Illustrating the Ostracized : the Depiction of Villain, Soldier and Jew in the Passional of Abbess Cunegund

The first treatise of the so‑called Passional of Abbess Cunegund was composed by the Dominican lector Colda of Colditz at the abbess’ behest in 1312, and illustrated by an unknown artist. In this study, images of three specific character‑types are analysed: villain, soldier and Jew, who not only act out their part in the treatises’ account of Christ’s Passion, but also appear to provide a window onto certain aspects of contemporary, medieval Czech society. By examining the iconography of the illustrations it is shown how, through characterisation, caricature and dress, the viewer is led to adopt an attitude either of disgust towards the malefactors, or a certain sympathy towards a chosen few.

The specifics of Croatian folk mythology

The article is devoted to the areal distribution of Croatian mythological characters, taking into account the general picture of folk mythology in the space of Southern Slavia. The author regards demonological images specific to the Adriatic, southern and northern parts of Croatia (including the Istrian peninsula), northwestern Croatia (often representing a single whole with the neighboring Slovenian area), Slavonia and Croats living in the environment of a foreign-cultural and foreign-speaking majority (Drava’s Croats in Hungary and Burgenland’s Croats in Austria and Hungary). The need to analyze character types considering the neighboring South Slavic regions (Bosnian, Serbian, Slovenian) is caused by the common system of distribution of cultural dialects and the corresponding terminology of folk culture in the whole South Slavic territory. As far as the geolinguistic study of folk mythology is concerned, and more broadly – cultural dialects, the ethnolinguist’s attention naturally falls on borrowings in the names of demonological characters: Italian, German, Hungarian, etc.

The Chapters on Women in Two Adab Encyclopaedias from the Mamluk Period

This paper is a study of the chapters devoted to women in general and to female figures (female singers) in two encyclopaedic adab works of the Mamluk period, al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab and al-Ibshīhī’s al-Mustaṭraf fī kulli fann al-mustaẓraf. We will analyse the content of these chapters, their focus, the materials from which they are constructed and their objectives within the ensemble of the works. We will also look at the moral and intellectual qualities that configure the portrayal of women in these books, in common with others of adab prose. The final aim of all this is to obtain results to add to those that already exist, with a view to defining the female character types in this literature, the topics that make women visible in it and their relationship with male characters in the stories.

Zweifel, Skeptizismus und das Dilemma der Wahrheitsfindung in der höfischen Epik des Mittelalters

Doubt, Scepticism, and the Dilemma of Establishing the Truth in Middle High German Epic. An Outline of a Research Field The article reflects on the specific uses of doubt as a productive method of ascertaining truth in Middle High German Epic (12th to 14th centuries). Intra-tex­tual debates on the correct interpretation of alternative claims to truth and the presentation of opposing points of view trigger a cognitive and emotional effect of doubt which strongly resonates in metaphors, images and rhetorical figures. Additionally, doubt inspires poetic (and narrative) techniques, motifs and character types which extant research has failed to recognise as interconnected. The purpose of this article is to introduce a research field that is concerned with the analysis of courtly scepticism in secular traditions of literature.

Az országos tájkarakter-elemzés kezdetei Magyarországon

Landscape character assessment is built on the Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe, which considers landscape as an area perceived by man, formed by the interactions of man and nature. According to the exemplary British practice of landscape character assessment, the particular combination and the unique composition of landscape elements have to be taken into account rather than the specific features independently. Its primary concern is that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Landscape character assessment results in the identification of landscape character types and landscape character areas. Identifying the character types and character areas happens at more hierarchy level (national, regional, micro-regional and local level). Defining the boundaries, the characteristics, and the main factors contributing to the formation of the character should be a value-free description of the given state. The following stage of the assessment is the landscape evaluation. Making a judgement on the actual state involves locals in a participatory process, and it is the preparatory phase of formulating the landscape quality objectives. In Hungary, the first landscape character assessment, covering the entire area of the country, was carried out between 2017 and 2021. Four micro-regional case studies complemented the nationwide research. The present paper gives a brief overview of the methods used at the national level, including the feedback from the micro-regional assessment, and summarises the results.

Kingly Intertwinement

Chapter 12 discusses final section of the Statesman (308b10-311c10), where Plato applies the paradigm of weaving to elucidate the statesman’s task. This chapter examines in detail what this ‘royal intertwining’ consists in. Plato distinguishes carefully between the tasks assigned to education and those assigned to statesmanship: although these tasks are so tightly connected as to make education an art even more precious than the precious arts of rhetoric, strategy, and the judiciary, they differ nonetheless in nature and scope. In addition to supervising education and the precious subordinate arts, statesmanship is crucially involved in choosing the officeholders involved in these forms of expertise. ‘The intertwining that belongs to kingship’ (Plt. 306a1: basilikē sumplokē), which the Visitor seeks to unravel in the concluding pages of the dialogue, amounts to giving prescriptions to these officeholders with the aim of maintaining concord and friendship between the two antagonistic character types in the city.

‘A patient act of adjustment’: Subjectivisation, adjectives and Jane Austen

Previous scholarship on Jane Austen has often commented on the moral overtones of her lexical choices; more specifically, the fact that “incorrect” lexical innovations and fashionable words (i.e. new usages) tend to be deployed as part of the idiolect of foolish, gullible or morally reprehensible characters. By contrast, ethically sound characters normally move within the limits of established (‘old’) usages and the “correct” Standard English repertoire. Taking the historical linguistic concept of subjectivisation as starting point, this case-study explores the use of two adjectives ( lovely and nice) in Austen’s novels. The article (a) demonstrates that a straightforward socio-moral classification of ‘old’ and ‘new’ word-senses in Austen’s fiction is not fully adequate and (b) advocates, in line with recent scholarship, a more nuanced approach to the study of her fictional vocabulary, where old and new senses of a word (in this case, lovely and nice) move across the idiolect of different character-types for ironic, character- and plot-building purposes.

Facial width-to-height (fWHR) revisited

To investigate peoples' trait attribution biases, we asked participants to generate faces of "bad guys" and "good guys" using three methods: free drawings, photo-editing, and feature assembly. In referring to research linking facial width (relative to height, fWHR) with aggressive and dominant personality traits in males, we compared fWHR displayed in the generated portraits between the two character types . We found that participants modelled emotional expressions (in particular, expression of anger and fear/friendliness), but not fWHR per se, to portray character trait. When emotional expressions were statistically controlled for, no difference in fWHR between "bad guys" and "good guys" remained. We conclude that emotion overgeneralization is a strong confound in research on fWHR.