Nota Necrológica. Bonifacio Palacios Martín

Nota Necrológica. Bonifacio Palacios Martí

The origins of intensive marine fishing in medieval Europe: the English evidence

The catastrophic impact of fishing pressure on species such as cod and herring is well documented. However, the antiquity of their intensive exploitation has not been established. Systematic catch statistics are only available for ca. 100 years, but large-scale fishing industries existed in medieval Europe and the expansion of cod fishing from the fourteenth century (first in Iceland, then in Newfoundland) played an important role in the European colonization of the Northwest Atlantic. History has demonstrated the scale of these late medieval and post-medieval fisheries, but only archaeology can illuminate earlier practices. Zooarchaeological evidence shows that the clearest changes in marine fishing in England between AD 600 and 1600 occurred rapidly around AD 1000 and involved large increases in catches of herring and cod. Surprisingly, this revolution predated the documented post-medieval expansion of England's sea fisheries and coincided with the Medieval Warm Period-when natural herring and cod productivity was probably low in the North Sea. This counterintuitive discovery can be explained by the concurrent rise of urbanism and human impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The search for 'pristine' baselines regarding marine ecosystems will thus need to employ medieval palaeoecological proxies in addition to recent fisheries data and early modern historical records

Medieval Christian Dualist Perceptions and Conceptions of Biblical Paradise

The article intends to draw attention to some of the most significant and telling appropriations of traditional themes of Biblical paradise in medieval Christian dualism (namely, Paulicianism, Bogomilism and related groups in Eastern Christendom and Catharism in Western Christendom) and initiate discussion on the important but presently not always explicable problem of their theological and literary provenance. The significance of this problematic is highlighted by the increasing amount of direct and indirect evidence of the role played by a number of early Jewish and Christian pseudepigraphic works in the formation of medieval Christian dualist cosmogonic, cosmological, satanological, Christological and biblical history traditions. The preliminary survey of medieval dualist conceptions of biblical Paradise shows also once more that the doctrinal evidence for Bogomilism and Catharism is too complex and polyvalent to be defined or ignored apriori as representing medieval heresiological constructs drawing on earlier heresiological texts and stereotypes. The material examined in the article shows that the text-critical treatment of the primary sources to first establish the most plausible literary and theological provenance of the respective teachings attributed to medieval Christian dualist groups or individuals still remains indispensable to the study of medieval heresy and needs to precede the application of models and approaches drawn from contemporary anthropological and sociological theory to the source material

Theorica et Practica: Historical Epistemology and the Re-Visioning of Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Medicine

Positivist medical historians, guided by the savoir of modern western biomedicine, have long depicted medieval medicine as an aberration along the continuum of scientific and medical progress. Historical epistemology, founded in the ideas of Cavailles, Foucault, Davidson, and Hacking, however, allows the historian to disrupt this false continuum and to unchain medieval medicine from modern medicine. Postmodernist approaches, such as those sourced in Lyotard, Barthes, and Derrida, allow the historian to further deconstruct medieval and modern medical discourse, revealing a multitude of narrative lenses spinning around biomedical and biocultural strands. In liberating these two medical systems and setting them within the distinct historical and epistemological contexts that both shaped and were shaped by them, the historian can revision the theories, practices, and culture of medieval medicine without having to anachronistically justify them according to modern medical discourse

Medieval property investors, ca. 1300-1500

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to profit. Careful analysis of the data provides evidence of group purchases, multiple transactions and investors buying outside of their own locality. The identification of these ‘investors’ and their buying behaviours, set within the context of the English medieval economy, contributes to the early commercialisation debate

Common Medieval Pigments

This paper discusses the pigments used in medieval manuscripts. Specific types of pigments that are examined are earths, minerals, manufactured, and organics. It also focuses on both destructive and non-destructive methods for identifying medieval pigments

Trinkets and Charms: the use, meaning and significance of later medieval and early post-medieval dress accessories

This is a thematic study of dress accessories of late medieval to early post-medieval date from two regions of mainland Britain. It is an investigation of everyday objects which aims to re-engage the material world with past individuals. An interdisciplinary approach is used to understand how dress accessories were often more than ornaments, and how they intersected with and were integral to social, political and religious life. Accessories recovered from a range of excavated archaeological sites, chance finds and data recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), have been catalogued and investigated. Documentary evidence, paintings and tomb effigies are sources of evidence drawn upon throughout to supplement the archaeological evidence, to enhance the interpretations and to place the accessories into a wider social context. The accessories have been analysed using object biographies in thematic discussions based on aspects of daily life. The results demonstrate the overall homogenous nature of dress accessories used in the two border regions and there is little evidence to suggest that they were consciously used by later medieval and early-post medieval people to display a border identity. Chance finds and PAS results have extended our knowledge of the types of adornments worn and revealed types not frequently found in excavations. Some variation between and within regions is identified, such as an unusual distribution of dress hooks, the possible presence of ‘Hanseatic’ material in the northeast of England, and purposeful deposits of accessories of monetary value in the north-east of England. Long-term biographies are also identified where a number of accessory types had different meanings depending on their context of use. The themes of memory, heirlooms, and gift giving feature throughout the thematic discussions of the accessories. By viewing archaeological artefacts as things, this thesis endeavours to expand our knowledge of medieval dress accessories and past lives

The Orality of a Silent Age: The Place of Orality in Medieval Studies

'The Orality of a Silent Age: The Place of Orality in Medieval Studies' uses a brief survey of current work on Old English poetry as the point of departure for arguing that although useful, the concepts of orality and literacy have, in medieval studies, been extended further beyond their literal referents of spoken and written communication than is heuristically useful. Recent emphasis on literate methods and contexts for the writing of our surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry, in contradistinction to the previous emphasis on oral ones, provides the basis for this criticism. Despite a significant amount of revisionist work, the concept of orality remains something of a vortex into which a range of only party related issues have been sucked: authorial originality/communal property; impromptu composition/meditated composition; authorial and audience alienation/immediacy. The relevance of orality to these issues is not in dispute; the problem is that they do not vary along specifically oral/literate axes. The article suggests that this is symptomatic of a wider modernist discourse in medieval studies whereby modern, literate society is (implicitly) contrasted with medieval, oral society: the extension of the orality/literacy axis beyond its literal reference has to some extent facilitated the perpetuation of an earlier contrast between primitivity and modernity which deserves still to be questioned and disputed. Pruning back our conceptions of the oral and the literate to their stricter denotations, we might hope to see more clearly what areas of medieval studies would benefit from alternative interpretations

The Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath ) and Totentanz ( Dance of Death ): Medieval Themes Revisited in 19th Century Music and Culture

During the pivotal November 2002 football game of Arkansas vs. Georgia in the SEC conference championship, the Georgia marching band struck up their defensive rallying song. Instead of a typical defense song, the band played an excerpt of the Gregorian Sequence Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath\u27\u27) from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. Drastically dissociated from its original medieval milieu, this musical Sequence still manages to elicit the same effect of fear and foreboding nearly a thousand years later. Precisely because of its deep musical and cultural roots, the Dies Irae occupies a significant place in history, closely intertwined from early on with the medieval folk motif Totentanz ( Dance of Death ), widely depicted in medieval art, and dramatically revived in 19th century music, art, and literature. This multi-disciplinary study focuses on the history of art and music of these two medieval themes during their development, and then moves on to study them in 19th century culture. Specifically, the manipulation of the original Gregorian chant and the incorporation of the idea of a medieval dance are analyzed in the music of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Camille Saint-Saens. Numerous other contextual links are explored as well, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Henri Cazalis, William Blake, and Alfred Rethel, all of whom created 19th century artistic or literary masterpieces derived from the thematic seeds of the Dies Irae and the Totentanz. Although neither of these ideas endured in their original form during the Romantic era, the inherently compelling nature of these themes that center on the macabre but inevitable end of life captivated the Romantic geniuses and continue to intrigue us to this day