Iambic verse in different literary traditions

This paper is devoted to study how the metrical verse like iambic tetrameter can be realized in different literary traditions. The formation of iambic verse in the Early Modern Time in Europe and its spread to the East of the Continent is investigated. The interaction between meter and language in different literary traditions during this process is considered and the nature of the meter’s implementation is determined. As a result of the transfer of iambic verse from one tradition to another, the highest degree of correspondence between meter and language is achieved. The utmost level of verse metricality was especially successfully embodied in the German and later also in the early Russian iambic poetry. However, the evolution and the further transfer of iamb on the East of the Continent significantly modifies the principles of interaction between metrical canon and language prosody.

Grain Prices in the Account Book of Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery (1570s – 1610s)

The article describes the feasibility of the study of prices fixed for bread (rye, oat, barley and wheat), one of the basic products consumed by Russia’s population in the early Modern Time according to materials containing in monastery vkladnye knigi of the XVI–XVII centuries. As a rule, all monasteries used to keep account books irrespective of how large the monastery brethren were, the time of monastery foundation and means of support they had. As a rule, contributions to monastries were priced, and it makes it possible to use such contribution records for a study of price history including grain prices. The study is based on the records containing in the account book of Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery for the period between 1559/60–1620s. (Archive of St.Petersburg History Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. Coll. 115. T. 1074). The found price data are comparable with grain prices published on the basis of account books of the Russian North monasteries and feature «bread» price changes in the region over the period of the crisis in the final third of the XVI century, Great Famine and the Time of Trouble at the turn of the XVII century.

Skola i skuggan: Privatundervisningen i Stockholm 1735

School in the shadow: Private education in Stockholm 1735. During the early eighteenth century, private education was a more significant sector of the educational market than was public education, regarding the number of students and teachers, the presence of female students and teachers, the social background of the students, and the introduction of a more diverse and modern curriculum. Hitherto, little has been known of the actual scope or general conditions of private education, which has been over-shadowed by studies of public education. The article maps private education through the Stockholm Church Consistory’s (Stockholms stads konsistorium) thorough inventory of private teachers in the capital of Sweden during 1734–36, providing information of both suppliers and consumers within the private sector of the educational market, as well as of the practice and functions of private education in early modern time.

Fictional Utopias, Dystopias, and the Problem of Evil

Fictional utopias of the early modern time, as an alternative and an opposite to classical social contract theories, and fictional dystopias of the 20th century, as the opposite of the democratic and liberal rule of law, remain a major reference or for our contemporary political debates when it comes to characterize warn against considerable dangers entailed in political options, regimes, opinions etc. Today, classical utopias are mostly overwhelmingly considered in a negative way, although there were initially designed to be a more comprehensive solution for the problem of political evil than the social contract theories. From the beginning, dystopias were designed as the greatest political evil ever. Yet, both are not only fictional, but also radically impossible to ever b realized, for reasons that have not been really analyzed yet. In the following, I enquire into these reasons.

Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. Trans. with an intro. by Dan Attrell and David Porreca. Based on the Latin edition by David Pingree. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xii, 372 pp.

Ordinary readers would welcome this new translation as one of many publications rendering a medieval Latin into modern English. All those efforts are certainly most welcome and necessary to maintain the scholarly and pragmatic-didactic approach to Medieval Studies. However, the Picatrix represents a unique magical treatise which every European pre-modern magician consulted and which enjoyed greatest respect for its universal relevance. Many contributors to the edited volume Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. by Albrecht Classen (2018) refer to the Picatrix, acknowledging it as a most important source for magic throughout the entire pre-modern world.