This study proposes that performative rituals-that is, verbal and physical acts that reiterate prior uses-enabled medieval women and men to negotiate the dangers and difficulties of conception and childbirth. It analyzes the rituals implicated in charms, prayers, amulets, and prayer rolls and traces the circulation of such rituals within medieval English society. Manuscript records from the Ang...

Traditionally, the word "abracadabra" was encrypted onto amulets and other magical paraphernalia to help ward off evil. George Polya ([8], [9]) provided the cryptic form of this word shown in Figure 1 and asked how many ways abracadabra can be spelled out using this diagram. If we replace the diagram in Figure 1 with the grid shown in Figure 2 where letters in the original diagram are placed at...

When Shelley invoked the snake symbolically in this fashion he was hardly doing anything new. The snake's association with death, rebirth and the cycle of nature is practically universal. For the ancient Egyptians the snake was the life of the earth, and there are texts from as early as 2300 B.C. referring to the Quroborus or tail eating serpent, the symbol of the cyclical nature of the cosmos....

The present paper offers some suggestions as to the way in which female figurines produced during Christian period (IV-VII ce) Egypt should be interpreted. They seem have been predominantly used a votive object talismans, others words amulets endowed with sacred meaning, expressions of personal, individual piety through religious worship. Their symbolical form had its background tradition Egypt...

By the end of the eighteenth century, Palestine's once busy medieval trade in medicinal substances and high standard of medical services had reached their nadir. The main reason for this was the prolonged and continuous decline of the Ottoman empire, in conjunction with serious insanitary conditions, poverty and ignorance, as well as a lack of public health facilities. In the absence of suffici...

In 1347, a disease of unprecedented mortality reached Italian ports: the Bubonic Plague. few years, it spread across European continent, killing millions people and leaving trail destruction. Amid urgency this scenario, in early years epidemic, tractates were created on pestilence written by doctors professors from main centres medicine such as Paris Bologna; and, second moment, smaller faculti...

It is also profitable to wear about them gemmes and precious stones, as the The custom of wearing or holding an amulet during pregnancy and childbirth is probably as ancient as the need for comfort and reassurance. For reasons not entirely clear, precious and semi-precious stones throughout recorded time have been considered to possess protective virtues."'8 The medical benefits ascribed to eac...

INTRODUCTION IN 1948 one of us (V. M.-C.) rediscovered the forgotten site of a Danish medieval leprosy hospital, St. George's Hospital (Sankt J0rgens Spital) on a farm near the flourishing market town of Naestved in southwest Sjaelland (fig. 1). It is located about one mile outside the town on the left bank of the river Susaaen, from which it is separated by a small meadow, and the old road bet...