Late Thirteenth Century Research Articles

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie Kent Timothy B. Noone Bonnie Kent. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 270. Cloth, $44.95. In this admirably written study, Bonnie Kent presents researchers on medieval philosophy with a survey of moral psychology during the crucial period between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the summit of Duns Scotus’s career in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Although there have been many studies of particular issues in particular thinkers during this period and a generous presentation of texts with commentary by the great Dom Lottin (Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 7 vols. Louvain, 1942–1954), there has not been any lengthy study to date devoted to the period of the late thirteenth century that focused on moral psychology and the will. Simply in drawing attention to this period in the history of moral psychology, Professor Kent has made a tremendous contribution to the study of medieval philosophy, since she has rendered accessible authors that are more often than not neglected and overlooked. Kent, in fact, attempts something more: she places her study in the framework of the general historiography of Scholastic thought and the more recent interest in medieval ethics prompted by those championing virtue ethics. In order to highlight the distinguishing features of recent studies on medieval ethical thought, Kent reviews the established interpretation of philosophy in the thirteenth century. In the opening chapter, entitled “Heroes and Histories,” she points out the features common to the scholarly approaches of Gilson, Van Steenberghen, and even Copleston: (1) a prominent role is assigned to schools and movements, especially Aristotelianism and Augustinianism; (2) metaphysics and epistemology are the primary objects of study along with the relation between philosophy and theology; and (3) the Thomistic point of view is the organizing principle for telling the drama of the period. The last feature means that the history of the period is fundamentally told as streams of influence leading to Aquinas, followed by the golden age of Aquinas and his contemporaries and succeeded by a gradual decline after Aquinas, leading to the demise of Scholastic thought. In the context of the established historiography, accordingly, the approach of Alasdair MacIntyre represents a restatement of the common view, but one more radical in form. Instead of being merely different schools or movements, Augustinianism and Aristotelianism are different worldviews with their own paradigmatic conceptions of rationality, each of which is subsumed into the higher synthesis of Thomism. According to MacIntyre, the passage to modernity is begun by Scotus whose innovative theses in moral psychology and ethics are considered revolutionary. Kent’s stated aim is to challenge the “standard story” found in Gilson and others as well as its revised version in MacIntyre’s writings by providing a detailed study of the [End Page 462] period just prior to Scotus and establishing precisely how revolutionary Scotus’s teachings were when compared to his immediate predecessors. She accomplishes this aim masterfully in a series of chapters dedicated to the sources of medieval thought and elements of moral psychology. Beginning with late thirteenth-century thinkers’ attitude toward Aristotle in her second chapter, she shows in considerable detail that there is little evidence for any serious anti-Aristotelianism in the vast majority of late thirteenth-century authors. Indeed, the posture of these thinkers was to separate Aristotle from radical Aristotelianism and Thomism in order to claim that ancient wisdom was on the side of Christian ethics and psychology. The only exception that Kent finds to this widespread attitude is in the writings of Peter John Olivi whose hostility to pagan philosophy is clearly evident. The focus in the next chapter is on ethical voluntarism, a position characterized by the endorsement of the superiority of will over reason, the claim that human freedom resides primarily in the faculty of the will, that the will can act contrary to reason’s judgment, and that the will, not the intellect, commands the lower powers of the soul. In detailing the advent of...

The Earliest Bill in Eyre: 1259

Abstract The aim of this article is to provide evidence for the earliest known use of the term ‘billa’. Previous investigations of the plea rolls, the primary sources, have yielded no use of the term prior to the late thirteenth century. However, a detailed study of one mid thirteenth-century eyre roll has shown the term in use and also provides a clue to the mesne process involved when proceeding by plaint (‘bill’).

The Reverend Richard Lamm on Trial for Heresy

In Christian theology, there is the story of Saint Martin of Tours. In the late thirteenth century, late one night outside an ancient city, Saint Martin of Tours was riding his horse down this ancient byway. Right outside the city gates, he comes across a cold and starving beggar. In an act of charity which got him sainted a couple hundred years later, he took his cloak and cut it in half. He took half of his dinner and gave it to the cold and starving beggar. Now, Bertold Brecht, in one of his plays, raises this question: What if instead of one cold and starving beggar, there were 50, or 60, or 100? What is the ethical choice now? What does the ethical person do? It is for asking these hard, but important, questions that you charge me, here and now, in 2007 A.D., with heresy. You charge me with heresy for changing "Love thy neighbor," to "Love thy nearest neighbor/ My answer to you is that this is the new bio-spiritual ethics. This is the new ethical reality. I wish with all my heart it were not, but my mind and soul tell me (tragically) that it is the new reality. Charity must begin at home. The Bible states (Timothy 5:8), "If any provide not for his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.1" Painfully, but inevitably, mankind must fit itself into its ecosys tem. At some point?we can argue endlessly when that takes place?but at some point, infinite growth in a finite world comes to an end. At that point?whenever it happens?a new ethics must be formu lated.

Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought by Annabel S. Brett

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. …

Auldhill, Portencross

Auldhill, on the Ayrshire coast of the Firth of Clyde, is a site with a very long history. Excavations were conducted there for a total of ten weeks in 1987, 1988 and 1989, and seven main phases were recognized, as follows:I the timber-framed fort occupied in the first millennium B.c.;II the iron age or early historic dun;III the timber castle of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries;IV the stone castle of the late thirteenth century;V the hall of the end of the thirteenth or early fourteenth century;VI the remodelled hall; andVII dismantlement and stone robbing of the site from the mid-fourteenth century. Significant finds from the prehistoric deposits include an antler cheek piece and cannel coal jewellery. The main objective of the excavations was to understand the use of the site as a lordly residence in the medieval period. An architectural analysis is offered of Portencross Castle, the fourteenth-century successor of Auldhill in an appendix.

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century.Bonnie Kent

<i>Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century.</i>Bonnie Kent

Een spookverhaal van Bate

Henry Bate is the author of the Speculum divinorum et quorundam naturalium, a philosophical encyclopedia in which he expounds his Platonic-Aristotelian world-view. A few years after the completion of his Speculum, he added a story about a spirit of a robber. This story (an English summary of which is to be found in our edition of Speculum, XX-XXIII) is a rich source for the cultural history of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. It sheds light on several aspects of religious life, such as the relation between clergy and laity, the unity of popular and official religion, and especially the belief in the reality of spirits. An analysis of Bate's story refutes Lecouteux's claim that spirits were banished by Christian authors into the realm of the imagination.

The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture. "Bedside manners in the Middle Ages".

“Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages” Michael R. McVaugh (bio) The title of this paper is a deliberate echo of another one, the title of an article published just fifty years ago by Henry Sigerist in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Northwestern University Medical School. There Sigerist translated and discussed a short Latin text, attributed to the late-thirteenth-century physician Arnald of Villanova, that set out some of the ways in which physicians needed to behave toward their patients. Sigerist saw no real reason to doubt this attribution, although I will try to explain why it seems to me more likely to be a picture of the medical world as it was in the twelfth century, and even earlier, than of the late thirteenth. What clearly intrigued him about the treatise was its opening section, where the author explained to his readers certain precautions they should take when examining urine specimens brought to them for diagnosis—it was accepted that a patient’s condition could be determined by studying the color, sediment, and so forth of his urine. 1 These precautions will introduce [End Page 201] us to the question of the interaction between healers and patients in the Middle Ages, and of how this changed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The description may seem to confirm all our worst preconceptions about medieval medicine—most people are convinced that it must have been ludicrous, bordering closely on farce—but we need to have a sense of the healer-patient encounter that it reveals. In the fifty years since Sigerist called attention to this text we have considerably expanded our understanding of the social and institutional setting of medieval medical and surgical practice, and that understanding should help to give the text some historical perspective. Actually, Sigerist’s title is quite misleading, at least as regards the part of the text that most interested him, because these precautions do not show the physician studying the urine at the bedside; he only encounters the patient by proxy. The author takes it for granted that the physician is being brought the urine by an intermediary, a messenger from the patient. You need to determine at the beginning, the text explains, whether the urine is human, or of another animal, or another fluid altogether—stewed thistles, perhaps; stare hard at the person who brings it to you, and if she blushes furiously, accuse her immediately of trying to trick you. If you think that she may be trying to fob you off with white wine, pour out a little of it in such a way that some gets on your finger; then stop and pretend to blow your nose with the same hand, sniffing the finger as you do so, and if you smell wine, tell her you know that she’s trying to mislead you. If it really is urine that you have been given, and you can’t learn anything from it about the patient, says our text, say that he has an obstruction in the liver. [The messenger] may say: “No, sir, on the contrary he has pains in the head, or in the legs or in other organs.” You must say that this comes from the liver or from the stomach; and particularly use the word, obstruction, because they do not understand what it means, and it helps greatly that a term is not understood by the people. 2 And so on: the author offers many such nuggets of advice, all very much of a piece, and all immediately suggesting to a modern reader that medieval medical practice was no better than an elaborate charade without any intellectual content at all. Yet on the contrary, this physician-patient exchange over a urine-flask has something serious to tell us about medical relationships in the Middle Ages. If there is any one stock image of the medieval physician in the public mind today, it is one showing him gazing deeply into a urine-flask, and the same thing was true in the Middle Ages: medieval manuscripts show [End Page 202] that scene over and over again. And whereas for us the scene is good for a condescending giggle or...

Book Reviews : Virtues of the Will: the transformation of ethics in the late thirteenth century, by Bonnie Kent. Catholic University of America Press, 1995. viii + 270 pp. hb. £35.50

Book Reviews : Virtues of the Will: the transformation of ethics in the late thirteenth century, by Bonnie Kent. Catholic University of America Press, 1995. viii + 270 pp. hb. £35.50

Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858 (review)

Reviews 177 ionable because it is not durable (in more senses than one). Ha Jin is a good writer and demonstrates the talent to become a much better one. His tar may be rising and should be watched. Jack J. Gerson University ofToronto Jack Gerson's attachment to Chinese studies began in 1938 where itprogressed through three-and-a-halfdegrees, and seven sojourns in China between 1948 and 1990 as administrator, scholar and teacher; he is still going at age 75. Linda Cooke Johnson. Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 10741858 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. ix, 440 pp. Hardcover $49.50, isbn 0-8047-2294-3. This book grew out of the author's doctoral dissertation, in which she speculated on the relationship oftwo Jiangnan cities, Suzhou and Shanghai, cities that had clearly reversed their historical roles by the twentieth century. In her dissertation, Johnson examined the decline ofSuzhou, a prefectural city ofconsiderable historical importance, and the rise ofthe modest "fishing village" ofShanghai. The book's primary focus, however, is Shanghai from the eleventh century to the midnineteenth century, a time frame broad enough to establish historical continuity and to make "the enduring, traditional components ofChinese society at Shanghai more conspicuous" (p. 13). This book is also an attempt to move away from the established discourse, which divides Shanghai's history starting from 1843, the year in which it was opened as a treaty port and exposed to Western influences. The author's expressed hope is to dispel the "myths attaching to Shanghai," particularly the idea that "fhe impact ofthe West was primarily responsible for propelling China into early modernization, and its reverse interpretation, that the West failed in this mission, and Shanghai became part ofthe 'other China'" (p. 5). This, ofcourse, is a reference to the standard and highly respected works on Shanghai by John King Fairbank, Rhoads Murphey, and Marie Claire Bergère, among others. The author softens this critique by agreeing that the "diachronic© 1997 by University frameworks" between her own study and that ofMurpheyor Bergère, who examined post-treaty-port Shanghai, may account for the apparent differences in interpretation . To Johnson, the social and economic structure and institutions in place before 1843 remained traditional and effective, with change occurring within 178 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 the parameters set by patterns oflate imperial urban development comparable to what happened in other cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou, or Hankou as elucidated by recent scholarship. This volume, therefore, represents an attempt to fill in the gaps in fhe evergrowing body of English-language studies on what we know of the historical development ofpre-treaty-port Shanghai. To fhat end it is a descriptive analysis, drawn from recent Chinese scholarship on urbanization that focuses on the geographical rise ofShanghai and the surrounding region, as well as the older gazetteer (difangzhi) sources, rich in detail about local history and economy. It appropriately begins with a discussion of the geomorphology of fhe Yangzi delta and the gradual formation ofthe Shanghai region, due mosdy to natural forces but also to man-made intervention through the building ofretaining dikes and seawalls , notably the Hanhai dike constructed around a.d. 713 to protect the new agricultural land. Profiting from the pioneering works ofMark Elvin and G. William Skinner on the medieval revolution in marketing structure and urbanization, this study illuminates the various factors responsible for Shanghai's evolution and advancement in the traditional urban hierarchy. The village of Hudu that predated the town of Shanghai is identifiable in records from the Tang dynasty, but it was not until the eleventh century that Shanghai was officially recognized as a market town, and subsequendy, after approximately one hundred years of growth, as a shi or market city. This was pardy due to the geological shift that widened the Huangpu River, giving Shanghai better access to the sea, a shift that also resulted in the commercial decline ofthe port city ofQinglong. By the late thirteenth century, with the bureau in Qinglong permanendy closed, official commercial activities were to be regulated by the Office of Overseas Trade that opened in Shanghai. But Ming dynasty governmental policies, including die relocation ofdie national capital...

Decline and Fall of Virtue Ethics - Bonnie Kent: Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. 263. $44.95.)

Decline and Fall of Virtue Ethics - Bonnie Kent: Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. 263. $44.95.) - Volume 59 Issue 4

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie Kent

BOOK REVIEWS 473 the "character traits" of God and the pattern of salvation. When asked from outside of faith whether the notion of divine action in history makes sense, or why these narratives are to be accorded the status of divine self-revelation, Placher suggests that we heed the wisdom of the past, and balance our assertions of trust in God with a frank recognition that our explanations will never match the firmness of our convictions. He makes the same point with respect to all efforts to explain the presence of evil in creation. If God has revealed himself, there is no question more decisive than how human beings ought to respond in word and action. Placher does the theologians grappling with this question service by demonstrating the existence of a premodern ecumenical consensus based on the character of divine transcendence . The premoderns teach, he argues, that theology must begin and end by trusting a self-revealing deity who remains beyond comprehension, and forego any hopes of explaining its assertions to the satisfaction of outsiders . The implication, of course, is that all such efforts inevitably confuse God with more familiar realities and ensnare God in systems of human thought. The danger is real, and Placher has shown the sorry results. However, I wonder whether the danger stems not solely from a desire to domesticate the transcendent, but also from the jarring claim of Christianity's universal significance. After all, it was the identification of the God of Jesus Christ with the one, true God that first led theologians to enter into dialogue with philosophy. Placher does not make this task his own, and thereby limits the effectiveness of his otherwise excellent book. St. Mary College Leavenworth, Kansas }AMES F. KEATING Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. By BONNIE KENT. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii+ 270. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-81320829 -7. Today, the person enquiring in a bookstore about where to find scientific information on the origins of human behavior would most likely be directed to one of two sections. First, she may be sent to the shelves labeled "evolutionary psychology." There an interested researcher may choose among titles such as Robert Frank's Passions within Reason (1988) or Matt Ridley's more recent The Origins of Virtue (1996). Authors writing in the area of evolutionary psychology proceed on the assumption that, since physical matter in the form 474 BOOK REVIEWS of genes controls our emotional and motivational tendencies, biology not only provides the most reliable explanations for what human beings do but also constitutes the principal explanatory conception behind moral systems. If, however, our enquirer finds the thought repugnant that material causes should provide the exclusive explanation of such apparently distinctive features of the human person as love, honesty, fidelity, and gratitude in the same way that genes are said, with due scientific evidence, both to produce a person's general physiognomy and to determine such features as hair color and cholesterol level, she can move to the sections marked anthropology and sociology. There the one interested in learning what makes human beings tick will encounter a massive collection of organized data on the practices ofhomo sapiens, accompanied by carefully annotated theories that explain human actions as the product of social construction. Can cultural diversity account for the inescapably present desire for a life beyond this life that Christian theology tells us arises in every member of the race? If not, then our enquirer needs to search elsewhere in order to attain complete information about human behavior. Virtues ofthe Will also reports on the efforts of significant scholars to give an account of the causes at work in the comportment of human beings everywhere . But it is highly unlikely that the potential buyer interested in studying its subject matter will discover a volume like this in sections of most bookstores labeled human behavior. Bonnie Kent examines medieval authors who, despite the spectrum of opinions that their Scholastic debates generated, shared the view that specifically human actions flow from a spiritual principle, which informs every human person. In other words, these authors assume, in the...

Was Florence a perfectly competitive market? Transactional evidence from the Renaissance

To the extent that any location can be considered the birthplace of mercantile capitalism, northern Italy, and especially Florence, is that place. Double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, partnerships with branches, holding companies, bills-of-exchange, and international banking in general all of these accoutrements of modern business and finance were invented in northern Italy in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 No one today, contra Weber, seriously questions that late-Medieval and early-Renaissance Italian merchants had passionately pursued but rationally disciplined acquisitive motives.2 These facts, with the absence of big business and big government,3 have led many to infer that northern Renaissance Italian economies must have been close to Adam Smith's dream a world of unfettered individualist entrepreneurs, rationally wheeling and dealing in laissez-faire markets.4 But was Florence a perfectly competitive market? Or even a close facsimile?

The Sawley map and other world maps in twelfth‐century England

The misnamed ‘Henry of Mainz’ world map of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century comes from Sawley Abbey, Yorkshire, but was probably drawn either at Durham Cathedral Priory or from a Durham exemplar. In this note, the map is set into the context of recent work on the manuscript volume containing the map and on the text it accompanies. The evidence for other world maps in twelfth‐ and early thirteenth‐century England is examined, and it is shown how the words mappa mundi in a booklist do not necessarily mean a map.

The Evolution of Servile Peasants in Hungary and in Catalonia: A comparison

Both Catalonia and Hungary experienced major peasant uprisings at the end of the Middle Ages. The Hungarian Revolt of 1514 was suppressed by the nobility while the Catalan peasants succeeded in throwing off servitude in 1486. Despite this fundamental difference, there are certain ideological similarities between Hungary and Catalonia, particularly with regard to the ideological justifications for servitude and attacks against it. The background to this ideological conflict goes back to the late thirteenth century when historical myths of foundation were elaborated in both countries based on the French Pseudo-Turpin cycle. In Catalonia, the Carolingian era provided a suitable background to explaining the privileges of nobles and the subordination of the peasantry based on courage and cowardice aganist the Muslim enemy. In Hungary, a similar test of bravery placed in early times explained why nobles dominated over the peasantry, but the historical context was now the supposed Hunnish ancestors of the Magyars. In both instances literary forms were taken over by historians and jurists to explain and justify servitude. We also have some idea from the late Middle Ages of how these assertations were answered by advocates of the rebellious peasantry.

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century.

This study aims to provide a more balanced account of how Christian thinkers, including Aquinas, transformed Aristotle's psychology and ethics. It traces late 13th-century debate about the freedom of the will, moral weakness and other issues that helped change the course of Western ethics.

Book Review: Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century

Book Review: Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century

Two Unusual Benign Tumours in Skulls from the Ossuary at Křtiny (Czech Republic)

Among 554 skulls of adult individuals from the ossuary at K𝔯̌tiny, Moravia (late thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuryAD), three (0.54 per cent) showed evidence of malignant tumours and two others (0.36 per cent) had changes suggestive of unusual benign tumours, which are described in the present article. The calvarium of a 20–25-year-old female has two osteoplastic overgrowths in the region of the left tuber parietale and in the left lateral part of the frontal bone. A macroscopic section showed a porotic structure with regularily arranged trabeculae. This was confirmed by radiographic examination, which detected two similar smaller shadows, and by histology and scanning electron microscopy, which showed the non-lamellar, unevenly calcified structure of these curious multiple osteomatous formations (osteomas, hyperostosis). A calvarium of a 40–50-year-old male showed a horseshoe-shaped excavation in the posterior part of the processi palatini of the maxilla, with destruction of the lower half of the nasal septum and the paramedial structures of the nasal cavity. These defects were well delimited macroscopically, radiographically and histologically, and seemed to be the result of pressure atrophy, perhaps from a slow growing benign tumour such as a fibroma or angiofibroma.

Comments on the Impacts of Climatic Variability and Population Growth on Virgin Anasazi Cultural Development

Larson and Michaelsen (1990) suggest that Virgin Anasazi cultural development can be explained as a response to population growth and climatic variation. They present demographic and climatic data to argue that abandonment of the Virgin Anasazi region was a response to a severe mid-twelfth century drought. Reconsideration of their data shows that Virgin Anasazi populations probably did not grow or decline as rapidly as they suggest. Further, radiocarbon dates suggest that the Virgin Anasazi occupied the area until the late thirteenth century. The Virgin Anasazi abandonment did not coincide with the twelfth-century drought, and cannot be explained solely by reference to population size and climatic change.

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie Kent

Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie Kent