Agency of Littoral Society: Reconsidering Medieval Swahili Port Towns with Written Evidence

Reconsidering Written Language

A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16 th and 17 th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the “quest for a universal language,” a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific method. From a modern perspective, one of the many surprising aspects of these efforts is that they relied on a diverse array of memorization techniques as foun...

Reconsidering Language Identification for Written Language Resources

The task of identifying the language in which a given document (ranging from a sentence to thousands of pages) is written has been relatively well studied over several decades. Automated approaches to written language identification are used widely throughout research and industrial contexts, over both oral and written source materials. Despite this widespread acceptance, a review of previous r...

Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants— including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plan...

Jews, medicine, and medieval society

reasons for the rise and decline of the spas in the first place. Neither does he adequately explore why Carratraca became one of the most important spas of the country, or why another one-Tolox-followed a very different developmental pattern, in that it began to take off at the beginning of the present century when the others were in definite decline. Moreover, although the book makes it clear ...

Fast and feast. Food in medieval society