’ with an implied
visual component, is a critical concept in the cultural milieu. Conceived as images,
performances, and imitations, representations propagate through various media:
films, television, photographs, advertisements, and other forms of popular culture.
As such, r…[Read more]

The earliest medical descriptions of anorexia occurred in 1689 with Richard
Morton’s Phthisiologia, Or, A Treatise of Consumptions, however, it took another
century for medical science to accept anorexia nervosa as a medical condition.
Later on, it was Hilde Bruch who initiated the first public discussion on anorexia
in the latter half of t…[Read more]

This study examined such issues as social media in personality development
and their influence on the development of public activism among young people.
We also estimate the efficiency that various forms of information exchange
have (shared or anonymous). The empirical base of the research includes
sociological surveys held in Kazakhstan. We…[Read more]

For over a century and a half, the assorted activities of viking hosts in and around the site of Dorestad have been subject to careful deliberation and debate, increasingly illuminating the early Scandinavian influence on this regional riverine landscape. Nevertheless, the material evidence for a ninth-century viking presence inside the settlement…[Read more]

Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]

The modern names for the Hebrew vowels (qameṣ, pataḥ, segol, ṣere, ḥiriq/ḥireq, ḥolem, shuruq/shureq, qibbuṣ/qubbuṣ) are derived from a variety of medieval sources. The pair of qameṣ and pataḥ are the oldest, both having evolved in the earliest stages of Masoretic analysis of vocalisation. The remaining names are products of three different…[Read more]

Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods to disambiguate the vocalization of important texts, especially the Bible. The earliest step in this process was the implementation of the Syriac ‘diacritic…[Read more]

Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most studies of Syriac dots either neglec…[Read more]

Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts with complete vocalisation are rare, a problem which makes reconstructing the pronunciation of the medieval language challenging. This study presents an edition of a Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes from the Cairo Genizah with full Tiberian vocalisation. This manuscript exhibits noteworthy features of dialectal…[Read more]

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and…[Read more]