Although the connection between head and stomach and hence the condition known as "gastric headache" was well known to the ancients, it has received little attention since the early 20th century. Herein, we review the teachings of the medieval Persian physicians about the gastric headache along with the related signs, symptoms, types and causes. The medieval Persian scholars adopted the main id...

Medieval analyses of molecular propositions include many non-truthfunctional connectives in addition to the standard modern binary connectives (conjunction, disjunction, and conditional). Two types of non-truthfunctional molecular propositions considered by a number of 13thand 14th-century authors are temporal and local propositions, which combine atomic propositions with ‘while’ and ‘where’. D...

The aim of the present paper has been to explore the medieval evidence on miraculous healings of paralysis and to confront it with modern medical knowledge. Paralysis has been selected as a model for such a study and St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) as a model of a saintly healer. Analyzed were the primary sources and modern literature. Paralysis was found to be among the most frequent disea...

Popular texts typically assert that guilds of craftsmen `̀ monopolized’ ’ markets in medieval England. Norman Cantor’s Medieval Reader declares `̀ craft guilds’ . . . main purpose and activity was narrow regulation of industrial productivity in order to restrain competition’ ’ (Cantor 1994, p. 278). Douglass North’s Structure and Change in Economic History asserts `̀ . . . guilds organized to prot...

The treatment of medieval texts is a particular challenge for parsers. I compare how two dependency parsers, one graph-based, the other transition-based, perform on Old French, facing some typical problems of medieval texts: graphical variation, relatively free word order, and syntactic variation of several parameters over a diachronic period of about 300 years. Both parsers were trained and ev...

This article argues that balm, or balsam, was, by the late medieval period, believed to be a panacea, capable of healing wounds and illnesses, and also preventing putrefaction. Natural history and pharmacological texts on balm from the ancient and late antique periods emphasized specific qualities of balm, especially its heat; these were condensed and repeated in medieval encyclopedias. The rar...

Pliny the Elder recorded that Phoenician sailors came ashore and, not finding any local materials suitable for supporting their cooking pots above the sandy shore, used lumps of trona (natural soda or sodium carbonate) that formed part of their ship’s cargo. As the trona was heated in the fire it combined with the sand to give a material that flowed. This story may not be entirely accurate but ...

The presented work is led in the framework of a general collaboration between three academic labs, industrial partners and Cultural institutions (Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Louvre museum). Such a pluridisciplinary work always in progress at Ecole Centrale Paris deals with 3D digitization, simulation, rapid prototyping, virtual restoration applied on a french medieval sculpture. The main pu...

This paper contributes to the emerging ‘historic turn’ in organizational analysis identified by Booth & Rowlinson (2006) by developing an historicised account of Knowledge-Intensive Organizations (KIOs). In a way parallel to McGrath’s (2005) study of early medieval Irish monastic communities as KIOs, we provide a study of Bletchley Park (BP), the WW2 codebreaking centre. In particular, we argue...