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Before the introduction of modern chemical nomenclature, polysulfides were known as ‘theion hudor’ (divine water), ‘hepar sulphuris’ (liver of sulfur), ‘dia sulphuris’ (synonymous to hepar sulphuris), and ‘liver of sulfur’. These compounds were used for industrial and medicinal purposes already in the ancient world and are still at the cutting edge of modern research in the areas of energy storage, environmental chemistry, and geochemistry. In the Graeco-Egyptian school of alchemy, polysulfides played an important role for coloring of metals with golden patina which was viewed as a step to their transmutation to gold. During the Middle Ages, sulfur was purified by first reacting it with carbonates of alkali metals to form polysulfides and then decomposing the polysulfides with acid. Phlogiston theory, which represented the prevailing understanding of the redox reactions in the XVIII century, was used to explain transformations involving polysulfides. Due to their ability to react quantitatively with oxygen, polysulfides played an important role in determining the composition of the atmosphere at the end of the phlogiston era.

What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called \"disabled.\" Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes. This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.

The article explores the relationship between knowledge and power in the field of education in China. The article adopts the research method of documentary analysis to discourse analyse the classical literature in Chinese history. The article selects the Zhou Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, and the Song Dynasty as representatives of ancient China and the period of the Cultural Revolution as representatives of modern China. The goal of the article is to propose a structurally similar research perspective on Chinese education that can account for the co-temporal states between different periods in time. By initially applying this perspective to the study of Chinese education, its structure of knowledge and power shows a pattern of subordination of education to politics, which is internalised by the educated individuals through discipline in educational activities.

What do we mean when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages? This volume brings together dynamic scholars working on the subject in medieval literature and history, who use the latest approaches from the field to address this central question. Contributors discuss such standard medieval texts as the Arthurian Legend, The Canterbury Tales and Old Norse Sagas, providing an accessible entry point to the field of medieval disability studies to medievalists. The essays explore a wide variety of disabilities, including the more traditionally accepted classifications of blindness and deafness, as well as perceived disabilities such as madness, pregnancy and age. Adopting a ground-breaking new approach to the study of disability in the medieval period, this provocative book will interest medievalists and scholars of disability throughout history.

This book offers a range of views on spolia and appropriation in art and architecture from fourth-century Rome to the late twentieth century. Using case studies from different historical moments and cultures, contributors test the limits of spolia as a critical category and seek to define its specific character in relation to other forms of artistic appropriation. Several authors explore the ethical issues raised by spoliation and their implications for the evaluation and interpretation of new work made with spolia. The contemporary fascination with spolia is part of a larger cultural preoccupation with reuse, recycling, appropriation and re-presentation in the Western world. All of these practices speak to a desire to make use of pre-existing artifacts (objects, images, expressions) for contemporary purposes. Several essays in this volume focus on the distinction between spolia and other forms of reused objects. While some authors prefer to elide such distinctions, others insist that spolia entail some form of taking, often violent, and a diminution of the source from which they are removed. The book opens with an essay by the scholar most responsible for the popularity of spolia studies in the later twentieth century, Arnold Esch, whose seminal article 'Spolien' was published in 1969. Subsequent essays treat late Roman antiquity, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Middle Ages, medieval and modern attitudes to spolia in Southern Asia, the Italian Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, modern America, and contemporary architecture and visual culture.

This is a study of ekphrasis, the art of making listeners and readers 'see' in their imagination through words alone, as taught in ancient rhetorical schools and as used by Greek writers of the Imperial period (2nd-6th centuries CE). The author places the practice of ekphrasis within its cultural context, emphasizing the importance of the visual imagination in ancient responses to rhetoric, poetry and historiography. By linking the theoretical writings on ekphrasis with ancient theories of imagination, emotion and language, she brings out the persuasive and emotive function of vivid language in the literature of the period. This study also addresses the contrast between the ancient and the modern definitions of the term ekphrasis, underlining the different concepts of language, literature and reader response that distinguish the ancient from the modern approach. In order to explain the ancient understanding of ekphrasis and its place within the larger system of rhetorical training, the study includes a full analysis of the ancient technical sources (rhetorical handbooks, commentaries) which aims to make these accessible to non-specialists. The concluding chapter moves away from rhetorical theory to consider the problems and challenges involved in 'turning listeners into spectators' with a particular focus on the role of ekphrasis within ancient fiction. Attention is also paid to texts that lie at the intersection of the modern and ancient definitions of ekphrasis, such as Philostratos' Imagines and the many ekphraseis of buildings and monuments to be found in Late Antique literature.

Guy Halsall relates warfare to many aspects of medieval life, economy, society and politics.This book recovers its distinctiveness, looking at warfare in a rounded context in the British Isles and Western Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the Carolingian Empire. Examining the raising and organization of early medieval armies and looks at the conduct of campaigns, the survey also includes a study of the equipment of warriors and the horrific experience of battle as well as an analysis of medieval fortifications and siege warfare. Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West uses historical and archaeological evidence in a rigorous and sophisticated fashion. It stresses regional variations but also places Anglo-Saxon England in the mainstream of the military developments in this era, and in the process, provides an outstanding resource for students of all levels.

The text of British Library Egerton MS 1982, with an essay on the cosmographical ideas of Mandeville's day by E. G. R. Taylor. The main pagination of this and the following volume (Second Series 102) is continuous. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1953.

While research on the crusades tends increasingly to bifurcate into study of the crusade idea and the crusading expeditions, and study of the Frankish states the crusaders established in the Levant, Benjamin Kedar confirms-through the articles reproduced in this latest selection of his articles-his adherence to the school that endeavours to deal with both branches of research. Of the ten studies that deal with the crusading expeditions, one examines the maps that might have been available to the First Crusaders and their Muslim opponents, another discusses in detail the Jerusalem massacre of July 1099 and its place in Western historiography down to our days, a third sheds light on the largely neglected doings of the Fourth Crusaders who decided to sail to Acre rather than to Constantinople, while a fourth exposes unknown features of the well-known sculpture of the returning crusader-most probably Count Hugh I of Vaudémont- who is embracing his wife. Of the ten studies that deal with the Frankish Levant, one proposes a hypothesis on the composition stages of William of Tyre's chronicle, another provides new evidence on the Latin hermits who chose to live in the Frankish states, a third examines the catalogue of the library of the cathedral of Nazareth, while a fourth calls attention to convergences of Eastern Christians, Muslims and Franks in sacred spaces and offers a typology of such events, and a fifth proposes a methodology for the identification of trans-cultural borrowing in the Frankish Levant. Preface; Franks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1047(with Reuven Amitai); A Note on Jerusalem's Bīmārīstan and Jerusalem's Hospital; L'appel de Clermont vu de Jérusalem; The Forcible Baptisms of 1096: History and Historiography; Crusade Historians and the Massacres of 1096; Emicho of Flonheim and the Apocalyptic Motif in the 1096 Massacres: Between Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse Dupront; Some Reflections on Maps, Crusading and Logistics; The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades; Did Muslim Survivors of the 1099 Massacre of Jerusalem Settle in Damascus? The True Origins of the al-Salihiyya Suburb (with Daniella Talmon-Heller); An Early Muslim Reaction to the First Crusade?; Again: Genoa's Golden Inscription and King Baldwin I's Privilege of 1104; The Voyages of Giuàn-Ovadiah in Syria and Iraq and the Enigma of his Conversion; The Significance of a Twelfth-Century Sculptural Group: Le Retour du Croisé (with Nurith Kenaan-Kedar); Some New Light on the Composition Process of William of Tyre's Historia ; The Fourth Crusade's Second Front; The Outer Walls of Frankish Jaffa; Civitas and Castellum in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: Contemporary Frankish Perceptions; The Latin Hermits of the Frankish Levant Revisited; On Books and Hermits in Nazareth’s Short Twelfth Century; The Eastern Christians in the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem: An Overview; Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim and Frankish Worshippers: The Case of Saydnaya and the Knights Templar; Problems in the Study of Trans-Cultural Borrowing in the FrankishLevant (with Cyril Aslanov); Index. Benjamin Z. Kedar is an emeritus professor of history at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

Dreambooks in Byzantium offers for the first time in English translation and with commentary six of the seven extant Byzantine oneirocritica, or manuals on the interpretation of dreams. (The seventh, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet ibn Sereim was published previously by the author.) Dreams permeated all aspects of Byzantine culture, from religion to literature to everyday life, while the interpretation of the future through dreams was done by professionals (emperors had their own) or through oneirocritica. Dreambooks were written and attributed to famous patriarchs, biblical personages, and emperors, to fictitious writers and interpreters, or were copied and published anonymously. Two types of dreambooks were produced: short prose or verse manuals, with the dreams usually listed alphabetically by symbol; and long treatises with subject matter arranged according to topics and with elaborate dream theory. The manuals were meant for a popular audience, mainly readers of the middle and lower classes; their content deals with concerns like family, sickness and health, poverty and wealth, treachery by friends, fear of authorities, punishment and honor-concerns, in other words, that pertain to the individual dreamer, not to the state or a cult. The dreambook writers drew upon various sources in Classical and Islamic literature, oral and written Byzantine materials, and, perhaps, their own oneirocritic practices. Much of the source-material was pagan in origin and, therefore, needed to be reworked into a Christianized context, with many interpretations given a Christian coloring. For each dreambook the author provides a commentary focusing on analyses of the interpretations assigned to each dream-symbol; historical, social, and cultural discussions of the dreams and interpretations; linguistic, lexical, and grammatical issues; and cross-references with Achmet, Artemidorus, and the other Bzyantine dreambooks. There are also introductory chapters on Byzantine dream interpreta