Platon im Arzneibuch und der Heller am Tresen Pharmazie im 16. Jahrhundert zwischen Humanismus,Stadtgesellschaft und Ökonomie

The study focuses on the development of pharmacopoeas during the early modern time. First, the >Nouvo Receptario< of 1499 came out in Florence as the first printed pharmacopoea of a north‐Italian town, edited by the guild of medicins and apothercaries. Following trading routes the idea of >pharmacopoea< arrived in Nuremberg, where the counsil of the town asked the humanist Valerius Cordus to prepare such a book. Printed in 1546, it quickly became the standard in preparing medicines for other towns in southern Germany. At Augsburg, a wealthy and powerful town, the physicians wrote their own pharmacopoea which was printed in 1564. The comparison of the three pharmacopoeas shows that its printing depended on the social stucture and the financial aspects of each town. But even if the apothecaries, the doctors or the mayors were trained in the humanistic tradtion, the materia medica still continued in the arabic tradition, i.e. the old drugs and preparations remained in these pharmacopoeas, probably for financial reasons.     

Civility,Male Friendship,and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth‐Century Germany

Largely neglected by historians who assume that its heyday passed in Europe with the demise of the Old Regime, Freemasonry in fact became a mass phenomenon among German (and French as well as American) middle‐class men in the nineteenth century. Masonic secrecy made possible a form of sociability which allowed men to experience intimate relations with each other. Within the lodge, men could experience the emotional drama of the rituals while, both in public and in the family, men increasingly sought to comply with the ideal of a man ruled by reason. Masonic rituals entailed the implicit message that the most important presupposition for civility, moral improvement and a ‘brotherhood of all men’ was male friendship.     

To be and to continue being a cog: the conservation of the Bremen Cog of 1380

The conservation project for the Bremen Cog of 1380 took 38 years from salvage to presentation of the ship to the public in the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum in 2000. The ship was salvaged from the River Weser in about 2000 pieces, and stored in water tanks. A new museum was built, and the Cog reassembled from the waterlogged timbers. The ship was reconstructed with most of the weight being taken by the ceiling of the hall via a steel-rod hanging system. Then a conservation tank was built around the hull, and a novel two-step PEG-treatment applied, especially developed for the Cog. In two consecutive baths PEG 200 and PEG 3000 stabilized lesser degraded and heavily degraded wood against shrinkage, splitting, and warping. After cleaning, the wood looks dark brown, dry, and natural. The extraordinary project is regarded a success.     

Casting the Riace Bronzes: Modern Assumptions and Ancient Facts

This article argues that classical archaeologists have seriously underestimated the output of heat required to melt a large quantity of bronze and therefore have wrongly reconstructed the ancient casting process. The idea that sufficient metal for casting a bronze of monumental proportions could be heated in a crucible with a charcoal fire ventilated by bellows is not realistic. The following observations are based on solid foundry experience: Nigel Konstam, a bronze sculptor, for many years supervised the casting of monumental bronzes comparable in size to those from Riace. This article has been written by Herbert Hoffmann drawing on Konstam's notes     

Western Mediterranean sand deposits as a raw material for Roman glass production

During the Late Roman and Byzantine period, natron glass was made from its raw materials in a limited number of primary production centres in Egypt and Syro-Palestine. For the earlier Hellenistic and Roman period, no primary furnaces have been found and the location of primary production during this era remains unclear. Ancient authors such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder suggest that glassmaking sands were found near the River Belus (Israel), in Egypt, near the mouth of the Volturno River (Italy) and also in Spain and France. However, primary production in the western part of the Mediterranean is not supported by any direct archaeological evidence and possible sand raw materials from these regions have never been evaluated for their suitability to produce glass.