Since the 16th century, art historians have debated the methods of medieval artists. A frequent topic of discussion and one that has been invoked at times to distinguish the medieval artist from his early modern successor is the extent to which medieval art is based on the observation of nature. In this vein, much recent commentary has focused on selected works whose descriptiveness challenges ...

Examination Committee Chair: András Kovács (Nationalism Studies Program, CEU) Members: Gerhard Jaritz (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU) Gábor Buzási (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Zsuzsanna Urbach (Museum of Fine Arts) Béla Zsolt Szakács (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU) Carsten Wilke (Departments of History, Medieval Studies, and Nationalism Program, CEU) External readers: Hans-W...

Historians of medieval philosophy have always paid attention to the topic of intentionality. This is not surprising. For medieval authors, the analysis of the metaphysics and the mechanisms of human cognition became over time one of the most important instruments for approaching a bundle of basic philosophical and theological questions, such as the nature of universals, the mind-world relation,...

Medieval manuscripts or other written documents from that period contain valuable information about people, religion, and politics of the medieval period, making the study of medieval documents a necessary pre-requisite to gaining in-depth knowledge of medieval history. Although tool-less study of such documents is possible and has been ongoing for centuries, much subtle information remains loc...

biological and cultural. She sees clearly how the medieval world has been used by later writers, from the Renaissance onwards, with their own agendas for reform and their own reasons for writing the medieval world in particular ways. Thanks to Green's work, the medieval medical world is a far more clear, but also more varied, landscape than it was before; medical, social, and gender historians ...

Vermilion red, mercury sulphide (a-HgS), was one of the most important reds in art and its use as a pigment dates back to Antiquity. In medieval Europe, it could be mined as cinnabar, or produced as vermilion by heating mercury with sulphur. This work aims to study the production of synthetic vermilion as a medieval pigment and to confirm which was the source (mineral or artificial) of the reds...

Examination Committee Chair László Kontler (Department of History – CEU) Members Endre György Szőnyi – Supervisor (Department of Medieval Studies – Department of History – CEU) Marcell Sebők – Supervisor (Department of Medieval Studies – CEU) Pál Ács – external reader and external member (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Literary Studies) Mária Dobozy– external reader and external m...

Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and or...

Love and its transformative power have long been at the center of Islamic Sufism. For Sufi writers profane love, perceived as the love of worldly beloved, was the first step on the path toward the union with the divine. Farid al-Din ‘Attar (1145-1221) was one of the most significant authors to espouse and articulate profane love as a representation of both earthly and heavenly love. 'Attar’s us...