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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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The authors offer the findings of their study of numismatic material from a warrior’s burial in barrow no. 3 of the Jailausay (Sarytau II) cemetery in Western Kazakhstan, and give a description of the grave and the goods. It is the first documented discovery of 22 silver Juchid dang of the 14th century, found in a silk purse. The burial contained remains of horse harness, 2 iron stirrups, birch quiver with remains of arrows, knife-dagger and other attributes of an elite warrior. The fact was also supported by the number of silver coins in an expensive multi-layered silk purse. Out of the 22 dangs, 19 are Uzbek Khan’s and 3 are Janibek Khan’s. The youngest coin of the set dates to 743/1342—43 year. The set could be formed in the Volga region in 740s/1340s. The burial is dated within 743~748/1342—1348.
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The geographic vicinity of the Golden Horde and Bulgarian lands in the 13th—14th centuries was reflected in a number of monetary artefacts found in the southern part of the Prut-Dniester interfluvial area. The authors address 69 individual coins by Bulgarian issuers found, mainly, over the last decade. Noteworthy, almost four out of five coins are related to the Golden Horde Costeşti settlement, to various degrees of probability. The majority of small Bulgarian coins minted in Tarnovo and, probably, in Cherven on behalf of Tsar Ivan Alexander (1331—1371) reached the region about 1355—1360. Their most plausible itinerary must be connected with the Danube and the Prut rivers, as well as an important river ferry at Orlovka. The reason for this massive movement of small coins from Bulgaria into central and south-western part of the modern Moldova could be traced not only in the history of military raids and international trade of the Golden Horde, but also in the big transformations caused by the terrible plague pandemic, which hit Europe from the east.
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The article addresses the seal of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, held in the Archives of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The artifact comes from N. P. Likhachev’s collection, and its earlier history is unknown. On its surface, there are clearly visible traces of remaking, which indicates the deliberate transformation of the matrix into a decorative element or amulet. The seal is made of copper-base alloy containing zinc (27.3 %), lead (1.3 %) and nickel (0.2 %). A trasological analysis revealed a number of technological features of the matrix. There are markers suggesting that the whole image, including the letters in the legend, was first produced as a wax model, which was then used for the lost wax casting. No traces of post-casting refinement on the matrix surface were found. Most of the legend letters were probably made with the help of a set of stamps consisting of small modules and whole letters.
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Din vremea lui Basarab I;O ipoteză în discuție;O scrisoare a misionarului Antonio Angelini di Campi;Hramul mănăstirii Tutana;Despre Udriște Năsturel; Un convoi venețian în Marea Neagră; La „dosarul” originii lui Mihai Viteazul; O însemnare a lui Udriște Năsturel; Un episod din viața lui Petru Cercel ;Duca vodă și Ucraina.
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The icon of Saint Francis of Assisi has become almost initiatory inthe iconography of Tuscany, an area belonging to the chasm of the greatculture of the Middle Ages. It is enough to say Florence, Siena, Cortona, Pisaor San Miniato to enter the bright labyrinth of acknowledgement of theFranciscan icon which has universal value.Being a breviary including masters and places embellished by the Franciscanicon, the present study aims, through a historical and an aesthetic perspective,to restore both Saint Francis’ personality and his entire mystical and asceticinfluence on the field of medieval iconography, which sprung from his realpresence, during his spiritual layovers that became landmarks of a trulyremarkable heritage. It is a joint work of two Christian authors, namely aCatholic and an Orthodox, who work to identify communication paths in theanthropology of the icon and in spiritual aesthetics
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The faction of Serbian historiography known as “critical” gained full recognition by deconstructing legendary narratives related to the Battle of Kosovo (1389) at the end of the 19th century. One of the most persistent of these narratives enclosed the alleged betrayal of Lord Vuk Brankovic, which is gripped only in legend and epic folk tradition. Although historian Ljubomir Kovacevic challenged this narrative already in 1888 using medieval sources, Serbian historians have repeatedly explored the issue of Vuk’s treason during the second half of the 20th century. Their search for roots of the legend of Vuk Brankovic’s betrayal was sought in real historical events and phenomena. The issue of Vuk’s betrayal was instigated within the wider public framework in 1989 as a part of the commemoration of the six hundred years jubilee of the battle. At that time, a re-examination of Vuk Brankovic’s role occurred. Some parts of academic circles reassessed the results of the Serbian “critical” historiography on the basis of which Vuk Branković was abolished from the stigma of traitor. Driven by a general atmosphere, some historians have even questioned Vuk’s military role in the Battle of Kosovo, while his political betrayal in the aftermath had somehow become historically relevant. The betrayal of Vuk Branković was relocated from the battlefield to the sphere of politics, statehood and vassal relations. The historians who followed that trail found Vuk’s betrayal in the conduct of an independent policy that was contrary to the pro-Ottoman policy of Lazarević. Another faction of Serbian historians has pointed out that there was no evidence or connection between Vuk’s politics after the Battle of Kosovo with the betrayal of Lazar’s political legacy. The argumentation of revisionist historians of Vuk’s historical role was based on a simplified or selective perception of social and geopolitical circumstances in the Balkans. Additionally, it derived from the misapplication of historiographical principles in interpretation of phenomena belonging to epic tradition that should be studied by different methodology. With this in mind, the conclusion is that Vuk’s alleged guilt should be viewed as a phenomenon within the framework of legend and folk epic tradition, while his historical role should be studied separately, based on postulates of historical methodology as a part of social sciences and humanities.
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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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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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