The catastrophic impact of fishing pressure on species such as cod and herring is well documented. However, the antiquity of their intensive exploitation has not been established. Systematic catch statistics are only available for ca.100 years, but large-scale fishing industries existed in medieval Europe and the expansion of cod fishing from the fourteenth century (first in Iceland, then in Ne...

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...

Most medieval scholarship arises from an encounter with the surviving texts of the Middle Ages and the documents which convey them. The use of computers to store and analyse these texts has a surprisingly long history. As early as 1949, when the computer was still in its infancy, Roberto Busa began developing an electronic concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas the Index Thomisticus. Until ...

The project Script and Text in Time and Space will create a new foundation for working with medieval Danish texts by creating and deepening fundamental knowledge about the development of medieval script in Denmark as well as the dating and localization of relevant text bearing objects (manuscripts and other document types). The project is placed in the field of Digital Humanities, meaning that ...

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...

the field of medieval history has produced several hundred, if not thousands of volumes on kingship in the Middle Ages. Students of medieval studies are well acquainted with much of this literature, particularly that sparked by Ernst Kantorowicz' s historiographical game changer, The King's Two Bodies (1957). Katherine Lewis's innovative study of the monarchy and masculinity of Henry V (r.1413-...