Medieval pottery kilns in the Carpathian Basin

2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-342
Author(s):  
Zsolt Vágner

This article discusses tenth–sixteenth-century pottery kilns in the Carpathian Basin in the territory of medieval Hungary. Kilns are classified on the basis of their structure, building technique and firing technology and these characteristics are examined using archaeological evidence, ethnographical sources and also technological and pyrotechnical analysis. The archaeological and stratigraphical features and some methodological problems of medieval pottery kiln study are also discussed and a topographical analysis of the pottery kilns in relation to the workshops and settlements on the basis of archaeological and historical evidence is presented. The history of the development, origin and distribution of the types of medieval pottery kilns in the Carpathian Basin is also presented. There is a brief discussion of the contribution that pottery kiln studies can make to the understanding of workshop organization.

Author(s):  
David N. Edwards

While it is commonly assumed that slavery, and especially an external slave trade, were significant features of the history of the earlier kingdoms in the Middle Nile, the evidence for this is less certain than the confident assertions of earlier scholars might suggest. Drawing on a range of archaeological and historical evidence, this chapter reassesses our current understanding of the development of slavery in this region in the medieval and post-medieval periods. Forms of slavery were clearly ever-present within the Middle Nile region during both periods, with slave taking likely a common practice on the margins of its early kingdoms. A significant external trade in slaves, however, is hard to demonstrate before the sixteenth century. Our perceptions of such a trade as a timeless and eternal feature of the history of the Nile Valley deserve closer scrutiny.


1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Chittick

This article, based on a critical examination of the Pate Chronicle in the light of archaeological and external historical evidence bearing on the subject, presents a case for a revision of the early history of the town. It maintains that Pate was the latest of the settlements to rise to importance in the region, being of little importance before the sixteenth century, and preceded by other city-statés, the earliest of which was Manda. The origins of Pate do not go back before the fourteenth century; the first dynasty there, the Batawi, was ruling up to around the seventeenth century, after which the Nabahani took over the sultanate.


Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

This chapter surveys the antiquarians of the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment periods. It shows how Italy in the sixteenth century saw an even deeper and broader engagement with the antiquities, and the identification of a group of people devoted to the study of its material remains. Through objects, Renaissance scholars gained access to parts of the past that were not discussed in texts or were discussed in texts that no longer survived. By the end of the sixteenth century, antiquarianism had spread across Europe, and the chapter pinpoints these waves of progress in the history of antiquarianism through a number of key individuals: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Jacob Spon (1647–1685), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).


2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Sterner ◽  
Nicholas David

The publication, largely by ethnoarchaeologists, of new data on the tamper and concave anvil technique of pot-forming (TCA) permits a reassessment of this uniquely African technique, its toolkit, and its culture history. A survey, inspired by the technologie culturelle school, of its varied expressions in the southern Saharan, Sahelian and northern Sudan zones from Mali to Sudan and extending north into Egypt emphasises the potential of the technique for the efficient production of spherical water jars of high volume to weight ratio, much appreciated in arid environments. The technique is demanding and therefore practised for the most part by specialists. The origins and diffusion of the technique are assessed in the light of the ethnological, archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence, and a four stage historical development is sketched.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


Author(s):  
Chris Fitter

Introducing the relatively recent discovery by the ‘new social history’ of an intelligent and sceptical Tudor popular politics, incorporated into the functioning of the state only precariously and provisionally, often insurgent in the sixteenth century, and wooed by discontented elites inadvertently creating a nascent public sphere, this chapter discusses the varied types and fortunes of plebeian resistance. It also surveys the leading ideas of the new historiography, and suggests the need to rethink the politics of Shakespeare’s plays in the light of their exuberant or embittered penetration by plebeian perspectives. Finally, it examines Measure for Measure in the light of its resistance to the polarizing, anti-populist climate of the late Elizabethan ‘reformation of manners’.


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.


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