‘Leger est aprendre mes fort est arendre’: wool, debt, and the dispersal of Pipewell Abbey (1280-1330)

It has long been known that English Cistercian monasteries often sold their wool in advance to foreign merchants in the late thirteenth century. The abbey of Pipewell in Northamptonshire features in a number of such contracts with Cahorsin merchants. This paper looks again at these contracts in the context of over 200 other such agreements found in the governmental records. Why did Pipewell descend into penury over this fifty year period? This case study demonstrates that the promise of ready cash for their most valuable commodity led such abbots to make ambitious agreements – taking on yet more debt to service existing creditors – that would lead to their eventual bankruptcy.

Early roman-period Nazareth and the sisters of Nazareth convent

First discovered by accident in 1884 – and thereafter informally investigated by workmen, nuns and clergy, for several decades – the archaeological site at the Sisters of Nazareth convent in central Nazareth has remained unpublished and largely unknown to scholarship. However, work by the Nazareth Archaeological Project in 2006–10 showed that this site offers a full and important stratified sequence from ancient Nazareth, including well-preserved Early Roman-period and later features. These include a partially rock-cut structure, here re-evaluated and interpreted on the basis of both earlier and newly recorded data as a first-century ad domestic building – perhaps a ‘courtyard house’ – the first surface-built domestic structure of this date from Nazareth to be published, and the best preserved. The site was subsequently used in the Roman period for burial, suggesting settlement contraction or settlement shift.

Televised Whorf: cognitive restructuring in advanced foreign language learners as a function of audio-visual media exposure

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events, e.g., “two nuns walk to a house,”, and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English), on the other hand, are more prone to direct attention to the ongoingness of motion events, which is reflected both in their event descriptions, e.g., “two nuns are walking.”, and in their non-verbal similarity judgements. This study examines to what extent native speakers of Swedish (n = 82) with English as a foreign language (FL) restructure their categorisation of goal-oriented motion as a function of their English proficiency and experience with the English language (e.g., exposure, learning). Seventeen monolingual native English speakers from the United Kingdom (UK) were engaged for comparison purposes. Data on motion event cognition were collected through a memory-based triads matching task, in which a target scene with an intermediate degree of endpoint orientation was matched with two alternative scenes with low and high degrees of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that the preference among the Swedish speakers of L2 English to base their similarity judgements on ongoingness rather than event endpoints was correlated with their use of English in their everyday lives, such that those who often watched television in English approximated the ongoingness preference of the English native speakers. These findings suggest that event cognition patterns may be restructured through the exposure to FL audio-visual media. The results thus add to the emerging picture that learning a new language entails learning new ways of observing and reasoning about reality.

L'"Inferno monacale" di Arcangela Tarabotti

The "inside story" on convent life by a political, protofeminist Venetian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652), which had never been published before, but circulated broadly, together with a lengthy essay by Francesca Medioli on unwilling nuns, Venice during the XVIIth century, alphabetisation, reading for women, textual strategies.