This nicely produced volume offers both more and less than its title promises. Begun as a dissertation on a group of late medieval herbals in Latin and French, including Wellcome 626, it studies the iconography of plants in a wide variety of manuscripts, from the Johnson papyrus, Wellcome 5753, written in Greek around AD 400, via Arabic manuscripts to Latin manuscripts of the fifteenth century ...

To the Editor: A scientifi c debate with public health implications wages: What caused the medieval European plague epidemics known as Black Death? Recent articles note inconsistencies between a rat fl ea– borne pandemic of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic plague) and the documented characteristics of Black Death (1, among others). Ayyadurai et al. (2) acknowledge that a rat f...

agricultural training centres (atcs) promote crop and livestock development by providing extension information to farmers and serving as models of improved crop and livestock husbandry practices. although potato farmers in nyandarua county were trained on potato production technologies, their average yield was ≤16 tonnes per hectare compared to the national potential of 30 tonnes. this study th...

A book on demography without statistics, graphs or charts: is this possible? Peter Biller has masterfully shown not only that it is possible, but that a textual approach to demographic questions in Latin Christendom before the Black Death (especially around 1300) enormously enriches our understanding of demographic trends in a period which lacks systematic statistical data, in which statistical...

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 ...

AVNER GIL'ADI, Children of Islam: concepts of childhood in medieval Muslim society, St Antony's/Macmillan Series, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan in association with St Antony's College, 1992, pp. xii, 176, £40.00 (0-333-55598-8). This volume is a collection of eight studies by the author on various aspects of the history of childhood in medieval Islamic society. A useful introduction surveys...

In the squares of many Italian cities, unnoticed by most passersby, incisions carved in stone reproduce the dimensions of the measurements that were employed locally until 1861, when the nation endorsed the metric system. By gathering the evidence pertaining to these forms of display, this essay hopes to bring them back into historical consciousness. The story that follows is a rich one, for th...

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...