Princely entries and gift exchange in the Burgundian Low Countries: a crucial link in late medieval political culture

This article treats the first entry of a new prince as the start of a series of exchanges between the prince and his subjects. On the occasion of an entry, gifts in all kind of forms, subsistence, luxury and symbolic goods, were exchanged with the intention of establishing a bond between the new ruler and the subjects. These gifts were not standardised in the Burgundian Low Countries. There was a wide range of gifts, from wine to silverware and from money to horses. Some gifts can be linked to the princely right of lodging in places he passed on his itinerary, whereas others refer to marks of honour offered by the host. However, not all gifts were given spontaneously, but were the result of a negotiating process between the town and the prince's officials on the one hand and between the different towns of a principality on the other. Those officials benefited as well from entry gifts that trickled down to lower levels in the official hierarchy. Therefore, the gifts can be considered as personalised items in a bigger process of exchange and as a confirmation of the outcome of political negotiations.     

Early medieval port customs, tolls and controls on foreign trade

The objective of this paper is to offer a fresh perspective on the nature and organization of international trade in early medieval ports from the evidence of documentary sources on tolls and customs, trading practices and controls on foreign merchants. In particular, the paper considers the evidence for continuities and borrowings from the Roman and Byzantine worlds and the extent to which they influenced trading practices in the west and especially in Anglo-Saxon England.     

Islamic law and the social context of exchange in the medieval middle east

Islamic law purports to be unchanging and valid throughout the Islamic world. Nevertheless, a close examination of the medieval Islamic law of sate shows that the concept of local knowledge plays a considerable part in it On the one hand, the distinction between legitimate exchange and usury depends on the adequacy of the information available to the purchaser of goods or services; on the other hand, this stress on information leads to insistence that transactions must conform to the local custom of the merchants. Local custom thus comes in, as one might say, through a side door as a source of law, without being explicitly recognised as such.     

Diet in medieval Denmark: a regional and temporal comparison

The aim of this research is to explore regional and temporal patterning in diet in medieval Danish populations. δ¹⁵N, δ¹³C_coll, δ¹³C_ap values were obtained from 154 human bone samples from three sites located in the Jutland peninsula of Denmark. These sites span the medieval period. The results suggest that the medieval Danish diet was composed of C₃ plants, terrestrial animals, and freshwater and marine fish in varying amounts. The data also suggest some regional patterning in diet, but little temporal differences in the composition of diet.     

Erosive osteoarthritis in a medieval skeleton

In human skeletons from archaeological sites, osteoarthritis is by far the most common disease found, but no case of erosive osteoarthritis has been described and we present here what we believe to be the first such case.     

陕西新发现的东罗马金币及其折射的中外交流

《中国钱币》2000年第2期李生程所撰《陕西定边县发现东罗马金币》一,报导了该县安边镇一农民在田里发现一枚焊有小环襻的东罗马金币及作获得这枚金币的情况。从报告所附的照片看,这枚金币已有相当程度的磨损,报告也未能判定此币是哪位皇帝在位时制颁。     

A pituitary tumour in a medieval skull

Evidence of pituitary tumours in osteoarchaeological material is rare. In the present case, an enlarged pituitary fossa in the sphenoid bone indicated an expanding lesion. There was no evidence of hormonal abnormality, and a non-secreting adenoma or, less likely, a craniopharyngioma are suggested as probable diagnoses.     

Towards a Byzantine ecocriticism: witches and nature control in the medieval Greek romance

Abstract

Since its rise in the mid-1990s, ecocriticism, the study of the depiction of the built and natural environments in literature, has been deeply engaged with contemporary political and social issues surrounding anthropogenic ecological degradation and climate change. Such an ideological outlook, however, limits the application of the discourse in the case of medieval literature, which lacks such contemporary resonance. Ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of the three witches with power over the environment in the Byzantine romances and their western analogues will nevertheless demonstrate the connection between nature control, femininity and patriarchal oppression and, as importantly, offer a theoretical framework for the application of an apolitical ecocriticism to Byzantine (and medieval) literature.     

Models of medieval and pre-medieval territorial organisation: with a select bibliography

The author synthesizes some Swedish investigations into area- and form-planning of administrative units, parishes and divisions of these, as well as of areas for clearing which were already divided up among the part-owners. The areas, which are described in a metrological notation system based on original length-measures and comparable area-measures, are combined with the corresponding cameralistic units of tax assessments. These have been reconstructed directly from medieval and sixteenth-century soures including evidence of much older relict units. The combined geometrical and cameralistic material gives the basis for models of (1) the spatial structure of rural landscape in different phases of evolution and (2) their evolution through centuries, the area of arable land or arable and meadow together being the key variable. Finally, it is shown that a regional planning system, which was probably introduced in parts of Middle Sweden in the eleventh century metrologically coincides with an organisation system probably also used in Northern Wales in the tenth century.     

Detecting the medieval cod trade: a new method and first results

This paper explores the potential of stable isotope analysis to identify the approximate region of catch of cod by analysing bones from medieval settlements in northern and western Europe. It measures the δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values of cod bone collagen from medieval control samples collected from sites around Arctic Norway, the North Sea, the Kattegat and the Baltic Sea. These data were considered likely to differ by region due to, for example, variation in the length of the food chain, water temperature and salinity. We find that geographical structuring is indeed evident, making it possible to identify bones from cod caught in distant waters. These results provide a new methodology for studying the growth of long-range trade in dried cod and the related expansion of fishing effort—important aspects of the development of commercialisation in medieval Europe. As a first test of the method, we analyse three collections of cod bones tentatively interpreted as imported dried fish based on a priori zooarchaeological criteria. The results tentatively suggest that cod were being transported or traded over very long distances since the end of the first millennium AD.     

Age-dependent cortical bone loss in a medieval population

Age-dependent cortical bone loss was studied in a skeletal assemblage from a British medieval site using metacarpal radiogrammetry. Significant loss of bone was found in the females but not in the males. The magnitude of bone loss in the older females relative to their younger counterparts was found to be similar to that reported for modern European subjects. Low cortical bone was associated with healed fractures of the highly trabecular bone of the axial skeleton, and this observation is suggestive that weakening of the skeleton due to loss of bone substance precipitated such fractures, as it does in modern Western women. The broad similarities between the medieval and modern data may call into question the importance of lifestyle factors in influencing the severity of osteoporosis, at least as far as loss of cortical bone is concerned.