Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

International relations (IR) research has increasingly explored non-Eurocentric histories by analyzing, for example, different historical international systems, societies, and orders beyond Europe, as well as the agency of non-Western polities in constituting world politics (see Phillips and Sharman 2015; Hobson 2020; Spruyt 2020). Before the West contributes to this burgeoning literature. Zarakol offers a longue durée “account of the history of Eastern ‘international relations’” (p. 6), focusing on the interactions between Eurasian polities and the rise and fall of Eurasian world orders between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis starts with the rise of the Mongols and their conquests across Eurasia, resulting in the establishment of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. This historical event constituted the foundation for three successive Eurasian world orders to emerge: the Chinggisid world order of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the post-Chinggisid world order, consisting of the Timurid Empire (Iran and Central Asia) and the Ming Dynasty (China) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and the “global” post-Timurid world order of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which incorporated Eurasian and European polities.

In this chapter, hydrological variability and changes that occurred in the Carpathian Basin are discussed, on millennial, centennial and decadal scale, presenting the results of multiproxy sedimentary research and archaeological investigations. Major topics of the chapter concern water-level and hydroclimatic changes of lakes, wetlands and peat bogs in entire Middle Ages, analysed by using complex multiproxy sedimentary macro-/microfossil-based hydroclimate reconstructions. Based on archaeological evidence, the potential water-level changes of the largest lakes, wetlands and some detected grounwater-table changes are also presented, partly concerning the late early-medieval, but mainly regarding the high-and late-medieval period. Largest in quantity, potential river flood changes, great and extraordinary floods, flood-rich periods, mainly those occurred on the Danube and partly on other rivers, are discussed, detected predominantly in archaeological and partly in sedimentary evidence. Concluding results, a humid period of the sixth–ninth century is followed by a drier period that culminated in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are more complex, but generally wetter conditions were detected that became especially visible in the fifteenth century. The most complex, sedimentary and archaeological set of information, available for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may also pinpoint on multidecadal variations and high water/flood-rich/wetter periods, especially around the turn of the fourteenth–fifteenth and that of the fifteenth–sixteenth century, but on the Danube periods, potentially richer in great floods, were as well suggested for the early and the mid/late thirteenth centhuries that probably extended to the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, significant spatial differences were identified, especially in sedimentary evidence, in water-level and flood changes over the Middle Ages.

Acknowledgements for Illustrations, Introduction, 1. The fifth and sixth centuries - Reorganisation among the ruins, 2. The later sixth and seventh centuries - Christianity and commerce, 3. The later seventh and eight centuries - Princes and power, 4. The ninth and early tenth centuries - Holding out against the heathens, 5. The tenth century - Towns and trade, 6. The eleventh century - Social stress, 7. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries - Community and constraint, 8. The later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - Luxury in a cold climate, 9. The later fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries - Into a new age?, Notes, Index.

The emergence of environmental historiography, for the first time, organically combined the history of the environment and human history and began to pay attention to the close relationship between human social changes and environmental changes. This paper explores the impact of environmental history on education from the perspective of environmental history. This paper explores and analyzes the history of the educational environment from the perspective of environmental history and studies the laws and characteristics behind the evolution of the relationship between education and environment. This paper analyzes the influence of environmental history on the three views of college students under environmental education. Further analysis of educational environmental history is improved to improve the three views of college students and promote the social development of research significance. The study of educational environmental history is of great significance to enlarge the field of educational history research, enrich the content of educational history research, and perfect the discipline construction of educational history. At the same time, the environmental perspective and ecological consciousness of educational environmental history research are the embodiment and adherence of Marxist historical materialism and environmental view.

Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

Dedication Two enduring fields of study for Anthony Reid have been Islam in Southeast Asia — in both historical and contemporary contexts — and the diverse relationships which have long tied Southeast Asia with China. Both aspects found expression in Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce , as well as in a range of articles and other contributions to scholarship. It was through Tony's encouragement that I began exploring the nexus of these two phenomena, particularly as they existed in the fourteenth century. The following article expands on an idea which Tony first conceived and expounded upon in our conversations. This small piece is dedicated to a man of rare qualities — a scholar whose breadth of interests and extensive scholarly endeavours have done nothing to diminish a deep compassion and concern for others. Introduction Islam came to the polities and societies of Southeast Asia by sea, along the girdle of trade which extended from the Arab and Persian worlds through the ports of South Asia, to Southeast Asia and onwards to the southern extensions of the Chinese world in the East China Sea. Islamic influences extended into Southeast Asia from both ends of this trade route in different periods. In examining such influences, the extension of Islam into Southeast Asia prior to 1500 can be divided into three major stages: The period from the emergence of Islam until the C ōla invasions of Southeast Asia in the eleventh century; The end of the eleventh century until the thirteenth century; The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following the establishment of the first Islamic Southeast Asian polities in the thirteenth century. The present paper will focus attention on the early part of the third period, specifically the second half of the fourteenth century, in order to demonstrate how key were events of this period in the Islamization of Southeast Asia. There is little doubt that the earliest introduction of Islam to Southeast Asia was by Muslim merchants who travelled along the maritime routes which, for at least a millennium earlier, had connected the two ends of the Eurasian continent. The foundation of the urban centre of Baghd ād in 762 C.E. — with Basra as its outlet to the Arabian Sea — was a major impetus in the transformation of trade and the development of commerce between the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

Urban dwellings in Gothic Bavaria, by Konrad Bedal Most Bavarian cities took on their present form during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This is also the case of the houses, both the interior and exterior. The main changes include 1) the passage from rambling constructions to larger, more compact buildings ; 2) the replacement of one-room dwellings, either post and beam or masonry structures, by large multi-roomed half-timbered or stonework constructions ; 3) the general adoption of the Stube (a combined living and eating room), with wooden walls and ceiling, as the main room, situated usually on the first floor. If the profile of the old cities is characterised by tightly packed houses with steep roofs, the South-east also has gently pitched shake roofs. From the thirteenth century on, buildings may be oriented either with the gable or the gutter wall facing the street ; the latter predominate in the South, former in the North. Regensburg has a special place in Bavaria, preserving that largest number of residences and private towers north of the Alps. Two major zones are distinguishable in Bavaria as of the fourteenth century. Masonry construction, principally brick, prevails in the South and East (Upper and Lower Bavaria), whereas timber-frame construction spreads through the North and West (Franconia and Swabia) after 1250. The development and characteristics of wood-frame construction in Franconia is well known from the nearly 2000 preserved medieval buildings. The oldest are storied post and beam dwellings measuring 5 x 10 meters to 12 x 30 meters. Short post construction in upper stories is known from 1300, but only becomes common in Franconia between 1400 and 1500, although one finds corbelling on gables and gutter walls, even in the oldest buildings. Softwood is most common, but oak is also used for the exterior facing. The infilling is cob, ashlar or brick, or even plaster. Many city dwellings have a rear gallery, usually on the first floor, that gives access to the latrines, an amenity that finds favour in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Narrow wings are often added at the rear of the houses ; they border a narrow courtyard which is closed at the end by a fourth structure that is used as a barn or complementary dwelling. The ground floor serves as a stable, whereas the upper storey has sleeping rooms and Stuben. The interior courts are characteristic features of the homes of the wealthy in southern Germany. Although the majority of the courts with a regular layout date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, precursors cans be found in the fifteenth. Galleries are often in wood, but some masonry arcades rest on columns, especially south of the Danube and constitute the highpoint of domestic urban construction in Bavaria.

<i>For gode</i> in Chaucer and the <i>Gawain</i> Poet

Reviewed by: Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E. R. Truitt Jonathan Sawday E. R. Truitt. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. x + 255, 36 ill. Spot is a 160-lb, four-legged robot, designed (so its makers, Boston Dynamics, claim) “for indoor and outdoor operation . . . electrically powered and hydraulically actuated, Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain.” A video of Spot marching through a corporate of ce, gamboling up and down hill, cantering across a parking lot, and most memorably, being kicked by a technician in order to demonstrate the structure’s seemingly miraculous power of self-recuperation as it scrambles to remain upright, has generated thirteen million views on YouTube. Viewer comments in response to watching the uncanny mechanism being put through its paces are illuminating: “eerie . . . creepy . . . terrifying . . . cute . . . trippy.” Boston Dynamics, the manufacturers of Spot and its various [End Page 286] electromechanical cousins (including “Cheetah,” “BigDog,” and “Sand-Flea”), is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and has worked in tandem with the U.S. armed forces, the Sony Corporation, and DARPA—the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—to create (according to the company’s website) “the most advanced robots on earth.” Spot does not feature in E. V. Truitt’s intriguing Medieval Robots, but, if one wants to understand something of the lengthy intellectual and imaginative antecedents of Spot, which stretch back at least to the mythical Homeric “robots” created by the god Hephaestus in the Iliad or to the designs of the Alexandrian engineers of remote antiquity (Ktesibios, Hero of Alexandria), Truitt’s carefully researched book would be a good a place to start. But Spot, or rather, human responses to Spot, perhaps also illustrates a major dif culty in thinking about automata (whether in the past or the present), which Truitt’s careful scholarship does not entirely overcome. Divided into six chapters and an introduction, with a lavish set of color illustrations, Medieval Robots contributes to an increasingly densely populated eld that straddles both academic and more popular readerships, and that include works by (inter alia) Adelhid Voskuhl, Kevin LaGrandeur, Wendy Beth Hyman, Minsoo Kang, Gaby Wood, Tom Standage, and (full disclosure) the present reviewer. Perhaps under the pressure of our own cybernetic technologies, we have become increasingly fascinated by the history of the automaton. Truitt’s book is organized (in the author’s words) both “chronologically and thematically” as it traces the history of pre-Renaissance automata from their rst appearance in Greek and Arabic texts, their migration to the Latin West, their re nement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as products of Natura Artifax (“Nature as Artisan”), to their emergence as the ctional automata (oracular statues, speaking heads), powered by sorcery and magic, attributed to gures such as Gerbert of Aurillac, Roger Bacon, Robert Grossteste, or Albertus Magnus (8). In succeeding chapters, Truitt contemplates the function of automata to “guard or memorialize the dead” between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, before introducing us to the appearance of “mechanical marvels” in the princely European courts of the fourteenth and fteenth centuries (11, 37). She ends by turning to the eld of clockwork technology whose most famous manifestation was the magni cent Strasbourg Cathedral Clock, frequently described and discussed by the adherents of the “mechanical philosophy” in the seventeenth century (155). Truitt’s canvas is a broad one, in both spatial and chronological terms. Stylishly written, she navigates the complex history of automata with real skill, moving deftly between (for example) Baghdad and Byzantium, the Mongol Court of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or texts such [End Page 287] as Lydgate’s Troy Book and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The chapter dealing with the appearance of automata as textual objects in the Franco-phone world of Romans, chansons, and historiae in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is particularly thoughtful, and displays Truitt’s considerable reading, as well as her ability to digest both primary and secondary sources to produce a coherent and compelling narrative. As Truitt amply demonstrates, automata were deigned not to perform...

IN an article on this subject (NATURE, vol. xxi. p. 350) by Mr. F. V. Dickins, there is a mistake in dates. He says: “The ‘adzuma’ or eastern region of the main island was probably peopled chiefly by an Aino race, up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.” He hesitates to assign a higher antiquity to the Omori heaps (which were discovered by Prof. Morse) than the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and yet thinks it probable that they were the works of an Aino race. But the fact is that this part of the island was already inhabited by the present race, who had expelled the Ainos long before those periods. Consequently if, as he thinks, the heaps were the remains of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, they cannot be the works of the Ainos; if, on the other hand, they were the works of the Ainos, a much higher antiquity ought to he assigned to them. Such being the case, either one of his conclusions must be incorrect.

Excavations just inside the main West gate of the town, a plantation of probably the later twelfth century, confirm that parts of the town that were intensively occupied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were abandoned as the settlement shrank and diminished in status from the later fifteenth century onwards. The earliest buildings, founded on earth-fast posts appear to have been replaced by ones of sill-beam construction during possibly the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One structure was converted into an ironworking smithy in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, to which a corn-drying kiln was attached. Charred remains of cultivated plants are dominated by oats, most of which probably represents crop processing activity.

The appearance of the local centres of glazed ware production in the Palaiologean Period allowed the development of local schools of parade table ware. In the Crimean Peninsula, the local production centres were active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Genoese castle of Cembalo, there were glazed ware workshops from the second half of the fourteenth to the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Along with the manufacture of various forms of original pottery, the artisans of these workshops copied the ornamental compositions which were popular in the Mediterranean area. This article addresses the vessels attributed to the so-called “imitations” or “counterfeits”, which reproduced the samples of the Byzantine glazed pottery of the group of Elaborate Incised Ware, so widespread in the region. Among these vessels, there possibly were the pieces produced in the same workshop or by the same artisan: small handleless cups with small flaring ring-base, bowls, and tureens or dishes with the so-called “aslant” ring-base typical of the Byzantine pottery from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The finds in question testify to the popularity of the Byzantine Elaborate Incised Ware in the Northern Black Sea Area, and the Genoese castle of Cembalo in particular, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

106BOOK REVIIWS conversi. In this respect, Salvestrini finds that the monks followed the same economic strategies as lay landlords. Both tended in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century to let more and more of their farms by sharecropping contracts. In the past, scholars have spent almost too much time on the nature and extension of such contracts. Salvestrini, however, follows a more recent trend among Italian historians and looks at the entire environment of the monks and their farmers. Thus he notes the significant role that grazing, timber farming, and the sale of chestnuts played in the economic life of the monks and their tenants. Perhaps 43% of the lands surrounding the monastery were wooded. Tenants gathered firewood, burned charcoal, and gathered chestnuts from some portion of this land while the monks harvested lumber of varying grades from much of the rest of the area. The picture that emerges from this careful study is of a complex economic system very much connected to the social and economic life of the upper Arno Valley. In spite of the fruitful observations that: fill this book, the reader is left a bit flat. The monks themselves and their connections to this complex world are largely absent. The author suggests that many were Florentine,but we never get numbers. We learn little about when or where they would have been seen. This seems to be an economic administratiori without administrators. There is a short chapter on the servants and lay brothers and sisters of the monastery, but it is perhaps the least satisfactory of his chapters. He notes several times that some of the monks were popularly venerated in the district, but he never helps us to understand why. It is, as his title suggests, a study of a patrimony and not a monastery. DUANE OSHEIM University ofVirginia Medieval Bishops' Houses in England and Wales. By Michael Thompson. (Brookfield,Vermont: Ashgate. 1998. Pp. xvi,207. $59.95.) Michael Thompson, who has produced many studies of medieval casües, here offers a useful inquiry into the architecture of English and Welsh bishops' palaces. The term "palace" includes not only the bishops' main domiciles near their cathedrals, but also their London residences, that is, the "inns" or town houses where they served as ministers of the Crown, lived after the thirteenth century while attending parliament,and the places from which they carried out legal and social business in the capital. For the medieval scribe, a palace differed from a castle in that the former was intended for domestic purposes, a castle for defensive ones. Twenty bishops and twenty-two abbots maintained London town houses; most were situated west of the city walls along the Thames, for the convenience of travel. Rents and revenues from the bishops' manors,which at the Reformation numbered 640, supported the London residences. One hundred sixty-eight manor houses contained chapels, suggesting that the bishops occasionally lived there. Probably, the most famous surviving manor house is BOOK REVIEWS107 the vast and magnificent Knole near Sevenoaks in Kent which was bought and expanded by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456 and further extended by the Sackville family over four centuries.1 The 108 illustrations provide sketches of ground plans, photographs of architectural ruins, and aerial views. Appendix 1 surveys the palace at Canterbury shortly after Archbishop Laud's death;Appendix 2 gives a list of the palaces whose bishops were licensed to crenellate between 1200 and 1523; and Appendix 3 lists bishops' manor houses. After the Norman conquest, designs for bishops' palaces predictably derived from the continent, especially France. "Without exception they are two-storied blocks vaulted at the ground level and subdivided for a smaller room at each level" (p. 31). As the number of a bishop's officials and household servants increased in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a main hall was superseded by a larger one. The site of the palace vis-à-vis the cathedral varied from place to place. Some palaces, Durham being the best example, were castles, and most palaces in design and layout were indistinguishable from those of the laity of the same social level. In the later fourteenth century, as bishops pressed seigneurial rights on the peasantry, they...

This paper presents a critical review of the historiographically dominant theory stating that the upper layer of the Lithuanian nobility formed its independent power only around the middle of the fifteenth century. The extant sources shed little light on the role of the nobility in the political processes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A complex of sources, more fully reflecting the specifics of the country, appeared only after the arrival of writing in Lithuania at the end of the fourteenth century. It was only in this period that the place of the nobles in the system of government became evident. Therefore, it is possible to speak about a distorted perspective, suggested by the early records. The paper presents a definition of the nobility and an analysis of the origin, composition and structure of the Lithuanian ruling elite in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Consequently it is possible to speak about the prerequisites of the rule of this social group and the duality of the power of the grand duke and the nobility. Two principal tendencies of the development of the Lithuanian nobility in the fifteenth century – personal continuity and internal transformation (family structure) – are distinguished.

Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. By Annabel S. Brett. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 254.) The word ius, as anyone acquainted with medieval juristic or scholastic texts recognizes immediately, poses a baffling array of problems for those who wish to explicate its range of meanings. Annabel Brett has written an important and stimulating book that provides such an explication with respect to scholastic discourse of fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as writings of Spanish Neo-Scholastics of sixteenth century and Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth. In asuming this challenging undertaking, Brett has performed a signal service for scholars. Our knowledge of uses to which this term was put has been enriched substantially by her work. Brett's work is divisible into two large sections, each consisting of three chapters. In first half of her book, she addresses formation of scholastic discourse of individual rights. She begins by rebutting notion, advanced by historians like Richard Tuck, that equivalence between ius and dominium made by some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers amounts to the `origin' of modern subjective right in its most radical form . . . in which it is preeminently associated with liberty, with property, and with a certain idea of (p. 10).To be sure, some thirteenth-century writers, especially theologians associated with Franciscan Order, did make such an equation. St. Bonaventure and John Pecham, for instance, equated ius and dominium as part of a larger effort to understand freedom of will necessary to renounce goods of this world: Ius as much as dominium involved ability to claim in court (p. 18), and so violated spirit of humilitas required of every Friar Minor. But most medieval authors, Brett continues, did not make ius-*dominium equivalence a central part of their thought on freedom of individual. Brett brings this point home by reviewing works of Roman lawyers like Bartolus of Sassoferrato and authors of Summae confessorum of late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. She closes chapter by looking to writers of late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, such as Conrad Summenhart and John Mair, to conclude that analysis of the equivalence of dominium and ius . . . did not bequeath to scholastics of sixteenth century a language of ius as sovereignty or indifferent choice (p. 48). After refuting those who would see dominium-ius as origin of Western subjective rights talk, Brett turns her attention in next two chapters to role played by scholastic writers in shaping of Western rights vocabulary. The story she tells is compelling and important. She sees William of Ockham as playing a crucial role in development of this vocabulary, especially in philosophically rigorous definition he offered of ius as a potestas licita. She avoids pitfall of tracing Ockham's definition back to his nominalist and voluntarist roots, recognizing that practice of characterizing scholars' work as nominalist or realist and reading into such characterizations assumed commitments about right and justice has deeply distorted much older writing about history of subjective rights. Brett's intention is to take full account of the many intellectual strands that have come to shape early history of rights (p. 50). She thus considers contribution of such writers as Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif. She closes chapter with a discussion of Jean Gerson, who articulated a theory of rights as faculties or powers held or exercised in accord with right reason. Brett's treatment of Gerson is marred by her shortchanging possibility that Gerson was influenced by a tradition of rights discourse that extended back to twelfth-century decretists. …