Böcker i Variorum Collected Studies-serien

The origins of the astrolabe are unknown but during the Middle Ages and Renaissance it was the pre-eminent astronomical and astrological instrument. The author describes Renaissance astrolabes and their origins in this detailed study.

The studies in this volume were written between the early 1930s and 1998. They span the growth of Nubian studies from the evolutionary archaeology of the early 20th century through the ethnic prehistory of the 1940s and 1950s.

These essays examine the thought and works of a series of writers on political thought, religion, historiography and literature from the 16th century to the 19th. The author is concerned to situate individual thinkers in the context of their times and show links between France and England.

This collection of papers also includes "The Study of Medieval Liturgy", "Lanfranc's Supposed Purge of the Anglo-Saxon Calendar" along with "Why do Medieval Psalters Have Calendars?", "St Hugh as a Liturgical Person" and "Prescription and Reality in the Rubrics of Sarum Rite Service Books".

This collection of essays takes the study of history as a starting point, and extends the exploration into adjacent fields of legal, political, and social thought - confronting some of the larger questions of the modern human sciences, and issues of intellectual, cultural, and political history.

The printed debut of the "Canzone Villanesca Alla Napolitana" occurred on 24 October 1537, in Naples. Fifteen anonymous 'rustic songs' were published in a pocket-sized anthology with a cover featuring three women with hoes tilling the soil. This volume traces the Neapolitan origins of this song form, and its subsequent development.

Includes ten essays, which contribute to the re-assessment of how the medieval 'backwardness' of English agriculture was transformed into modern 'progress'.

Focuses on the history of organic chemistry, which arose improbably out of early speculations about the construction of chemical compounds, and their electrochemical nature. Dealing with the rise of electrochemistry and the work of Berzelius, this book considers aspects of the contributions of Frankland and those of Kekule and Hofmann.

Focuses on two types of historiography: early medieval narratives, with special attention to Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica"; and printed maps designed to portray and teach history, with special attention to the ubiquitous 'map of the barbarian invasions'.

Includes papers which explore the relation between literary texts and collective consciousness, scrutinizing the evidence of the texts themselves in their late- or post-Byzantine context, and assessing how their reception both influenced and was influenced by the processes of nation-building in Modern Greece.

Focuses on the relations between Byzantium and 'the East', though this generic concept embraces societies as far afield as Islamic Andalusia and Sasanian Persia. This book investigates not only questions of influence and appropriation, but also examples of hybridity and rejection in the name of cultural self-determination.

Between 1000 BC and 400 AD, a larger proportion of the population of ancient west Arabia could read and write than in any other part of the ancient Near East, and possibly any other part of the ancient world. This title explores some of the ways in which reading and writing were used in the literate and non-literate communities of ancient Arabia.

This is the second volume in the series of Marie-Therese d'Alverny's selected articles. It gathers together the majority of her studies on the understanding of Islam in the West from the early Middle Ages until the mid-13th century.

Examines the origins and development of early medieval commerce through an analysis of the dirham hoards from European Russia and the Baltic - between 750-900 - when Viking and Rus' merchants took fur and slaves south through European Russia to the markets of Khazaria and the 'Abbasid caliphate.

The two themes brought together in this volume have close links. The book attempts to show the need for liturgiologists to be aware of the riches in mediaeval legal sources, and for legal historians to take account of the wealth of liturgical material that is a principal part of Church law.

This volume presents a series of analyses of particular poems and problems of literary history, illustrating the many sides of medieval poetry and the interactions of learned, popular and courtly traditions.

This study deals with the psychological, metaphysical and scientific ideas of two major and influential Aristotelian philosophers of the Italian Renaissance - Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo - whose careers must be seen as interrelated.

Explores the history of drugs with the hypothesis that ancient and medieval medicines were effective, arguing that our ancestors had discovered and made effective use of many of the drugs used in medicine today, from antiseptics to oral contraceptives, even chemotherapy for cancer.

Focuses on the Ash'arites and the classical Ash'arite tradition. This title includes studies on the science of kalam, that present the author's insights on its very nature and essence, followed by a series of detailed analyses of the physics, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology of the Ash'arite system.

It is accepted that Russian culture is based upon the reception of Byzantine culture, however, the question of what was in fact received is explored in this work, by means of an examination of the corpus of translations.

This volume focuses on western economic expansion within the Eastern Mediterranean from the 11th-15th century. It examines the presence of the powers and their subjects in these regions, and industrial competition between Venice and the cities of the Italian mainland.

Gathers together a series of widely-scattered articles concerned with the great tradition of Platonic scholarship - "The Golden Chain" - from the time of Plato himself up into the period of Middle Platonism. The main emphasis is on the first three centuries AD.

Offers a description of China in the time of Mongol rule. Among the topics addressed are a Chinese historiography for that time; the progression from tribal chieftains to universal emperors and gods; Yuang China and Tibet; and a Sino-Uighur family portrait.

An exploration of the culture of natural history in Britain between 1700 and 1900. The author's interests are mainly botanical, but he has attempted from time to time to examine natural history as a unitary whole, revealing parallels and interactions between the separate studies.

Brings together five studies on the Mongol empire. This title relates the early history of the Delhi Sultanate, with reference to the role of its Turkish slave (ghulam) officers and guards. It examines the collapse in 1206-15 of the Ghurid dynasty, whose conquests in northern India had created the preconditions for the Sultanate's emergence.

This volume considers how the philosophies of Greek and Roman antiquity shaped - and were reformulated by - the work of medieval ethical and political theorists. They represent an effort to gain a cross-disciplinary perspective on the infiltration of classical learning during the Latin Middle Ages.