The localization of motor and sensory activities, the “rete mirabile” and the localization of the mental processes – the seat of the soul – in the ventricles or “cells” of the brain were ancient Greek concepts which were handed down to the middle ages. Although this last concept had not fully matured during classical antiquity its basic elements can be traced to Galen’s works. Even though there...

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...

Miracles have been a perennial source of interest to medieval historians, and in recent years the level of interest has only increased as scholars from a growing range of disciplines have discovered the value of miracle stories as a source for their studies. This diversity of interest is reflected in this volume (developed from a conference held in Cambridge in 2011), which includes historical,...

Lighting either natural or not in the european medieval architecture (roman period) is studied and simulated around a special and famous example. "Notre-Dame de Paris" cathedral and its polychromy are studied for many years and, today the remains of polychromy are very reduced. This prestigious monument is then a unique opportunity to study the complex relationships between light, paint and gil...

introducing three principal methods of determining the solar orbital eccentricity in the ancient and medieval astronomy (i.e., the method of seasons, of mid-signs, of three–points), the accuracy of the results obtained from each is being investigated. in doing so, two main goals have been targeted: (1) to determine the accuracy and the intrinsic limitation of each method with regard to their st...

editors for at least seven years. A valuable side-product of this concentrated editorial activity has been the stream of theses and articles produced by the team during the period of their labours. The editors properly distinguish their edition as "critical" because, as they point out, "the absence of any Trevisa holograph ... the loss of his latin copy-text, some unresolved cruces and ambiguit...

This article presents the Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF). The corpus is composed of texts taken from the two major Old French corpora, the Base de Français Médiéval and the Nouveau Corpus d'Amsterdam. This contribution describes some of the core principles of the annotation model, which is based on dependency grammar, as well as the annotation procedure and representation...

abū l-ḥasan alī ibn al-‘abbās al-majūsī ahvazi (? 930-994 ad), best known as haly abbas in the west, was a 10th century persian physician whose lifetime coincided with the flourishing of medical science in the near east, the islamic medicine golden age, an era extending from the 9th to the 12th centuries ad. haly abbas, in his extant book kāmil al-sinā‘ah al-tibbīyah (the perfect book of the ar...