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Considerations on the nature and properties of light are a distinctive trait of Oxford natural philosophy. Medieval scholars on the Continent did not devote much attention to this issue, most probably because, in Aristotle, one finds only a few remarks on the nature of light (in De anima and De sensu et sensato). In England, however, the first Chancellor of Oxford University, Robert Grosseteste, adopted light as the core of his metaphysics, cosmology and natural philosophy. Although later generations of Oxford philosophers generally neglected Grosseteste’s metaphysics and cosmology, taking the Aristotelian view instead, considerations on the nature and properties of light remained a substantial part of their natural philosophy. Among fourteenth-century Oxford philosophers’ works, one finds comprehensive discussions on light in John Dumbleton’s Summa logicae et philosophiae naturalis and Richard Swineshead’s Liber calculationum. In his Summa, John Dumbleton presents a detailed inquiry into the the action of light in a medium. We do not find there, however, any attempt to ‘measure’ or calculate the power of a light source itself. Richard Swineshead, though, devotes a substantial part of his considerations on light to determining the ‘proper measure’ of the power of a light source. His main concept in this regard is ‘the amount of form’ (multitudo formae) — a notion presumably invented by Swineshead and developed in the preceding parts of his work. Both Dumbleton and Swineshead present consistent and well-developed theories rooted in the medieval Oxford scientific tradition, drawing upon Aristotelian philosophy and Euclidean mathematics. Swineshead’s conclusions complement and correct the theory developed by John Dumbleton. Yet the method of ‘measurement’ presented by Swineshead is practically inapplicable and the value of the consecutive conclusions is determined only on the basis of logical and mathematical consistency, with no reference to common experience. Such methods of philosophical inquiry are characteristic of all the fourteenth-century thinkers of the group known as the Oxford Calculators.
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The fragments of a very fragmentary inscribed tombstone depicting an armed knight were found in the one-time Cistercian monastery of Pilis at Pilisszentkereszt (Pest county) during László Gerevich’s excavations (1967–1982). As certain fragments were uncovered in the debris heaped in the shaft of grave no. 59 in the centre of the chapter-house, the tombstone was associated with this grave (L. Gerevich). The man lying in the grave was identified as Robert de Courtenay (†1228), Andrew II’s wife Yolande de Courtenay’s brother, who was elected Byzantine Latin emperor then he was expelled and died at an unknown place (I. Takács). The author reviews the finding circumstances of the fragments and determines from radiocarbon measurements that there could be no direct contact between the late medieval body found in the centrally placed grave no. 59 of the chapter-house and the tombstone. The arguments that were raised to link the tombstone with Robert de Courtenay are not acceptable either: if he was ever buried in the medieval Hungary, his grave could rather be in the Cistercian monastery of Egres (to date Agriş, Romania) where Yolande de Courtenay was also buried. A secular nobleman must have been buried under the Pilis tombstone who could play an important role in the establishment of the monastery in the 13th century and who is called precium comitum (the most eminent of comites) in the very fragmentary inscription. There are no realistic data that would suggest that the pit of a heart burial was beside grave no. 59 in Pilis as it is suggested in the archaeological literature. This feature must have had a different function in the center of the chapter-house (foundation of a lectorium or a judicium).
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We have more than a thousand manuscripts of the great hagiographical collection, the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine from the 13th century, but there is only one codex which not only illustrated the text but translated it into a language of images. It is related to the Hungarian Anjous, that is why the codex is titled ‘Hungarian Angevin Legendary’. The pages of the codex are spread over different collections of the world. Nowadays 58 legends are known on 142 pages, altogether 549 images. Some more important legends, as that of the apostles or the Anjous’ favorite saint, King Ladislas, occupy 20–24 images. The paper tries to demonstrate two examples. St. Martin and St. Gerard, of how these cycles were organised. Two pictures of the supposed eight are emphasising the role of Martin as a bishop. Five images show the miracles of the saint and only one is consecrated to the charity of St. Martin, to the event which is his most popular story. Martin is the symbolic saint who gives half his goods to the poor. This scene is the most frequently represented in medieval art. In the Hungarian Angevin Legendary his miraculous activity is much more emphasized which is correlated with the written legend. The legend of St. Gerard is preserved completely in the Legendary.
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Analyzing various medieval Bulgarian hagiographical texts, inscriptions and marginal notes, as well as the Synodicon of the Bulgarian church and other evidence, the author aims to reveal the dynastic concepts of the second Bulgarian Tsardom (1186–1396) and literary attempts to create and support a complex dynastic idea with the means of medieval Bulgarian history writing. Such attempts were connected with two core ideas. Firstly, the state’s foundation was represented as a personal merit of two Asens – father and son. Asen “the Old” adopting the throne name John marked the beginning of the Asens’ Tsardom liberating the Bulgarians from “the Greek slavery” and transferring to his stronghold Tărnovo from Sredets – the center of the Byzantine power over Bulgaria – the relics of St. John of Rila. John Asen “the Great”, his son, strengthened the Tsardom with his victories, returned the status of Patriarchy to the Bulgarian church and brought the relics of St. Parasceve to the capital Tărnovo. Secondly, the literary tradition shaped the image of the Bulgarian Tsardom as an ever-lasting Empire whose enduring attributes – Sceptre and Throne – were given by God to change the mortal monarchs.
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In 1314 Bishop Guichard of Troyes was transferred from the lucrative Episcopal See of Champagne to the Episcopal See of Bosnia, with the seat in Diakovar (nowadays Djakovo, Croatia). This was the consequence of a lengthy trial that baffled both contemporaries and historians alike, and which included a plethora of charges – most notably high treason, murder of the Queen and her mother through witchcraft, heresy, etc. To explain beyond factual reality, the paper regards the concept of treason for which Guichard was tried. To comprehend the methods of construction of treason in Guichard’s case, the paper examines features beyond the accusations and deposited witness testimonies: the social, religious and legal transformations; similarities with contemporary trials of the Templars and of the deceased Pope Boniface VIII. This will facilitate comprehension of the elements that construct or add to the concept of treason and the contemporary notions and institutions that permitted it.
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In 1985 at the 16 th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Stuttgart, Germany, historians debated the idea of human behaviour and anthropology, as parts of researching history of mentalities. Both history of gesture and orality belong to the history of mentalities, while analysing the juridical procedure of former centuries can change the contemporary perception about the medieval justice. A large number of Transylvanian documents from the 14th -15th centuries refer to the borders of communities or estates, containing elements of a ritual composed of gestures and words. The memory of such rituals was written down in documents highlighting the value of the oral oath associated both with the ritual performed between neighbours, and with the individuals taking the respective oath.
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The study introduces and edits two different copies containing Rășinari’s Cartea Ocolnița („book” of the Rășinari village borders) of 1488, both copies being written in Romanian language with Cyrillic letters. After a few considerations regarding the way in which the old Slavonic Cyrillic letters (that differ from the Russian letters used today) can be reproduced best with the help of soft programmes, the author exposes: 1) the more detailed and dated copy preserved at the National Archives in Sibiu, including Cartea Ocolnița (22 May 1488) and the extract from the deed of donation (7 January 1383) in Romanian-Cyrillic, while the dates of both documents, as well as a final sentence indicating the scribe (copyst) Petru Cazan, priest in Rășinari and notary of the church synod, are written in Latin; 2) the more simple, incomplete and undated copy of Cartea Ocolnița, preserved in the Church Museum at the Bishop House in Rășinari. When doing the transcription and transliteration of the two copies, the author was counseled by the Slavonic expert Eugeniu Lazăr, scientific researcher from the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest, who also suggested several investigation and interpretation hypotheses. Even if the original document was not found yet, it can be assumed that there existed even more copies in circulation. In the study’s annex, the copy from Sibiu and that from Rășinari are reproduced in transcription with Cyrillic letters and transliteration with Latin letters, and are critically edited.
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Most of the contracts from the unpublished notary registry of the notary Petrus from Zadar, known as Perençanus (1365–1392) provide only the most basic information about the contractors, the type of legal business and its subject matter, witnesses, officials, etc. because of their usual formulaic nature. In this paper, we shall deal with contracts that break this uniformity common to medieval notary records by presenting unusual and interesting details of people’s lives, largely found in the formulae contrahentes, res and causa. The content of these contracts is analyzed at two levels: within the context of studying the medieval mentality and within the linguistic context.
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Scholarly discussion on various issues related to St Jerome and his cult, including the age-old question of his birthplace, was recently revitalized following the publication of the translation of Josip Bedeković’s eighteenth-century monograph on the ‘Illyrian’ Doctor of the Church. This question has indeed intrigued various authors for quite some time, and we will try to offer some answers with respect to the rise of St Jerome’s cult in medieval Štrigova, a purported place of his birth, and to explain initial phases of the process which eventually included Štrigova into the relatively large group of places along the borders of Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia. In 1447 Freiderick of Cilli built a chapel dedicated to Saint Jerome in Štrigova and later strove to establish it as a pilgrimage site. He soon received a papal bull which recognized Štrigova as the birthplace of the Saint. Only after these mid-fifteenth-century events took place, Štrigova started to appear in numerous narrative and cartographic sources as his birthplace, a tradition still cherished today.
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This paper discusses the manors that were situated in the territory surrounded by today’s towns of Garešnica, Dišnik, Velika Bršljanica and Gojlo, particularly on the basis of reambulations from 1256 and of other written sources. Among other possessions there were the manors of Saint John of the Berivoj family, Dišnik of the Ruh family and Desnica of the Kapitanić family. Various hypotheses can be found in literature as to where these places were located; hence, this paper is a new contribution to the precise location of elements of the cultural scenery in the area mentioned. The paper is divided into five chapters. In the first four chapters the manors of Garešnica, Dišnik, Desnica and Gojlo are discussed on the basis of written sources; in accordance with the attached maps a reconstruction of the borders of the manors has been proposed. On the borders of some of the manors, Juraj, the son of Berivoj, was mentioned as a neighbour whose manor has not been located with certainty to date. In this paper the more precise location of this manor is associated with the place named Kapelica near Garešnica. The manor of the Berivoj family adjoined the manor of Descha, which had in the second half of the 13th century been acquired by Count Ruh, and it can be correlated with the area of today’s Dišnik. In the western part of the Berivoj and Ruh manors there were two estates named Desnica, located on today’s little Bršljanica River, in the territory of today’s villages of Veliko Vukovje and Velika Bršljanica. In the eastern part of all the places mentioned there was the manor of Gojlo, owned by the Teteny (de Pukur) family.
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Not all cities of medieval Bosnia had the same interior design. In addition to the prominent leadership role of the city prince, there were influences of regional lords, the ruling family, but the self-government of the local population also occurs. The beginning of city self-government in the Bosnian Middle Ages is the so-called Saxon privileges, more precisely, the mining customs transmitted from mines and mining squares as statutory regulations to the urban settlements and from 1377 to the Kingdom of Bosnia. Mining is the first market enterprise and the first industrial branch of medieval Bosnia, which, along with territorial expansion and entry to the Adriatic Sea, represents the veil of the entire economy, as well as the first legal norms that were used in the environment. This type of local self-government is different from the Hungarian city privileges. The first Bosnian town with royal privileges was Bihac, to which King Ladislav IV, in 1279, affirmed earlier Bela IV privileges modeled on Zagreb's Gradec.
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Hanatul Hoarda de Aur s-a desprins din imensul imperiu gengishanid și a devenit entitate politico-administrativă de sine stătătoare în 1242, în vremea lui Batu Han. Alianța de lungă durată dintre Hoarda de Aur și statul mameluc a constituit un factor deosebit de important în evoluția Hoardei de Aur în sine și a situației politice, economice, culturale din spațiul eurasiatic și mediteranean, controlat de cele două mari puteri ale timpului. Marea majoritate a populației din hotarele Hoardei de Aur era formată din cumani/kîpceaci, care erau în mod incontestabil de origine turcică. Procesul de islamizare și turcizare din Hoarda de Aur a avut ca rezultat esențial apariția poporului tătar. După ce Islamul a devenit credința principală în Hoarda de Aur, instituțiile tradiționale au fost adaptate ideologiei islamice. Hoarda de Aur nu a fost un stat sau imperiu nomad, ci unul de stepă, bazat pe structuri stabile.
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In 2013, a new linguistic and genre-related interpretation of the Trace of Basel (Dini 2004; 2014: 553–558) based on analogy with singing, recitative, texts akin to Christmas carols was put forward in the pages of Acta Linguistica Lithuanica (Lemeškin 2013: 11–29). The new reading was supported and encouraged by the manuscript’s metadata or, specifically, reference to time, which was intentionally emphasized by the scribe in the composition of the colophon: the phrase in vigilia epiphanie was moved to the front, and the passage per manus illius qui scripsit eas, which had been written first, was put down afterwards. Considering formal features and genre-related properties of the text, most of the word forms comprising the micro-text found a logical and convincing interpretation; however, the author was not fully satisfied with the interpretation of the phrase thoneaw labonache. The word form thoneaw was read as an abbreviated vocative singular form of the personal name ‘[An] tony’ (Lemeškin 2013: 19–20). As regards the word labonache, more potentially possible, yet artificial, hypotheses requiring serious graphical corrections, were provided. The article comes back to the analysis of these words by adhering to the earlier interpretation of the text.
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This article examines new facts of the Lithuanian historical onomasticon selected from MTB 1394–1409. This financial documents collection of the German Order contains names of Lithuanians, who were prisoners of war and were held to ransom in Prussia. All 13 personal names found in the GO financial documents are analyzed in terms of composition and origin with an attempt to identify their authentic forms.
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This article analyzes crusading in Prussia (present-day Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Russia) as a specific form of experience, specifically by examining two elements of that experience: the use and function of relics, and the perception of crusading in Prussia as a pilgrimage. While the expeditions have been previously cited for their brutality and lack of connection to the ‘real’ crusades to Jerusalem or other theaters, like Spain (due to the lack of holy shrines in the region, and the motivations of their participants), this article presents a challenge to that narrative: relics and pilgrimage formed key elements to the crusading experience in Prussia from an early stage, developing over the course of a century. This article first addresses the contested issue of whether or not relics were used in the military expeditions by consulting not only the extensive primary sources available, but also the most recent and up-to-date scholarly research, concluding that they were, indeed, used on the battlefield. It also analyzes the role of other objects, namely banners and images, to assess the religious elements of the crusade experience in Prussia. It then proceeds to the veneration of relics at shrines throughout Prussia by crusaders, demonstrating the role of these shrines in reinforcing the religious experience of crusading in Prussia. What emerges is a more complete picture of how people in the Middle Ages perceived crusading and holy war on the last pagan frontier of Europe.
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Review of: Otfried Krafft - Les saints et leur culte en Europe centrale au Moyen Âge (XIe-début du XIVe siècle). Hrsg. von Marie-Madeleine de Cevins und Olivier Martin (Hagiologia, Bd. 13.). Brepols Publishers. Turnhout 2017. 382 S., Ill. ISBN 978-2-503-57548-3. (€ 90,–.)
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The paper deals with some aspects of the history of the Balkans under the rule of Ottomans. Undoubtedly the great civilizations (Greek, Roman, Byzantine) left deep traces in this part of Europe. But the Ottoman civilization perfected the Balkan civilization in a completely remarkable way, influencing it as no other civilization did. The word Balkan has a Turkish origin and means “mountain”. Its earliest mention appears in a 14th-century Arab map, in which the Haemus Mons are referred to as Balkan. At the beginning of the 14th century the leaders of various Balkan states fight among themselves for domination in the area, and they don't realize that a new danger appeared in the south. In 1362 the Ottoman Turks conquer Adrianople; this would be the beginning of their conquest in the Balkan Peninsula which will end after a century. The impact of Ottoman Turkish rule upon all sectors of Balkan society was profound. In the Balkans especially the big cities become Islamic, although the Ottoman Empire has a relative tolerance for other religious confessions. This happened as a result of a deliberate forced migration state policy, but also due to the large number of converts to Islam. Under Ottomans the economic life in the Balkans was controlled by guilds. Taxes on production and on commercial activities provided the bulk of the money needed for the Empire's operation. Centuries of Ottoman rule marked the urban landscape of the Balkans as well as the everyday life of the Balkan people. The influence of Ottoman rule is often viewed with hostility, especially in the Balkan world. Sometimes it is about prejudices without a real historical basis or real arguments.
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Теолошки спор око исихазма тијесно је био повезан са политичким дешавањима у Ромејском царству. То је нарочито био случај када је ријеч о његовој другој фази, која се поклопила са грађанским ратом из 1341–1347. године. Сложени сукоб између Григорија Паламе и Григорија Акиндина разријешен је осудом потоњег, а у њега је била укључена и царица Ана Савојска. У циљу подробнијег упознавања са теолошким питањима која су била у игри, она је у једном трeнутку затражила изјашњење од главних протагониста спора. Палама је своје ставове саопштио у виду кратке посланице, у којој се настоји одбранити од оптужбе за „двобоштво“ и показати како је његово разликовање суштаства и енергија у Богу у складу са отачким предањем. У тексту се даје историјска, богословска и филолошка анализа ове Паламине посланице, са посебним освртом на до сада непознати српскословенски препис који је пронађен у манастиру Свете Тројице код Пљеваља. На крају је дат српскословенски превод напоредо са грчким изворником и преводом на савремени српски језик. Упоредна анализа показује да између грчке и српскословенске редакције постоје разлике, што је вјероватно посљедица чињенице да је средњовјековни преводилац имао нешто другачији предложак од оног којим располажемо данас.
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Prizren during the c. XIII-XV was a developed economic center. This development was made possible thanks to several factors: Prizren was an important center of medieval roads for the region; In Prizren, the Ragusan consulate (1332) was opened as a requirement for the development of more successful business activities. Thus Prizren in the 13th-15th century was a city of traders and trade exchanges. Traders in defense of their own interests created their own associations, such as shoemakers in Prizren. Commercial products came from the most developed countries, such as Venice, Naples, Ragusa, Constantinople etc. Traders operating in Prizren, besides importing economic products, they also exported numerous products such as cereals, barley, fern, silk, honey, etc; As well as mining products such as: lead, zinc, and gold-plated silver, known as silver (galam). The sources speak for a large number of traders, as well as for large monetary circulation through the form of lending and debiting. Among many foreign merchants, there were also distinguished prizrenas merchants, who either come as debtors or creditors, where Bogdan Chirisma. In the 13th-15th centuries, besides trade developments, in Prizren and the surrounding area, agricultural and livestock activities have also been successfully developed. This development is evidenced by numerous sources such as: The Monastery of St Archangel 1348, which included 93 villages; Deçan Monastery Charter 1335. From the development of agriculture, the sources speak of successful aspects of viticulture, grain, barley, flax. The sources also speak for beekeeping, silkworm, etc.
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