Biblische, mythische und fremde Frauen

In the texts and illustrations of medieval Mappae mundi, women are represented in three different roles: as biblical or Christian characters (such as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Lot's wife and female saints), as legendary or mythical figures (e.g. the Queen of Sheba, mermaids) and as 'other' creatures with a deviant behaviour from the European norm (e.g. Amazons). The principal goal of this study is to analyse the different strategies that were developed by male European observers to project a filtered image of woman in the selective medium of cartography from the tenth to the fifteenth century.

Vida i obra de Fra Bernat Hug de Rocabertí

Fra Bernat Hug de Rocabertí (c.1420-1485) was a prominent member of the Order of the Hospital in the Crown of Aragon in which to attain the dignity of Castilian of Amposta, the most important dignity in the Crown. This work is a historical biography of him, since he entered into the Order by the hand of his brotherin- law, fra Joan de Vilagut, until he became a confidant of King Joan II and his side took part in Catalan Civil War in the fifteenth century. In parallel, Rocabertí also devoted himself to poetry and wrote at least two pieces, the Estrampa, so far unpublished, here this work is published critically, and La glòria d’amor, a long narrative poem, which is a study of possible chronology. Moreover, also studied other people linked to Bernat Hug, like his brothers, authors of some interesting battle letters, also published for the first time, or their brothers-inlaw, among them Joan de Vilagut, also a poet, and Guillem Tinter, who had a poetic Exchange with Vilagut. The whole work is accompanied by transcription of an interesting collection of documents.

The domestication of water: water management in the ancient world and its prehistoric origins in the Jordan Valley

The ancient civilizations were dependent upon sophisticated systems of water management. The hydraulic engineering works found in ancient Angkor (ninth to thirteenth century AD), the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (thirteenth to fifteenth century AD), Byzantine Constantinople (fourth to sixth century AD) and Nabatean Petra (sixth century BC to AD 106) are particularly striking because each of these is in localities of the world that are once again facing a water crisis. Without water management, such ancient cities would never have emerged, nor would the urban communities and towns from which they developed. Indeed, the ‘domestication’ of water marked a key turning point in the cultural trajectory of each region of the world where state societies developed. This is illustrated by examining the prehistory of water management in the Jordan Valley, identifying the later Neolithic (approx. 8300–6500 years ago) as a key period when significant investment in water management occurred, laying the foundation for the development of the first urban communities of the Early Bronze Age.

The 'child of Babylon' and the problem of paternity in Medieval French Alexander romances

A study of the use of hybrid physical appearance both to signal and to explore the disputed paternity of Alexander the Great throughout its vernacular French tradition. The article compares the 'child of Babylon' portent and Alexander's son Alior in the twelfth-century French "Roman d'Alexandre" poem cycle, and a fifteenth-century prose adaptation of it.

Entre histoire et fiction: la représentation du règne d'Arthur dans le manuscrit enluminé du Brut en prose, Londres, Lambeth Palace 6 (c. 1480)

The manuscript London, Lambeth Palace 6, contains the Middle English prose Brut, a text which benefited from a great popularity throughout the fifteenth century. It was copied by an English scribe and richly illuminated by the Master of Edward IV and his assistants at Bruges around 1480. This article studies the representation and integration of the reign of Arthur in the historical framework of the Brut or Chronicles of England, including its fictional aspects: Arthur emerges as a historical character but also as a chivalric and mythical figure. The analysis covers the miniatures ranging from the plot leading to the conception of Arthur to the end of his reign (fols. 36-66). The textual and iconographic choices of the prose Bruts are highlighted by comparisons with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace’s Brut, and later prose rewritings in the Lancelot-Grail romance cycle, especially Merlin and its Vulgate Sequel. They show the continuous interest raised by Arthur in the aristocratic and royal circles of late fifteenth century England and the relationship be¬tween continental and insular historiographical, literary and artistic traditions.

Papal power and protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth-century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.

Family, locality and nationality: vernacular adaptations of the Expugnatio Hibernica from late medieval Ireland

This paper examines two late medieval abridgements of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica, one in Hiberno-English and one in Irish. The manuscripts in which these adaptations survive all date from the late fifteenth century and appear to bear witness to a sudden and pronounced interest in Gerald’s text. Drawing on evidence from the extant manuscripts, this paper explores the readerships of, and the nature of their interest in, these adaptations. A key conclusion is that the Expugnatio, which gives prominence to Gerald's own relatives, the Fitzgeralds, was valued as a family history by the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and their allies. The Earls were at the height of their power in the period in which these manuscripts were produced. Examination of this neglected evidence of the adaptation and readership of the Expugnatio in late medieval Ireland suggests that, for some medieval readers at least, the primary identities Gerald’s text expressed were familial and local rather than colonial or national.

The circulation of romances from England in late-medieval Ireland

The fifteenth century saw a striking upturn in the number of texts from foreign vernaculars that were translated into Irish. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak in terms of a ‘translation trend’ in Ireland during the mid to late fifteenth century. A notable feature of this trend is that a particularly high number of these Irish translations are of romances; contextual and textual evidence suggests that the original exemplars for many of these translated texts appear to have come from England, though not all of them were necessarily in English. Irish translations of eight romances have survived to the present day: Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; La Queste de Saint Graal; Fierabras; Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troie; William of Palerne; the Seven Sages of Rome; and Octavian. This paper addresses two aspects of these texts of particular relevance to romance scholars who do not work within the sphere of Celtic studies. Firstly, it argues that certain aspects of the dissemination and reception of romance in Ireland are quite distinctive. Manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the religious orders, particularly the Franciscans, seem to have played a role in the importation and translation of these narratives. Secondly, examination of the Irish versions of romance tends to bear out an observation made by Flower many years ago, but not pursued by subsequent scholars: ‘texts of an unusual kind were current in Ireland, and it may be that interesting discoveries are to be made here’. Certain narrative features of several of these Irish translations diverge from all the surviving versions of the relevant romance in other languages and may witness to a variant exemplar that has since been lost from its own linguistic corpus.

A obra de triangulis omnimodis libri quinque de Johann Müller Regiomontanus (1436 1476): uma contribuição para o desenvolvimento da trigonometria

Trigonometry, branch of mathematics related to the study of triangles, developed from practical needs, especially relating to astronomy, Surveying and Navigation. Johann Müller, the Regiomontanus (1436-1476) mathematician and astronomer of the fifteenth century played an important role in the development of this science. His work titled De Triangulis Omnimodis Libri Quinque written around 1464, and published posthumously in 1533, presents the first systematic exposure of European plane and spherical trigonometry, a treatment independent of astronomy. In this study we present a description, translation and analysis of some aspects of this important work in the history of trigonometry. Therefore, the translation was performed using a version of the book Regiomontanus on Triangles of Barnabas Hughes, 1967. In it you will find the original work in Latin and an English translation. For this study, we use for most of our translation in Portuguese, the English version, but some doubt utterance, statement and figures were made by the original Latin. In this work, we can see that trigonometry is considered as a branch of mathematics which is subordinated to geometry, that is, toward the study of triangles. Regiomontanus provides a large number of theorems as the original trigonometric formula for the area of a triangle. Use algebra to solve geometric problems and mainly shows the first practical theorem for the law of cosines in spherical trigonometry. Thus, this study shows some of the development of the trigonometry in the fifteenth century, especially with regard to concepts such as sine and cosine (sine reverse), the work discussed above, is of paramount importance for the research in the history of mathematics more specifically in the area of historical analysis and critique of literary sources or studying the work of a particular mathematician

O discurso do grotesco na mídia digital

This study presents our research on the discourse of the grotesque in digital media, specifically in two blogs. We rely on the theoretical-conceptual and methodological discourse analysis of the French School. We analyzed a set of posts in the following blogs: Eu Sou Ryca and Cleycianne, and we did it based on some propositions on the discourse of the grotesque by Mikhail Bakhtin (1999a), Muniz Sodré and Raquel Paiva (2002), Wolfgang Kayser (2003) and Mary Russo (2000). The expressions of the grotesque analyzed in the blogs Eu Sou Ryca and Cleycianne result predominantly in humorous effect, obtained by means of irony and parodization, which calls for ridicule and relegation, through a strong tension between the beautiful and the ugly, the socially acceptable and the aberration, the taste for the strange and the aesthetically striking. The grotesque appears initially as a significant feature of ornamental paintings found in Roman caves in the late fifteenth century, and today it can be seen permeating from sculptures, paintings, literary works, talk shows for television, videos hosted in cyberspace, specifically in the collective domain of weblogs. This work seeks to analyze how the discourse of the grotesque constitutes the humorous process in its insertion in cyberspace

A expressão da cultura nobiliárquica nos livros de viagens medievais

Pós-graduação em História - FCHS

Estudo diacrônico do uso das preposições: documentos latino-portugueses e português paulista moderno

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O regimento do corpo em Portugal no século XV

Pós-graduação em História - FCHS