Mensuration in Early Medieval Barcelona

Slaves and Warriors in Early Medieval

The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the ...

Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet

What's Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?

The medical writings of early medieval western Europe c. 700 – c. 1000 have often been derided for their disorganised appearance, poor Latin, nebulous conceptual framework, admixtures of magic and folklore, and general lack of those positive features that historians attribute to ancient or later medieval medicine. This paper attempts to rescue the period from its negative image. It examines a n...

Signa mortifera: death and prognostication in early medieval monastic medicine.

Walter Pohl - Conceptions on Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies

Recently, the problem of ethnicity has been one of the most widely discussed topics in early medieval studies. From the historian's perspective, the discussion on ethnicity owes its decisive impulse to Reinhard Wenskus (1961; his approach was elaborated in the monographs by Herwig Wolfram in 1979 and Walter Pohl in 1988). Traditional research has taken the meaning of the terms "people" or "trib...