Fifteenth century earth science

The earth science content of two late medieval encyclopedias, the Mirrour of the World and Higden's Polychronicon, both printed by William Caxton in the 1480's, is examined in relation to fifteenth century ideas about the physical nature of the earth and the universe. Such topics as the four elements, the earth and the spheres, location of Hell and Paradise, the arrangement of , continents and oceans, the unity of waters, earthquakes and volcanoes, erosion, fossils and mountain building, climatic zones and weather phenomena are summarized and reference made to the Biblical and Classical Greek sources of these ideas

Altichiero in the Fifteenth Century

Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari’s Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero’s work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari’s account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero’s reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter’s death (by April 1393)

ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC LIFE IN FRANCOLISE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

Francolise is a small farm and thermal town that rises on the right bank of the river Volturno, in the territory of Calvi Risorta, in the province of Caserta. It is well known above all for its embattled castle dating back to about the thirteenth century and for the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie where the wooden sculpture of the Madonna del Castello (fourteenth century) and the painting of the Madonna del Cardellino (fifteenth century) are kept. Among the past evidence, there are the ruins of two Roman Villas inhabited from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D. In 787 Charlemagne, king of the Franks, passed near the ancient town leading his mighty army to Capua. The presence of farmers mainly specialized in cereal growing has been important in the territory since the second half of the fifteenth century.urban, land use, planning, economy, farm, grain, olive, wine, macaroni.

Strathconon, Scatwell and the Mackenzies in the Written Record c. 1463-c.1700

Although some writers have considered the earlier history of Ross, these studies tend to focus on dynastic and political events and not much is know about the internal workings of Ross-shire far less Strathconon in the historical record prior to the end of the fifteenth century.2 Strathconon, strategically situated in central Ross, was the key to the control of the earldom of Ross in that possession of these lands secured control of the few good access routes from coast to coast. The earldom of Ross and the possession thereof in turn was pivotal to the fortunes of the Macdonald Lords of the Isles in the fifteenth century who were fatally undermined by their loss of the area to the Stewart monarchy in 1475. This essay will consider the Strathconon and Scatwell area from the time of its earliest appearance in the historical record at the end of the fifteenth century (at much the same time as the Mackenzie clan themselves) and go on to concentrate on the area in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An attempt will be made to pull together a variety of written sources in order to try to build up a picture of the area in this period inasmuch as the evidence will allow. These lands, Strathconon and Scatwell, which form the focus of this investigation, were a small part of a much wider (and expanding) estate that was controlled in this period, c.1463 to 1700 by the Mackenzies of Kintail / Seaforth

A Flourynge Aege: Tracing the Sacred and Secular in the Book of St. Albans

With the introduction of the printing press to England around the mid-fifteenth century, English authors were not only writing under the lingering influence of Chaucer and the conventions of established medieval genres, but now had to confront the implications for reading and readership that printing brought with it along with the already turbulent political climate of the fifteenth century. Though this cultural shift was arguably a gradual one, with the earliest printers taking special care to remain faithful to the manuscripts they were copying, and conventional scribes likewise being commissioned to make copies of printed works, there were nevertheless radical innovations in text production and formatting being experimented with well before 1500 (Eisenstein 51-52). It was into this literary scene that The Book of St. Albans was published, a collection of treatises on hawking, hunting, and “other dyuers playsaunt materes belongynge unto noblesse” traditionally attributed to the Prioress Julyans Barnes (Barnes, rev. d viij). In spite of the book’s contemporary popularity, scholarship on the text has conventionally been limited to exploring the authenticity of the book’s authorship or relaying what the text reveals about the practicalities of late medieval sport. There has been a noticeable lack of analyses which read the collection as a cohesive literary text, which will be my endeavor throughout this project. Through this literary analysis, I hope to break free of the common trappings of previous scholarship and to showcase that The Book of St. Albans is a fascinating piece of secular literature in its own right which exemplifies the shifting consciousness of fifteenth century English society

The map of Johannes Quintinus Haeduus and its derivatives

The first known map of the Maltese islands was drawn in the latter part of the fifteenth century, but the first printed map was that published in 1536 in Lyons by Johannes Quintinus. Being rather primitive, it did not serve as a model for other maps beyond the 16th century. However, as it was important in the time frame of Maltese cartography, it was reproduced by other cartographers, namely, in Frankfurt in 1600, in 1725 in Leiden, and around 1800 as a loose sheet probably in Malta. Of the 16th-century Malta maps, those by Antonio Lafreri (1551) and Matteo Perez d'Aleccio (1582) remained the basic maps for the next two centuries.peer-reviewe

Late medieval Maltese surnames of Arabic and Greek origin

As a contribution to the historical study of Maltese and Greater Sicilian onomastics, this article is an analysis of fifteenth-century Maltese surnames of low frequency (5 or less occurrences in the militia lists of 1419 and 1480) which are of certain Greek or Arabic origin. Each surname is analysed in terms of its etymology, meaning and known geographical distribution in Sicily or elsewhere in Italy.peer-reviewe

The Ethiopian Manuscripts in the Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo

The Kulturhistorisk museum in Oslo possesses a small collection of ten Ethiopic codices predominantly acquired in the mid1930s. Included among them are an illuminated fifteenth-century psalter (UEM36096) and a late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth century hagiographical manuscript (UEM35900)