and necromancy; and magic as entertainment. Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in her section on medical magic. Jolly explains that this was an especially "fuzzy" area. Medieval medicine embraced both a material and spiritual understanding of illness in which physical and religious factors played a part. Within this context, it is often difficult to distinguish magical medi...

The paper considers some Medieval sources about imagined or actually studied automata, to make a contribution to the reconstruction of the cultural landscape of a period that, from the technological point of view, is commonly regarded as less interesting than others. It will be shown that the idea of an automatic device or system, capable of performing not necessarily simple tasks, of measuring...

The paper deals with the historical development of Rasasastra in Medieval period. Knowledge of Rasa has been in existence from the time immemorial. Exploration of natural resources for the benefit of human beings is the object of this therapy. It is a medical science recognized during vedic periods for the betterment of even Devas. Medieval period can be treated as a golden age for the developm...

A vast economic history literature suggests that medieval institutions supporting contract enforcement were necessary for impersonal exchange to emerge. Yet this literature cannot account for the bill of exchange, an important financial instrument that had positive legal standing in both the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds but remained relegated to personal networks only in the former. Th...

Periods of widespread warmth or cold are identified by positive or negative deviations that are synchronous across a number of temperature-sensitive proxy records drawn from the Northern Hemisphere. The most significant and longest duration feature during the last 1200 years is the geographical extent of warmth in the middle to late 20th century. Positive anomalies during 890 to 1170 and negati...

In this paper I focus on the nature of diagnosis in the Czech written medical sources. In the first part, the character of medieval medicine is described. Further, I deal with contemporary definitions of disease and some important aspects of diagnostic; finally, I adduce the signs of diseases described in examined sources: primarily the manuscript texts created in the first half of the 15th cen...

science and culture separate and then to show ways in which the two were "integrated", "linked", "fused", "blended", "synthesized", "amalgamated". A consequence is that naturalistic explanations are treated less as gendered products than as tappable sources serving medieval constructions of gender. For some readers, the primary material Cadden presents will have considerably greater interest th...

The first Jewish medical graduates at the University of Padua qualified in the fifteenth century. Indeed, Padua was the only medical school in Europe for most of the medieval period where Jewish students could study freely. Though Jewish students came to Padua from many parts of Europe the main geographical sources of its Jewish students were the Venetian lands. However, the virtual Padua monop...

The MEDIEVAL project aims to leverage today’s Internet with the necessary fabric to provide optimized video services in a mobile wireless world. It is expected that video traffic will surpass Peer-to-Peer (P2P) in volume in the coming years, and thus novel mechanisms and techniques need to be provided to better suit its unique requirements. This article describes the key functional elements of ...

First of all, one point seems in order regarding the title: this article is not intended to be comprehensive in its coverage. Rather, it focuses on a deliberately and highly selected body of studies on the division of labor ranging from ancient Greeks to WWII as represented by those reproduced in Sun (2005a), with particular attention paid to what I believe has been relatively unknown even amon...