scholarly journals A tale of two villages: Isotopic insight into diet, economy, cultural diversity and agrarian communities in medieval (11th–15th century CE) Apulia, Southern Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 102009
Author(s):  
Guro Linnerud Rolandsen ◽  
Paul Arthur ◽  
Michelle Alexander
Author(s):  
Rebecca LeMoine

From student protests over the teaching of canonical texts such as Plato’s Republic to the use of images of classical Greek statues in white supremacist propaganda, the world of the ancient Greeks is deeply implicated in a heated contemporary debate about identity and diversity. Plato’s Caves defends the bold thesis that Plato was a friend of cultural diversity, contrary to many contemporary perceptions. It shows that, across Plato’s dialogues, foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: liberating citizens from intellectual bondage. Through close readings of four Platonic dialogues—Republic, Menexenus, Laws, and Phaedrus—the author recovers Plato’s unique insight into the promise, and risk, of cross-cultural engagement. Like the Socratic “gadfly” who stings the “horse” of Athens into wakefulness, foreigners can provoke citizens to self-reflection by exposing contradictions and confronting them with alternative ways of life. The painfulness of this experience explains why encounters with foreigners often give rise to tension and conflict. Yet it also reveals why cultural diversity is an essential good. Simply put, exposure to cultural diversity helps one develop the intellectual humility one needs to be a good citizen and global neighbor. By illuminating Plato’s epistemological argument for cultural diversity, Plato’s Caves challenges readers to examine themselves and to reinvigorate their love of learning.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102102
Author(s):  
A. Di Cintio ◽  
L. Labanchi ◽  
M. Spagnolo ◽  
G. Musella ◽  
T. Romeo ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Melinda Szőke

The founding charter of Pécsvárad Abbey (+1015/+1158 [about 1220]/1323/1403/PR.) is a document that has only survived in a 15th-century copy of a 13th-century forgery. Thus, an analysis of toponym history and linguistic history must deal with several chronological planes when studying the document. The first section of this study examines Hungarian words (Duna ‘Danube’; the names of trees: e.g. tulfa ‘oak’, scylfa ‘elm’; geographic common nouns: e.g. aruc ‘ditch’, nogwt ‘main road’) that are used only in Latin in other documents or are characterised by mixed usages of Latin and Hungarian terms. These indicate a lack of Latinisation. The second section details the characteristics of five Latin name forms used in the document (Scena abbatis, Sirmia, Strigoniensis, Colocensis, Montis Ferrei), emphasising their chronological order. The small number of Latin names among all designations in the charter and the use of vulgar elements instead of Latin is presented as an imprint of 11th-century charter writing (from the time of Saint Stephen). Thus, the charter can provide significant insight into the beginnings of charter writing in Hungary.


2017 ◽  

Researching cultural diversity is a central subject of social anthropology. 25 authors from institutes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland offer an insight into the subject, its contents and theoretical perspectives. The articles cover a variety of topics: the history of the discipline as well as basic theories and methods, subareas such as business or kinship anthropology, crosscutting issues such as anthropology of media, but also up-to-date specialised fields such as urban or development anthropology. The book is therefore invaluable for students and anyone interested in social anthropology who wants to open up fields of work, theoretical approaches and results of the subject.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Whitley

The peopling of the Americas is both the oldest and most frequently researched question in American archaeology. Although rarely considered, early art has the potential to provide insight into questions that may be obscured by other kinds of evidence, particularly stone tools. What part did art play in the peopling of the Americas? This question is addressed starting with a reconsideration of rock varnish chronometrics as applied to Great Basin, eastern California, petroglyphs. This demonstrates, conservatively, that the petroglyph tradition began before 11,100 YBP, probably before 12,600 YBP, and potentially in the 14,000 years range. Comparison of these ages with evidence from other regions in the hemisphere demonstrates substantial artistic and stylistic variation in rock art by the Paleoindian period (circa 10,000–11,000 YBP). This suggests that, while art may have been part of the baggage of the first immigrants, regional cultural traditions had already been developed by the Terminal Pleistocene, if not earlier. The result is evidence for the development of regional cultural diversity in the Americas by Paleoindian times.


Author(s):  
Cristina Dondi

The ledger of the Venetian bookseller Francesco De Madiis, known as the Zornale (1484-88), which is currently being studied by Cristina Dondi and Neil Harris, offers a unique insight into the market value of the earliest printed books, of any sort. The essay offers the analysis of a variety of subjects, prices, sales, customers, and comparison with the cost of living in Renaissance Venice, the largest place of production and distribution in 15th-century Europe. The focus is first and foremost on the cheapest and most popular items, a production and trade enabled by the new technology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 527-593
Author(s):  
Paweł Sierżęga ◽  

The article presents Antoni Prochaski’s private correspondence to Aleksander Semkowicz from Teofil Emil Modelski’s private collection, stored in the Archive of the Jagiellonian University. The letters document A. Prochaski’s search queries in archives and libraries in Konigsberg, Petersburg and Moscow (1876–1882). The correspondence allow insight into the scientific environment of the luminaries of the German, Polish and Russian historical science, describe the conditions of everyday archival work and introduce the topics of Prochaski’s works focused on the history of Poland in the 14th and 15th century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
Anita Prelovšek

This doctoral dissertation provides an insight into funeral music as an ethnomusicological, anthropological, economic and cultural phenomenon, which has so far in Slovenia not attracted appropriate scholarly attention. It focuses on the role and importance of music at funerals in the context of the symbolism associated with death, departure and the concept of transience, and on the causes of different choices of music as an integral part of the leave–taking of the deceased, in conjunction with aspects of historical, social and cultural diversity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 150 ◽  
pp. 301-326
Author(s):  
Rachel Meredith Davis

Medieval Scottish women’s seals remain largely unexplored compared to the scholarship on seals and sealing practice elsewhere in medieval Britain. This article has two chief aims. First, it seeks to demonstrate the insufficiencies of the 19th- and 20th-century Scottish seal catalogues as a mediated record of material evidence and the use of them as comprehensive and go-to reference texts within current research on late medieval Scotland. This includes a discussion of the ways in which medieval seals survive as original impressions, casts and illustrations and how these different types of evidence can be used in the construction and reconstruction of the seal’s and charter’s context. Second, this paper will explore the materiality and interconnectedness of seals and the charters to which they are attached. A reading of these two objects together emphasises the legal function of the seal and shows its distinctive purpose as a representational object. While the seal was used in con-texts beyond the basic writ charter, it remained a legally functional and (auto)biographical object, and, as such, the relationship between seal and charter informs meaning in representational identities expressed in both. The article will apply this approach to several examples of seals belonging to 14th- and 15th-century Scottish countesses. Evidence reviewed this way provides new insight into Scottish women’s sealing practice and female use of heraldic device. The deficiencies of assuming women’s design to be formulaic or that their seals can be usefully interpreted in isolation from the charters to which they were attached will be highlighted. The interconnectedness of word and image conveyed personal links and elite ambitions, and promoted noble lineage within the legal context of charter production.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Michelina D’Allessio

This article falls within a branch of studies aimed at highlighting the experiences of some neglected protagonists of Italian education through their professional writings. Indeed, school journals and records give an insight into the transformations that the teaching profession and school culture have undergone throughout the years. From such a historiographical perspective, this contribution highlights the «new school» experiment carried out by the teacher Arturo Arcomano (1927-2007) in a small town in Basilicata, a region of Southern Italy, in the mid-twentieth century. By looking at the material held in the private archive of this educator, scholar, professor and politician, particularly his school journals, as well as at the notebooks and school papers produced by his pupils, we can get a sense of the «new life» breathed through the school of Roccanova, where Arcomano applied the teaching methodologies that were becoming popular in those years, like the use of free writing and Freinet’s printing press at school. The Arcomano case study enables us to understand both the resistance and the push towards this experimentation, which was based on a «different» pedagogical culture, and action intended to fit the environmental context. The use of the sources that can be found in Arcomano’s personal archive on the one hand enables us to define the human and professional profile of the teacher, and on the other, contributes to the reconstruction of the renovation process that affected education in Southern Italy in the mid-twentieth century. 


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