Towards a history of courtly emotions in early medieval India, c. 300–700 CE

Author(s):  
Daud Ali
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 36-56
Author(s):  
James McHugh

This article considers the nature of one particular drink made from sugar cane called sīdhu (usually m., also śīdhu), exploring the evidence from textual sources. Other drinks were made with sugar cane products, such as āsavas, medicinal ariṣṭas, and the drink called maireya, but I will not consider those here.   As I argue, sīdhu was the basic fermented sugar cane drink, not strongly characterized by additives—“plain” sugar-wine as it were. Though in a manner typical of premodern Indic alcohol culture, even this one drink was a complex and variable affair. Rather than consider this drink in medical sources alone—important as that evidence may be—my methodology here is to examine the history of this drink in the light of a wide range of textual evidence, placing this drink in the broad context of pre-modern South Asian drinking culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 13-26
Author(s):  
Brandon W. Hawk

Literature written in England between about 500 and 1100 CE attests to a wide range of traditions, although it is clear that Christian sources were the most influential. Biblical apocrypha feature prominently across this corpus of literature, as early English authors clearly relied on a range of extra-biblical texts and traditions related to works under the umbrella of what have been called “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” and “New Testament/Christian Apocrypha." While scholars of pseudepigrapha and apocrypha have long trained their eyes upon literature from the first few centuries of early Judaism and early Christianity, the medieval period has much to offer. This article presents a survey of significant developments and key threads in the history of scholarship on apocrypha in early medieval England. My purpose is not to offer a comprehensive bibliography, but to highlight major studies that have focused on the transmission of specific apocrypha, contributed to knowledge about medieval uses of apocrypha, and shaped the field from the nineteenth century up to the present. Bringing together major publications on the subject presents a striking picture of the state of the field as well as future directions.


Author(s):  
EVE KRAKOWSKI ◽  
SACHA STERN

Abstract Halper 331 is the fragment of a codex that has been styled the ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’. It preserves the opening of a Jewish legal document dated to the year 1182 (Seleucid era), which appears to have been copied into this codex, probably as a formulary, not long after this date, in the late 9th century. In this article, the text of this fragment, in Aramaic and Hebrew, is edited, and its identification as the beginning of a marriage contract (ketubbah) is evaluated. Its Egyptian provenance is questioned, partly because the earliest evidence for the introduction of the Seleucid era by Jews in Egypt dates from the mid-10th century. The article surveys the history of Jewish dating methods in early medieval Egypt and the Near East, in an attempt to clarify this question. The specific date of the document deviates from the rabbinic calendar, but agrees with that of the contemporary Jewish Near Eastern sectarian groups of Abū ʿImrān al-Tiflīsī and Ismāʿīl al-ʿUkbarī; this document could thus uniquely attest one of these sectarian Jewish calendars.


Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.


1966 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 82-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.


2021 ◽  
pp. 282-298
Author(s):  
Mikhail B. Sverdlov ◽  

The author studies the history of the judicial natural and money forfeit for the criminal offence, moral and social content of this criminal offence in the late tribal Slavic society and in early medieval Russian state the context of the history of the Pravda Russkaya’s content. He analyzes the content of the social and legal policy during the rule of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh in Kiev or the rule of his son Mstislav. Probably at that time the Vast Pravda Russkaya was issued. It made judicial rights secured of all social strata including women, children, poor men on the principles of social justice and the Evangel. It kept old human tradition of the money forfeit for a crime instead of to cut off any limb or to execute as in Byzantine and in medieval vest European countries.


Author(s):  
Adrianna Szczerba

The Management of Research on the Beginnings of the Polish State was established to carry out extensive, interdisciplinary research on the genesis and functioning of the state of the first Piasts, which was undertaken in connection with the need to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the Polish state and its baptism. In 1949–1953, Early Medieval archaeological sites were examined in 31 cities. The most attention was devoted to strongholds with Piast records (Gdańsk, Gniezno, Giecz, Poznań, Kruszwica, Kalisz, Tum pod Łęczycą, Błonie, Bródno, Wrocław, Opole, Niemcza, Cieszyn, and Wiślica). Most of them are located in the medieval centres of modern cities. In this situation, the natural order of things was to link the problems of Early Medieval castles with the problems of the beginnings of Polish cities. Early Medieval sites in Poland, usually with a complicated stratigraphy, especially in the case of cities or strongholds, are the most difficult to excavate. Meanwhile, at that time only limited experience of excavation work at multi-layer sites prior to World War II was available – as a consequence, research methods for larger settlement complexes were developed on an ongoing basis, in the course of the research itself. Thus, the Millennium program has become a kind of testing ground in the field of urban archaeology in Poland. Key word: history of Polish archaeology, Management of Research on the Beginnings of the Polish State, millennium archaeology, urban archaeology.


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