当前俄罗斯人口地理变动的新特点

俄罗斯是一个地广人稀的国家。在20世纪90年代世界性人口增长的大背景下,人口持续减少,已成为影响国家发展和民族生存的重大问题,特别是其人口的发展显示出有悖于世界人口增长普遍规律的一些特征,非常值得探讨和研究。本文在对俄罗斯人口的增长、结构、分布和城市化发展特点等四个方面进行全面分析的基础上,探讨了俄罗斯人口危机产生的经济、社会和文化原因。指出解决俄罗斯人口问题的当务之急是加快发展经济,全面提高人口的生存环境质量。     

Leather straps with avian tarsometatarsi from the medieval Russia: Jesses or amulets?

The paper examines leather straps associated with avian bones from archaeological excavations in Medieval Russia. These leather straps, found attached to the tarsometatarsi of hunting birds, such as gyrfalcon, peregrine falcon, goshawk and sparrowhawk, constitute components of falconry equipment. A leather strap, secured on the tarsometatarsus of a buzzard, indicates the use of this bird as a decoy during the training of hunting birds. The same is true for the crane and little owl. The loss of other bones of the avian skeletons during the excavation process often leads to the erroneous interpretation of the leather straps with avian tarsometatarsi as amulets.     

Promoting Investment in Russia's Regions

The paper, based on extensive field interviews in 2009, examines regional investment policies in Russia, focusing on the Novgorod and Kaluga regions. The author, a Finland-based geographer specializing in Russia's economy, argues that some Russian regions (including the ones not well endowed with natural resources) can succeed in promoting investments despite the generally unfavorable economic environment. He also questions the ability of so-called regional "growth machines" to be sustained over the long term, by contrasting the cases of Novgorod and Kaluga, whereby Novgorod represents a region transformed from a leader in promoting investment into a corrupted autarchic regime. Kaluga, on the other hand, is presented as a successful region on the basis of an innovative but somewhat risky investment promotion strategy.     

A thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman crossing boundaries: visible and invisible

In 1242, the private life of an Anglo-Jewish couple, Muriel and David of Oxford, became very public when David asked the royal curia to intervene in the Jewish court (bet din) which had either refused or stalled his divorce from the childless Muriel. The curia not only agreed to force the divorce, but used it as an excuse to ban all betai din, catching the whole Anglo-Jewish community in the growing anti-Judaism of the time. Though David married a fertile widow who bore him a son shortly before his death in 1244, Muriel lived on in growing poverty. David was the most prominent financier of his time but examining the story from Muriel's usually silent point of view allows us insights into the life of a woman in a growing academic town. Her story especially highlights how she might have interacted with both male and female Christians in her daily life as well as in seeking help with her especially feminine problem of infertility.     

Metastatic carcinoma in a leper skeleton from a Medieval cemetery in Chichester England

Both leprosy and metastatic cancer are well documented in the literature on human skeletal palaeopathology. The manifestation of both pathological conditions in a single archaeological skeleton has not been reported. A case from a Medieval site in Chichester, England exhibits bone lesions and patterns of skeletal involvement indicative of both these diseases. Evidence of leprosy is largely restricted to the lower tibiae, fibulae and the bones of the feet. Fine destructive foci and reactive fibre bone associated with metastatic cancer are distributed in many of the remaining areas of the skeleton. There is minimal overlap in the areas of the skeleton involved in the two pathological processes.     

Water power and the plan of St Gall

An analysis of the scale used by the designer of the Plan of St Gall allows for no other conclusion than that the mill and mortars shown on this Plan were water driven. Because of the paradigmatic nature of the Plan this means that hydraulically operated mills and mortars were by the makers of the Plan considered to be standard equipment of a Carolingian monastery — a conclusion supported by a wealth of other documentary source material available for this period.The Romans knew the water mill, but made little use of it. Its general adoption and diffusion in Merovingian and Carolingian Europe is in this study attributed to the rise and spread of Benedictine monasticism. It received its primary impetus from the need to provide milled and crushed grain in bulk for communities of considerable size, including a leisure class of men who had to be freed from the normal chores of toiling for life so that their energies could be directed to their primary task: the Work of God (Opus Dei). Water-powered trip hammers were in use in China before the birth of Christ. Their portrayal on the Plan of St Gall suggests that they were introduced in western Europe, not by Marco Polo, as some propose, but in the age of folk migrations or the early Carolingian Period.     

Population Trends in the Russian Federation: Reflections on the Legacy of Soviet Censorship and Distortions of Demographic Statistics

A noted demographer assesses the reliability of data in the 1989 census of the Soviet Union for 14 regions of the Russian Federation affected by distortions designed by Soviet authorities to conceal the populations of "secret towns" of the military-industrial complex. More specifically, using declassified population data available but only selectively published following the disclosure of these hidden settlements (and their populations) in 1994, he re-estimates the urban populations of these regions in 1989, and compares differences in 1989-2002 population change indicated by use of the original and adjusted 1989 data sets. Distortions of up to 10 percent of the regional populations (and as high as 13 percent for their eponymous regional capitals) are examined in light of their implications for the calculation of a variety of demographic and population-based indicators in studies of Russia comparing the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J11, O18, R23. 8 tables, 35 references.     

The East Anglian chronicle

Abraham's sacrifice. Very early on, this Biblical theme became the subject of a number of representations who did not vary much, having a rich and precocious theology as their base: the sacrifice of Isaac prefiguring that of Christ on the Cross. The anecdotal development is one of the major variants. The dramatization of the scene in miniatures, especially noticeable from the 13th century onward, enriched the stylistic effects. The social changes that took place in medieval western Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries (the place of children, attitudes to death...) provoked a final evolution. The previous embellishments were reorganized to take into account the preoccupations of the day.     

Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna

The article opens with the prosecution in 1432 of a spicer for abducting a nun. This is first of all presented as the story of a trial: the formation of the indictment, the defence tactics, the deposition of witnesses, and only then are the experience of the nun, and the gender relations in the event, examined. This leads to numerous contexts: legal (the development of the law on sexual relations with professed nuns); judicial (similar cases in late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Bologna); monastic (the unstable history of convents); social (the place of the nunnery in the local sexual economy); and historiographic (Ruggiero's ‘culture of illicit sexuality’).     

中世纪天主教的信仰与危机:1000-1500年

在1000-1500年间,天主教欧洲见证了信仰事务上的多次危机,它们的性质、规模、影响以及重要性各不相同。在此期间,"信仰"伴随着"危机";但信仰没有受到严重的威胁。大多数危机是地方性或区域性的,持续时间也不长,从未达到真正的临界点。它们是可以用这种或那种方法来化解的,并总是能够得到化解,天主教对中世纪整个西欧的掌控因而从未受到严重的威胁,直到宗教改革改变一切。     

‘Stronger than men and braver than knights’: women and the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the later middle ages

Women who participated in the long-distance pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries faced a variety of economic and social barriers. Based upon the pilgrimage narratives of Margery Kempe, Felix Fabri, and others, this article examines the strategies women used to overcome those barriers both before and during the journey. While resistance to women’s pilgrimages was strong, in part, because they did not fit their quotidian roles as caregivers, it was nevertheless to aspects of those same normative roles that women appealed in order to justify their pilgrimages and shield themselves from censure during their journeys.