Extant Sources Research Articles

The Black Death, Girl Power, and the Emergence of the European Marriage Pattern in England

This article critiques the debate over the extent to which labor shortages caused by the Black Death and subsequent epidemics empowered women economically, and whether this had significant implications for overall demographic behavior and long-term economic performance. Some historians have argued that after ca. 1350 women in the North Sea region were drawn into the land and labor markets to a far greater extent than women in other parts of Europe, and in particular into employment as single live-in servants, which led to a rise in the average age of women at first marriage and the proportion of women never marrying. This in turn led to the formation of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which is associated with fertility restriction and higher levels of household income. The evidence and arguments underpinning this viewpoint are critically evaluated for England, where by 1600 the EMP was certainly established. The extant sources do not enable us to measure the extent of women's financial gains after the Black Death, or to assess changes in their marital choices. There is no convincing evidence for any rise in the proportion of single female servants in the century after the Black Death or for the existence of the EMP before 1550. Young women did not increase their participation in the land market in order to construct a marriage fund. The article concludes by assessing the possible chronologies of England's transition to the EMP, and by suggesting new lines of enquiry about structural changes in women's work during the sixteenth century.

Musical Contacts Between the Polish and Jewish Communities and the Image of Jewish Culture in Nineteenth-Century Polish Popular Music

Enduring contacts between Polish and Jewish communities on Polish soil began to take shape around the turn of the thirteenth century, initiating a period of many centuries of mutual cultural and musical influence. Extant sources, although few and far between (normative documents, chronicles, journalistic accounts, commentaries from observers and scholars, iconography, sheet music, recorded music and films), enable us to follow the development of the mutual musical relations between the two national groups over time. Yet this article concentrates primarily on the state of those relations during the nineteenth century, limited to popular culture. Taking the works of Oskar Kolberg as an example, we will discuss the repertoire of the Jewish community at that time, as perceived and received by the Polish community. This will be followed by a presentation of Jewish music groups that played for Poles as well, and also of particularly popular Jewish musicians who were singled out by journalists at that time. The article also presents the way in which Jews and their musical culture were depicted by Polish journalists and portrayed in the musical expression of representatives of rural and urban communities.The article shows that the image of Jews and their musical culture among different strata of Polish society during the nineteenth century varied a great deal. The virtuosity of Jewish musicians aroused interest and admiration among the Polish intelligentsia and acquired a mythologised personification in the literary figure of Jankiel. Lower social strata, when taking up Jewish strands in their musical expression, were often reacting to conflicts of interest experienced in their contacts with Jews representing a pre-capitalist economy. Jews in ritual and everyday situations constituted important ritual symbols bringing in wealth, and their very presence in theatrical forms was perceived partly as evidence of the veracity of biblical events. References to Jewish culture in the musical expression of the Polish community were confined to the most common stereotypes, which attests to the superficiality of the contacts between the two communities. Against that background, the actual idiom of Jewish music was far better understood, imitated and copied.

Towards equitable AI in oncology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the threshold of revolutionizing clinical oncology, with considerable potential to improve early cancer detection and risk assessment, and to enable more accurate personalized treatment recommendations. However, a notable imbalance exists in the distribution of the benefits of AI, which disproportionately favour those living in specific geographical locations and in specific populations. In this Perspective, we discuss the need to foster the development of equitable AI tools that are both accurate in and accessible to a diverse range of patient populations, including those in low-income to middle-income countries. We also discuss some of the challenges and potential solutions in attaining equitable AI, including addressing the historically limited representation of diverse populations in existing clinical datasets and the use of inadequate clinical validation methods. Additionally, we focus on extant sources of inequity including the type of model approach (such as deep learning, and feature engineering-based methods), the implications of dataset curation strategies, the need for rigorous validation across a variety of populations and settings, and the risk of introducing contextual bias that comes with developing tools predominantly in high-income countries.

A third indeterminacy of labour power: Worker health investment and the indeterminacy of labour health.

This article identifies the health of the worker as a third source of labour power indeterminacy to be added to the indeterminacy of labour effort and the indeterminacy of labour mobility. The paper clearly differentiates worker health from effort as a distinct source of labour power indeterminacy-something that cannot be guaranteed and that varies for an individual over time. It considers the relationship between worker health as a new source of indeterminacy and the two extant sources of labour power indeterminacy, focussing on the way in which health moderates the relationship between effort and output. The paper also considers the way in which worker health investment moderates the indeterminacy of labour effort and labour mobility, independently of its impact on the health of the worker. The paper documents the potential value of worker health investment to the organisation and also considers the boundary conditions for investment in worker health.

Small translocations of endangered Gallinula galeata sandvicensis (Hawaiian Common Gallinule) may be sufficient to generate a viable reintroduced population

Abstract Where stable source populations of at-risk species exist, translocation may be a reasonable strategy for re-establishing extirpated populations. However, the success rates of such efforts are mixed, necessitating thorough preliminary investigation. Stochastic population modeling can be a useful method of assessing the potential success of translocations. Here, we report on the results of modeling translocation success for the Gallinula galeata sandvicensis or ‘alae ‘ula (Hawaiian Common Gallinule), an endangered waterbird endemic to the Hawaiian Islands. Using updated vital rates, we constructed a model simulating 3 existing extant (wild) source populations and a hypothetical recipient site on another island. We then projected the effects of 6 different translocation scenarios and sensitivity of the results to variation of three important demographic parameters on the probability of extinction (PE) of the reintroduced and donor populations. Larger translocations, of at least 30 birds, had low probability of extinction in the reintroduced population, but raised extinction risk of the smallest source population. Spacing out translocations in time (e.g., 10 birds translocated in total in 3 installments over 9 years), led to lower PE than translocating all individuals at once (i.e., bulk translocations) for both the source and reintroduced populations. Brood size and hatch-year juvenile survival had a disproportionate impact on reintroduced population viability. Importantly, the reported juvenile survival rate is very near the threshold for population failure. This suggests that post-introduction and subsequent management of wetlands, particularly predator control, could be critical to reintroduction success. We recommend that individuals should be translocated from multiple, genetically distinct subpopulations to reduce the possibility of inbreeding depression. Based on this analysis, the recipient wetland should be sufficiently large that it can support at least 25 pairs of gallinules. Based on recent estimates of population densities on O‘ahu, such a wetland would need to be between 3.75 and 74.6 ha.

Central Europe in the Fifteenth Century: Patterns of Conflict and Negotiation

Abstract The nine articles in this collection are the product of two workshops hosted at the University of Chicago in 2022 and 2023 in affiliation with the University of Vienna. They build on recent work that has called attention to the extraordinary political and religious diversity in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, and Central Europe more broadly. Pushing back against older historiography, in which this period was frequently overlooked or framed by uncritical use of such broad categories as the “state,” the “territory,” the “estates,” and the “feud,” this collection recognizes the polycentric nature of the fifteenth century's structures and institutions. Specifically, these articles return to the sources, especially documents of practice rather than normative texts, to open the door to a new understanding of conflicts and negotiations. They illuminate the patterns of conflict and negotiation evident in specific historical contexts by examining actors, networks, and practices of community building—as well as the processes through which conflicts emerged, evolved, and were negotiated and settled. Rather than relying on time-honored categories and meta-narratives, the contributors embrace the messiness of social and political relations and of the extant source material to shine new light on key themes in the fifteenth century's history.

The problem of winter navigation in the medieval Black Sea

Unlike the pre-industrial practice of winter navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, which has been the subject of numerous studies, winter seafaring on the medieval Black Sea has not previously been the subject of thorough scholarly investigation, not least because the available sources are relatively few and fairly circumstantial. Being aware of the limitations of the present survey, the author attempts to gather together and reinterpret several instances dating from the period of the Byzantine and Italian domination over the Black Sea, which can shed some light on the seamen's often complicated relation with the winter season. The majority of the extant sources date from the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, an era that witnessed substantial technological developments which contributed to the amelioration of winter navigation. This study chiefly aims to highlight the unresolved issues and address the challenges that such a topic of inquiry presents.

Przyczynek do rumuńsko – mołdawskich zainteresowań i kontaktów naukowych Józefa Andrzeja Gierowskiego

The article addresses the topic of the professional contacts between the renowned Polish histor-ian, Józef Andrzej Gierowski, and Romanian historians from academic institutions in Bucharest, Iasi and Chisinau. Following an analysis of the extant sources, it has been concluded that these contacts were the most intensive in the 1970s. They included participation in academic con-ferences, congresses and symposia, as well as private correspondence, e.g. with Veniamin Ciobanu from Iasi. In this particular case, the professional relationship evolved into a personal friendship. Józef Andrzej Gierowski’s recognisability among historians on a foreign academic forum attests to the fact that his achievements in research on the history of Central and Eastern Europe earned him considerable standing and respect among his peers.

Invisible Mountains? The Eastern and Southern Carpathians and their Environmental History (Fourteenth–Seventeenth Centuries)

The environmental history of the pre-modern Eastern and Southern Carpathians is largely understudied, primarily due to the scarcity of sources. Also, since these mountains divided Moldavia and Wallachia from Transylvania, historians have regarded them as a political frontier. This article shows the possibilities of studying the Carpathians’ past environment while demonstrating short and long-term anthropogenic changes from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It also offers a detailed overview of the extant sources that complement and confirm the results from palaeobotanical and dendrochronological studies. The Ottoman fiscal and commercial pressure on Moldavia and Wallachia as well as the emergence of Transylvania as an independent principality in the sixteenth century increased demand for grassland, fuelwood and timber, affecting the environment in the long run. The article shows that the Southern and Eastern Carpathians were well-integrated into the regional and superregional economy and the importance of their resources was not marginal.

«Сказание о хождении в Тибет пандита-хамбо-ламы Заяева из цонгольского рода» как источник по истории буддизма

The history of Buddhism and the initial period of its spread in Transbaikalia in the XVII-XVIII centuries are insufficiently studied due to the lack of archival materials and sources, while the surviving historical records provide different information about some events, such as the year of construction of the first Buddhist temple and the first sermon, the years of D.-D. Zayaev's life. The earliest extant sources are "Autobiography" and "Travel Notes" written by D.-D. Zayaev in 1768. They contain valuable information not only about the history of Buryat Buddhism, but also about the life and activities of D.-D. Zayaev (1711-1776), the first Buryat pandita Khambo-Lama, whose name is associated with the beginning of the spread of Buddhism among the Buryats and its institutionalization in the Russian Empire, but also with the description of his pilgrimage to Tibet. In this regard, in order to clarify some dates on the early history of Buryat Buddhism, texts related to him have been searched for and analyzed in the funds of the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs (CVRK) of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS. It was established that of the six sources found, the most informative work is "The Legend of the Tsongol Kin Pandita Khambo-Lama Zayaev's Journey to Tibet" in the Old Mongolian script, stored in the Mongolian collection of the CVRK. As a result of the study, it was revealed that this work is a late manuscript consisting of the "Travel Notes", the Biography of D.-D. Zayaev and of an anonymous manuscript containing a brief description of Buddhist sacred places and shrines in India, Nepal, Tibet and Mongolia, what has determined its structure consisting of 3 parts. It was found out that this manuscript contains information about the socio-economic situation of the population of Tibet and neighboring countries, as well as information about the history of Buddhism in Transbaikal region in the middle of the XVIII century. It testifies to Russia's geopolitical interests in this region of Inner Asia and the peoples living there, as the author reports, saying that it was written at the behest of Catherine II, who outlined a range of issues: "to describe what I’ve seen on my way to Tibet, the length of the road and distance, as well as about the customs and habits of people". The unique historical information preserved by the Buryat pilgrim and the Russian citizen D.-D. Zayaev is also relevant for conducting comparative studies of the phenomenon of modern pilgrimage that is becoming popular not only for believers but among ordinary lay population.

Elite Women in Pre-Mongol Chronicles

Abstract This paper examines Rus’ chronicles’ information about female political participation. Frequent omission of women’s given names in the chronicles is often interpreted as evidence that Rus princesses were less politically significant than Western and Byzantine elite women. An analysis of East Slavonic name usage offered below challenges this interpretation. The paper argues that the scarcity of information about women in the extant sources does not reflect the realities of pre-Mongol Rus, and that elite women in Rus were no less politically active than their counterparts in the rest of Europe.

Retouched and Remarkable: Female Athletes in La Culture Physique (1904) as Historical and Visual Documentation

In 1904, Edmond Desbonnet launched La Culture Physique, a magazine that presented itself as scientific and entertaining in its promotion of strength athletes. La Culture Physique prioritized photomechanical imagery to demonstrate the visual merits of the conditioned human body. A surprising number of women feature in nearly each month’s issue. The magazine represented these athletes using a number of editing techniques that made their bodies seem remarkably muscular and yet conventionally feminine. But the specific formal qualities of the publication—such as paper quality, printing technology, and size—helped mask the work that went into making its subjects appear real. La Culture Physique is one of very few extant sources wherein the muscularity of specific women is promoted alongside men’s during a period when gender disparity was deeply engrained in French society. La Culture Physique worked within and at times pushed against dominant French cultural values articulated around concepts of gender and belonging, using a set of tools that packaged its contents and form as works of art: as legible, desirable, and collectable. This paper demonstrates that these same tools also helped the publication maintain its veneer of authority. La Culture Physique has yet to be examined from an art historical perspective. This paper seeks to remedy this by arguing that La Culture Physique’s 1904 issues are a crucial source of historical and visual documentation for scholars interested in how women participated and were represented in early French physical culture.

Written Practices na Maia: A Newly Discovered Source of Old Hispanic Notation from Portugal

This study introduces a manuscript kept in the Arquivo da Torre do Tombo which represents the third source with Old Hispanic notation found in Portuguese territories, and the first recovered from a charter. This unique document is significant given the paucity of extant sources with this type of notation, and because few are securely dated whilst this one allows for a better chronological contextualisation. Likewise, this source is relevant because it is linked to a context of rural and mostly secular written production in a period of change towards monastic rule. Focusing on this peculiar charter, in the following pages we will introduce the most significant aspects of its materiality, shedding light on the world of scribes operating in northern Portugal and opening up new possibilities for a better understanding of the patchy scenario of diffusion and use of Old Hispanic notation.

The origin of nautical cartography: certitudes, doubts, and perplexities

ABSTRACT European geographical maps and nautical charts have distinct geneses and underwent separate evolutions. When scientific cartography was reborn in the beginning of the fifteenth century, following the translation and dissemination of Ptolemy’s Geography, the portolan chart had already been established as an effective navigational tool for over one hundred years. And while new geographical maps started to be constructed by the erudite, using the coordinates and prescriptions given by Ptolemy some thirteen centuries before, charts continued to be made by artisans, on the basis of navigational data collected by pilots. Despite being a unique achievement in the history of cartography, if not in the history of civilization, the creation of the medieval portolan chart was still poorly understood at the turn of the twentieth century. With the introduction of new research tools and a deeper study of the extant sources, we have now reached a situation where the initial state of perplexity concerning the very emergence of the portolan charts has given way to a broad consensus about some central questions. The purpose of this article is to appraise the present state of knowledge regarding the so-called ‘origins problem’.

Idealisation in Greek Geometry

Some philosophers hold that mathematics depends on idealising assumptions. While these thinkers typically emphasise the role of idealisation in set theory, Edmund Husserl argues that idealisation is constitutive of the early Greek geometry that is codified by Euclid. This paper takes up Husserl's idea by investigating three major developments of Greek geometry: Thalean analogical idealisation, Hippocratean dynamic idealisation, and Archimedean mechanical idealisation. I argue that these idealisations are not, as Husserl held, primarily a matter of ‘smoothing out’ sensory reality to produce ideal, ‘perfect’ figures. Rather, Greek geometry depends on assuming some falsehoods – equidistance from a source of illumination, a perfectly unwavering hand, or a machine that weights abstract objects – in order to make complex problems tractable. Although these idealisations were rarely discussed explicitly in antiquity, they can be systematically reconstructed from our extant sources.

A Distorted Lemma: Στεφάκης Ἀθηναῖος ἱερομόναχος and a False Biography of Nicholas of Methone

Abstract This paper aims at reconsidering traditional data available for the figure of the hieromonk Stephen the Athenian, purported to be the author of a biographical compilation about famous monks of Mt Athos and of a biography of the Byzantine theologian Nicholas of Methone, published by the Greek forger Costantinos Simonides at the end of the 19th century. The main source for Stephen the Athenian is provided by a lemma of a biographical encyclopedia written by the Phanariot scholar Demetrius Procopius of Moschoupolis (with the title Succincta eruditorum Graecorum superioris et praesentis saeculi recensio) and published in 1722 by Johann Albert Fabricius at the end of the 11th volume of his Bibliotheca Graeca. The employment of a philological analysis to the extant sources of “Stephen” shows that the figure is indeed to be considered the mere result of the distortion created by Simonides from a lexicographical lemma.

Penning the stakes: paper and the post/colonial music archive in Shanghai and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT The not-so-bygone worlds of music and colonialism in the twentieth century have yielded a wealth of scholarly ‘paper knowledge’ in the twenty-first of which to build off new archival-musicological work. This article takes a particular archiving direction by turning to paper itself – and pivots the postcolonial pen around the texts and textures of re-engaging colonial history in postcolonial music scholarship. I explore these writing stakes through my adopted narrative of ‘the post/colonial music archive’, as shaped by paper and paper’s sounding elements of tone and voice. Crisscrossing between the colonial moment and the postcolonial pen, I straddle this developing narrative of the archive, and the registers and inflections of extant source narration for what they can jointly vocalize about the music making of the Municipal Brass Band in 1930s treaty port Shanghai, and the Sino-British Club in postwar colonial Hong Kong – two ostensible musical worlds of ‘Britain in China’ in the twentieth century, here thrown into disarray by the post/colonial archive’s own inchoate, counter-tales. Ultimately, in this process, postcolonial music scholarship gains further traction and meaning as a multi-articulating inquiry – and a turn of mind that does not let colonial history and its persistent challenges for writing go askew.

Saxo Grammaticus's Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in Gesta Danorum

Saxo Grammaticus's Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in <i>Gesta Danorum</i>

Nizarorustu: A Textual Analysis of the Battle of Niså

Nizarorustu: A Textual Analysis of the Battle of Niså

Instances of Preaching in a Medieval Transylvanian Town. The Case of Cluj in the Century before the Reformation

Preaching was an essential component of the religious life during the Middle Ages, shaping the Christian identity and promoting the norms and decisions of the Church. In line with recent contributions that have drawn attention to Transylvanian expressions of medieval preaching, the present paper intends to examine its significance in the urban milieu prior to the Protestant Reformation, by exploring the case of Cluj (hu. Kolozsvár/ germ. Klausenburg). An important town of the region, it was inhabited by a mixed population of Hungarian- and German-speaking communities, whose pastoral care and access to the divine Word was facilitated by various religious institutions. Although the extant sources do not provide detailed accounts regarding specific sermons delivered in town, their actual contents and mise-en-scène, the present paper outlines the profile of the routine preaching activity, based on homiletic works that belonged to the secular and regular clergy of the town, as well as charters attesting their complementary or competing actions. The analysis reveals that homiletic concerns progressively increased from the beginning of the 15th century onwards, reaching a pinnacle in the decades prior to the adoption of the Reformation.