John-Jerome of Prague (1368–1440) and the Errores Graecorum: Anatomy of a Polemic Against Greek Christians

This paper discusses the anti-Greek writings of the Camaldolese John-Jerome of Prague from 1409 to 1433. It demonstrates how his varied experiences in Poland and the Middle East helped shape his views on eastern Christians, and how these views were further affected by the role Greek theology played in the thought of his great opponents, the Hussites. His hostile statements about the Greeks provide some indication of the depth of the antipathy between the two sides, as well as the limited knowledge of many in the Latin West about the details of ecclesiastical history and Greek theology on the eve of the Council of Florence. A discussion of his writings over a quarter century illustrates how John-Jerome's opinions about Greek Christians changed as he experienced different aspects of the relationship between the Latin and Greek churches. It is interesting to compare John-Jerome's views with two contemporaries whom he knew personally, the Camaldolese humanist Ambrogio Traversari and the Greek Dominican theologian Andrew Chrysoberges.     

Neurognostics Question: An American Neurophysiologist,Pioneer of Electromyography,A President of Universities and Scientific Advisor to United States Presidents

The semantics of pain are an important and interesting aspect of any language. Ancient Greek and Latin had multiple words for pain, which makes scrutinizing different meanings problematic. The ancient physician Galen approached this issue through the use of adjectives to describe the qualities for pain, instead of the words for pain themselves. The medical texts of Celsus and Caelius Aurelianus reveal that Latin also vested particular significance in qualifiers to distinguish between different types of pain. This article looks at the qualifying terms used for pain in the ancient Greek and Latin languages to reveal a sophisticated Greco-Roman vocabulary for pain.     

Aristotelian Influence in the Formation of Medical Theory

Aristotle is oftentimes viewed through a strictly philosophical lens as heir to Plato and has having introduced logical rigor where an emphasis on the theory of Forms formerly prevailed. It must be appreciated that Aristotle was the son of a physician, and that his inculcation of the thought of other Greek philosophers addressing health and the natural elements led to an extremely broad set of biologically- and medically-related writings. As this article proposes, Aristotle deepened the fourfold theory of the elements with anatomic and physiologic observations. In books like History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and the lost Anatomai, he actively dissected organisms and recorded his findings. The corpus of medically-related literature Aristotle developed had a direct influence on subsequent Greek thinkers, including Galen, and on Medieval Islamic and modern Western practitioners such as William Harvey. Aristotle's ideas continue to influence modern medical thinkers in Europe and America through both his interpretation by European philosophers gaining the attention of medical humanists, and his writings’ enduring impact on medical researchers balancing scientific with more personalistic approaches to medicine.     

A History of Depressed Skull Fractures from Ancient Times to 1800

The story of managing depressed fractures illustrates how knowledge of proven value does not always get handed down. Celsus was the first to describe sensible management for depressed fractures. As he wrote in Latin this was forgotten. Galen’s Greek writings survived forming the basis of management until the sixteenth century. In 1517, Hans von Gersdorff published a formidable illustrated surgical text. One illustration depicts an instrument for elevating depressed bone fragments. It looked dramatic but could not work and its defects were finally defined in the eighteenth century. Ambroise Paré used a bone punch just as we do today, but no later surgeon mentions this, though the instrument was well known. Elements of chance, fashion, emotionally powerful illustrations, and perhaps stubbornness had a profound effect on management delaying rational treatment for centuries.     

The agrarian history of Byzantium,from the origins to the twelfth century. The sources and problems

The relationship between conquerors and conquered in the Latin Empire of Constantinople has traditionally been understood as a relentlessly hostile one, particularly on the religious level. Whatever its merits, the dominance of this view has sometimes resulted in the gross misinterpretation of important pieces of evidence. This article examines two unusual liturgical texts that were treated by their discoverers as products of a Latin campaign of liturgical proselytism. The texts themselves are bilingual presentations of the Western rite of mass, with Greek and Latin text presented in an interlinear format. Most unusually, the Latin text is written in Greek characters. This article makes the case, due to internal evidence as well as the broader context of ecclesiastical relations in the Latin Empire, that these texts were created by Greek clerics rather than by Latin authorities, and that their purpose was entirely different from that imagined by their discoverers.     

西方古典文献学的名与实

以希腊文、拉丁文为载体的西方古典文献学,希腊文作"philologia"。在近代西方各国学界在根据各自的语言整理、研究古文献藉以溯源其共同的"古代"过程中,西方古典文献学的名称与内容在不同历史时期、不同语境中均曾发生过变化,但总体上的沿革类似于中国古典文献学或传统文献学,即由校雠而校雠学而文献学,最终被冠之以"古典的"则意在强调"希腊、拉丁的"这一属性。     

Reviews

Artefacts from Wrecks: Dated assemblages from the Late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, MARK REDKNAP (Ed.)
Scientific Diving: a General Code of Practice (2nd edition), N. C. FLEMMING and M. D. MAX (Eds)
The History of English Sea Ordnance: 1523–1875: Vol. II, The Age of the System, 1715–1815 ADRIAN B. CARUANA
Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook ( Annotated translations of Greek and Latin texts and documents ), J. W. HUMPHREY, J. P. OLESON and A. N. SHERWOOD
Siedlungsarchäologie im Alpenvorland IV Die Spätbronzezeit am norwestlichen Bodensee, GUNTER SCHØBEL A. BILLAMBOZ, W. OSTENDORP, M. RØSCH
Looking for Leads, CHRISTIAN AHLSTROM
Die Schiffe im Alten Testament, ARVID GOETTLICHER
Dansk Sefarts Historie vol. 2: Skuder og Kompagnier 1588–1720, OLE DEGN, ERIK GØBEL
Waterschip ZN 421: a clenched-lap fishing vessel from Flevoland ( Excavation Report 17 ), RALPH K. PEDERSEN
Man & Sea in the Mesolithic, ANDERS FISCHER (Ed.)
Das neuzeitliche Wrack aus dem Hedwigenkoog, Kr. Dithmarschen, ANTON ENGLERT
Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Archeologia Subacquea (Anzio, 1996), AIASub (Ed.)     

Preaching,politics and episcopal reform in Wulfstan's early writings

Putting Wulfstan's earliest legal texts – the Canons of Edgar and the so‐called Peace of Edward and Guthrum – in dialogue with his homilies on the role of the bishop, this article argues that, from his earliest writings, Wulfstan adapted approaches from Kings Alfred and Edgar as well as from the Benedictine reform to make ambitious claims concerning the role of the bishop in the secular sphere. These claims went beyond the contemporary understanding of the relationship between bishop and king both in England and on the Continent, to frame the bishop as the primary authority in the nation because he is the teacher of teachers.     

Aretaeus on Migraine and Headache

Aretaeus of Cappadocia's classification of headache has been referred to for many centuries. Several Latin translations and an English translation (1856) of his books have been published in the past. We translated the pertinent texts on headache from the Greek text as published by Hude in 1958. In this paper, we present an annotated translation preceded by an outline of contemporary knowledge of headache from Celsus’ De Medicina. Although symptomatic headache was most probably involved in the types of headache identified by Aretaeus and the making of retrospective diagnoses is hazardous, the terms heterocrania and cephalea may be compared with what today we would call migraine and tension type headache respectively.     

The ‘Life of Muhammad’ in Eulogius of Córdoba: some evidence for the transmission of Greek polemic to the Latin west

Eulogius of Córdoba, the principal recorder of the ninth‐century Córdoban martyrs’ movement, copied for posterity a polemic biography of the Prophet Muhammad. The lost original is the earliest such text known in Latin, despite the longstanding tradition of anti‐Islamic polemic in the Greek east. However, textual analysis indicates that Eulogius revised the original biography, and that his revisions were influenced by the polemic of John of Damascus. Eulogius's exposure to John's writings probably came through personal contact with a monk from the monastery of Mar Saba, contact which offers rare evidence of a non‐textual transmission of ideas.     

The Particle γάρ: From Ancient Greek Sentence Connector to Blatant Line Filler? A Case-study on the Late Medieval Greek Chronicle of Morea

Ancient Greek is widely regarded as a language with an extraordinary number of so-called “Wackernagel P2 particles” such as γ?ρ, δ(?), and μ?ν, which serve a multitude of discourse functions. From the post-Classical period on, however, these small words gradually lose their importance in discourse and die out. This is reflected in the interest of scholars: while there are many studies on particles in older stages of Greek, not much research has been conducted on the particles in late medieval Greek (LMG; twelfth to fifteenth centuries). At this stage of the Greek language, the P2 particles are acknowledged to no longer be part of the living spoken language. Nonetheless, some of these small words still turn up in texts written in the vernacular. Since most LMG vernacular literature is composed in the metre of the 15-syllabic πολιτικ?? στ?χο? (vernacular prose being extremely scarce in this period), these occurrences are traditionally explained by appealing to metrical and/or stylistic reasons: the particles constitute archaizing relics merely inserted to give a classicizing flavour to the text, or are even used “metri causa”, simply to achieve the required number of syllables. In this note, I present a case-study on the “explanatory” particle γ?ρ (“for”) in the Chronicle of Morea, the best-known verse chronicle of the Greek Middle Ages. I show that γ?ρ is more than a blatant line filler. First, γ?ρ is not at all distributed at random, but consistently occupies P2 and thus obeys the so-called “Law of Wackernagel”, as the particles in Ancient Greek do. Moreover, γ?ρ can still exert a clear discourse function, albeit often a different one than in Ancient Greek.     

‘Disgusting acts of shamelessness’: sexual misconduct and the deconstruction of royal authority in the eleventh century

That the sexual misconduct of a king had political ramifications is clear from a large number of texts from throughout the entire Middle Ages. At no point, however, was royal sexuality more salient in political writing than in the second half of the eleventh century. This was not simply a reflection of contemporary efforts to reform sexual morality. Neither can charges of sexual immorality be dismissed as mere rhetorical devices, intended to blacken a king's character (although they certainly did that). On the contrary, sex was doing important ideological work in political texts from this period. This article focuses on the particularly savage set of sexual accusations made against King (after 1084, Emperor) Henry IV of Germany (1056–1106). It argues that the long‐standing association between sexual desire and privacy, shame and disorder worked powerfully in the eleventh century to justify rebellion, and to separate the king, as libidinous individual, from the ‘majesty’ of the office he held.     

Squaring the Shield: William Ridgeway's Two Models of Early Greece

From the early 1880s the Cambridge-trained classicist William Ridgeway had applied cutting-edge anthropological theory to his reading of ancient Greek literature in order to develop an evolutionary account of the continuous development of early Greek social institutions. Then, at the turn of the century, he began to argue that archaeological evidence demonstrated that the Achaean warriors described by Homer were in origin Germanic tribesmen from north of the Alps who had but recently conquered Mycenaean Greece. The present paper inquires as to how Ridgeway reconciled these seemingly opposed visions of early Greek society. A fairly comprehensive survey of his writings leads to the suggestion that, in Ridgeway's opinion, Achaean invasion had left little lasting impact upon most early Greek social institutions, but that it had been responsible for a fundamental shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and that this shift was the key to the subsequent greatness of Greek—and so ultimately Western—civilisation.     

Framing papal communication in the central Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the production and consumption of papal communication in the central Middle Ages. It outlines the development of the papacy, which formed the historical and political framework for papal communication, and discusses the processes, themes and meanings behind various types of communication relating to the papacy in Latin Christendom principally between the years 1100 and 1300. Particular emphasis is placed upon the plurality of responses to papal communication and on the relationship between papal communication and authority, and papal self-identity and perceptions. The essay introduces seven diverse and interdisciplinary articles in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the papacy and communication in the central Middle Ages.