The evolution of the goals and conditions of the execution of the penalty of deprivation of liberty from the Middle Ages to the present day

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Justyna Bieda ◽  
Katarzyny Rydz-Sybilak

The functions of prisons in old Poland, their role and organization changed along with the evolution of views on the objectives of the institution of punishment in the system of criminal law. The picture will be completely different if the punishment is to have a main rehabilitation effect, and another when the basic premise of the penal policy is the principle of deterrence, not the moral improvement of the offender (it was in Poland until the 18th century). The penalty of deprivation of liberty could be carried out in five different ways. The choice of prison was primarily determined by the type of crime committed, but also the state of the convict was very important. The first, as early as the 12th-13th centuries are prisons, in which the population of lower states, ie townsmen, and peasants, were imprisoned. Initially, they play only a preventive role. In the Middle Ages, an upper tower was also developed, mainly applied to the nobility, it was an institution in which convicted in decent, even home conditions performed his penance. In the modern era, ie in the first half of the 16th century, a lower tower is being established, often not so much a place of imprisonment, but a place of slow death. Significant changes in the character and function of penitentiary institutions were brought by the 18th century, which was connected with the enlightenment flowing into the Republic of Poland, under which the punishment was also to be a means of improvement and rehabilitation, and not only revenge. The practice of imprisoning people in the tower, which was only a place of penance, deprived of any rehabilitation factors, slowly disappears, while prison comes to the fore. Here, the marshal prison should be pointed out, constituting a symbol of changes taking place, a modern facility in which the convict punished in humane conditions for those times, but above all, he was cared for his moral improvement, so that in the future he would not return to crime. The houses of improvement and forced labor houses started to play an extremely important role, the goal of which was to improve the prisoners through work and prayer.

Author(s):  
Nicholas J. P. Owens

This introduction traces the earliest interaction of ancient humans with their marine environment, through marine explorations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the development of early marine science in the Enlightenment. This sets the scene for how marine observations developed in the modern era and explains the status of today's marine observation networks. The paper concludes with an assessment of the future needs and constraints of sustained marine observation networks and suggests the lessons from a long history might be the key to the future.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Muhsin al-Musawi

AbstractIn this part, the implications of negativism are interrogated, especially as they lead to a deliberate negligence on the part of some nahḍah scholars to overlook significant and in fact groundbreaking contributions to the theories of translation as laid down by al-Jāḥiẓ, for example. Counter readings by other nahḍah scholars and translators balance and should have corrected the view of$T{\hskip-5.6pt\vskip1.9pt.}\,$āhā Ḥusayn, whose alignment with the Enlightenment prevented him from exploring even the most salient features of a past tradition. The medieval as a powerful dynamic in the makeup of historical understanding can be traced in writings by Mudawwar, Sulaymān Khaṭṭar al-Bustānī, and others, but these draw on a Golden past (the Abbasid) as an imaginary that sustains another lineage that takes translation from a Greco-Roman tradition as an invigorating enterprise in an otherwise lively Abbasid (750–978; and then until 1258) culture that was already triumphant. In other words this reclamation of the Golden past was not meant to disparage the Middle Ages, that is, the Mamluk period (1250–1517), but to obliquely criticize cultural dependency on Europe. Hence, prominent journals and publishers did not shy away from picking their designations and names from the Mamluk parlance and architectural sites. These two trends in lexical activity, translation, and historicization attest to a differentiated nahḍah space where the proclaimed epistemic discontinuity with the immediate past was balanced by the setup of a schema for translation as a schema for the nation, a premise that was also applied to the lexicon as a pan-Arab cauldron.


PMLA ◽  
1894 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-450
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Deering Hanscom

The fourteenth century was for England a period of storm and stress. The Saxon genius does not achieve its conquests lightly; it does not march to victory with furled flags or muffled drums; it is profoundly conscious of its own effort and the object to be realized. True, it often attains more than it hopes or even knows; but it attains the larger result through the accomplishment of the immediate purpose. The internal struggles are those that cost, with nations as with men; and it is no small part of the greatness of England that she has been able to see and strong to resist those dangers which, rising from within, have threatened to overthrow that stability which outward foes have in vain assailed. In that century which marked the close of the middle ages and the beginning of the modern era, England was busy taking cities and ruling her own spirit, and only the wise knew which was the better.


Curationis ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Cilliers ◽  
F.P. Retief

The evolution of the hospital is traced from its onset in ancient Mesopotamia towards the end of the 2nd millennium to the end of the Middle Ages. Reference is made to institutionalised health care facilities in India as early as the 5th century BC, and with the spread of Buddhism to the east, to nursing facilities, the nature and function of which are not known to us, in Sri Lanka, China and South East Asia. Special attention is paid to the situation in the Graeco-Roman era: one would expect to find the origin of the hospital in the modem sense of the word in Greece, the birthplace of rational medicine in the 4th century BC, but the Hippocratic doctors paid house-calls, and the temples of Asclepius were visited for incubation sleep and magico-religious treatment. In Roman times the military and slave hospitals which existed since the 1st century AD, were built for a specialized group and not for the public, and were therefore also not precursors of the modem hospital. It is to the Christians that one must turn for the origin of the modem hospital. Hospices, initially built to shelter pilgrims and messengers between various bishops, were under Christian control developed into hospitals in the modem sense of the word. In Rome itself, the first hospital was built in the 4th century AD by a wealthy penitent widow, Fabiola. In the early Middle Ages (6th to 10th century), under the influence of the Benedictine Order, an infirmary became an established part of every monastery. During the late Middle Ages (beyond the 10th century) monastic infirmaries continued to expand, but public hospitals were also opened, financed by city authorities, the church and private sources. Specialized institutions, like leper houses, also originated at this time. During the Golden Age of Islam the Muslim world was clearly more advanced than its Christian counterpart with magnificent hospitals in various countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Kovalev ◽  
◽  
Konstantin E. Krylov ◽  

The main theme of the article is investigation of the electoral culture in the European political and legal thought. Authors argue the ancient sources of this tradition tracing it from the three sources — Roman, German and Christian political thoughts. During the Middle Ages European legal concepts of the supreme power’s nature oscillated between hereditary and election as a foundation of the supreme power. Only on the edge of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era monarchy became strait hereditary. The idea of election did not disappear, remains the core ingridient of the image of power’s legitimacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4 (1)) ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Daniel Wojtucki

There are references reaching back to the Middle Ages, regarding the fear of the “undead” or “living dead” who would rise from their graves in a local cemetery to haunt and harm the community. The fear of the “undead” was extremely strong, and the entailing hysteria often affected entire communities. In the 16th to the 18th century, in Silesia, effective forms of coping with the harmful deceased were developed. Analysing the preserved source material, we are able to determine that the basic actions involved finding the grave of the “undead” in the cemetery, exhuming the corpse and destroying it. However, this did not always mean the total annihilation of the poor man’s corpse. The trial and execution of the corpse of a person suspected of the harmful activity against the living took place observing almost the same rules as in the case of the living. Apart from the authorities, who usually commissioned local jurors to handle the situation, opinions and advice were also sought from the clergy as well as gravediggers and executioners. The last were considered to be experts of sorts and were often called upon to see corpses of the suspected dead. In the analysed cases of posthumous magic (magia posthuma) in Silesia, we deal with two directions of handling the corpse accused of a harmful posthumous activity. In both cases, the main decision was made to remove such corpses from the cemetery’s area. Costs of the trial and execution of the “undead” were considerable. They included expenses incurred due to rather frequent court hearings at which sometimes dozens of witnesses were heard, payments to expert witnesses, payments to guards watching graves, costs of legal instructions, services of gravediggers who would dig up suspicious graves, and, finally, the remuneration of executioners and their people. In the second half of the 18th century, despite relevant decrees issued by supreme authorities, trials and executions of the dead were not completely abandoned.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-367
Author(s):  
Maryam Seyidbeyli

At the beginning of the VII century in the political life of the Near and Middle East, fundamental changes have taken place. The Arabs conquered a colossal territory, which included the lands of Iran, North Africa, North-West India, the Asian provinces of Byzantium, most of the former Roman Empire. In the conquered cities of the caliphate, observatories, madaris, libraries were built. At the end of VII century, the first scientific center, an academy, the House of Wisdom, was founded in Baghdad, in which scholars who spoke different languages were assembled. Here the translation and commentary activity were very developed, the main works of ancient thought, such as the writings of Aristotle, Ptolemy were published in the 9th century in the Arabic-speaking world. For two centuries from 750 to 950 years, the works of ancient authors on philosophy, mathematics, medicine, alchemy, and astronomy were translated into Arabic, which indicates the high scientific potential of that time in the East. At the same time, in the XII century, Ibn Rushd composed 38 commentaries on the works of Aristotle, the “Republic” of Plato, the treatise “On the Mind” of Alexander of Aphrodisias, which subsequently had an important influence on the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Thus, this period in the history of Eastern scientific thought is marked by high intellectual potential. To this day, historians of medieval Arabic literature face a sufficient number of difficulties, since the vast majority of manuscripts remain inaccessible to them. The works of many renowned Arab authors of the middle Ages are more than 1000 years old, so it seems obvious that the manuscripts of the vast majority of authors have not survived to this day. The researchers of the history of Azerbaijan and neighboring countries in the middle Ages, with all the variety of available sources on which they rely, still attract little factual material related to the Arabic-language works of the historical and scientific genre. Undoubtedly, a comprehensive study of the entire complex of information of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi on the history of science in Azerbaijan is of great importance.


1963 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 407
Author(s):  
William Gerber ◽  
John Herman Randall

Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

The preceding chapter dealt with the legend of the three rings, which highlighted the close family relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This relationship, which had been an obvious one up through the Middle Ages, began to be seen as less evident in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment (or perhaps, rather, the Enlightenments) took many different shapes across Europe. The present chapter is devoted to a paradigm shift, one which reflects a new historicization of European cultural life, at least in the approach to religious phenomena. In France, on which this chapter focuses, the historical transformation started earlier than elsewhere, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.


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