Search results for ""Author MANUS"

The notebooks of bishops of Carlisle reveal a wealth of detail concerning clerical life at the time. The volume presents three nineteenth-century manuscripts originally created for the use of bishops of Carlisle: Walter Fletcher's "Diocesan Book", written between 1814 and 1845, and Bishop Hugh Percy's two parish notebooks, compiled between 1828 and 1855. Based on visitations, and on articles of enquiry now lost, they add to a growing body of knowledge relating to the condition of the Church in the first half of the nineteenth century, providing a unique record of livings in the Carlisle diocese prior to its expansion in 1856. In particular, they illuminate the concerns of two significant clerical figures. In 1814 the newly installed chancellor, Walter Fletcher, set about recordinghis primary visitation, updating his notes frequently until the year before his death in 1846. In 1828 the newly consecrated bishop, Hugh Percy, created his own diocesan record, utilising Fletcher's material while adding matter of his own. The popularity of Anglican ritualism since the advent of Tractarianism has made it commonplace for the Georgian Church to be viewed with a certain amount of disdain. The notebooks allow us a more objective view ofthe period. Fletcher's notes on the 130 churches he visited are particularly valuable in presenting a diligent, hard-working clergyman, loyal to the Tory high-church traditions into which he had been born, with a vision for the diocese which, above all, was one of orderliness and obedience to canon law. The documents are presented here with introduction and notes. Dr Jane Platt is an honorary researcher in history at Lancaster University.

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A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color blue throughout the agesBlue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it as their favorite color. In this fascinating history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearance in prehistoric art to its international ubiquity today. Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Pastoureau investigates how the ever-changing role of blue in society has been reflected in manuscripts, stained glass, heraldry, clothing, paintings, and popular culture. Beginning with the almost total absence of blue from ancient Western art and language, the story moves to medieval Europe. As people began to associate blue with the Virgin Mary, the color became a powerful element in church decoration and symbolism. Blue gained new favor as a royal color in the twelfth century and became a formidable political and military force during the French Revolution. As blue triumphed in the modern era, new shades were created and blue became the color of romance and the blues. Finally, Pastoureau follows blue into contemporary times, when military clothing gave way to the everyday uniform of blue jeans and blue became the universal and unifying color of the Earth as seen from space.Beautifully illustrated, Blue tells the intriguing story of our favorite color and the cultures that have hated it, loved it, and made it essential to some of our greatest works of art.

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A cultural, social, and medical history of migraine.For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages. Touching on classical theories of humoral disturbance and medieval bloodletting, Foxhall also describes early modern herbal remedies, the emergence of neurology, and evolving practices of therapeutic experimentation. Throughout the book, Foxhall persuasively argues that our current knowledge of migraine's neurobiology is founded on a centuries-long social, cultural, and medical history. This history, she demonstrates, continues to profoundly shape our knowledge of this complicated disease, our attitudes toward people who have migraine, and the sometimes drastic measures that we take to address pain.Migraine is an intimate look at how cultural attitudes and therapeutic practices have changed radically in response to medical and pharmaceutical developments. Foxhall draws on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, including medieval manuscripts, early-modern recipe books, professional medical journals, hospital case notes, newspaper advertisements, private diaries, consultation letters, artworks, poetry, and YouTube videos. Deeply researched and beautifully written, this fascinating and accessible study of one of our most common, disabling—and yet often dismissed—disorders will appeal to physicians, historians, scholars in medical humanities, and people living with migraine alike.

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A guide to managing data in the digital age.Winner of the ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award by the Society of American ArchivistsMany people believe that what is on the Internet will be around forever. At the same time, warnings of an impending "digital dark age"—where records of the recent past become completely lost or inaccessible—appear with regular frequency in the popular press. It's as if we need a system to safeguard our digital records for future scholars and researchers. Digital preservation experts, however, suggest that this is an illusory dream not worth chasing. Ensuring long-term access to digital information is not that straightforward; it is a complex issue with a significant ethical dimension. It is a vocation.In The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, librarian Trevor Owens establishes a baseline for practice in this field. In the first section of the book, Owens synthesizes work on the history of preservation in a range of areas (archives, manuscripts, recorded sound, etc.) and sets that history in dialogue with work in new media studies, platform studies, and media archeology. In later chapters, Owens builds from this theoretical framework and maps out a more deliberate and intentional approach to digital preservation. A basic introduction to the issues and practices of digital preservation, the book is anchored in an understanding of the traditions of preservation and the nature of digital objects and media. Based on extensive reading, research, and writing on digital preservation, Owens's work will prove an invaluable reference for archivists, librarians, and museum professionals, as well as scholars and researchers in the digital humanities.

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First translation into English of 12th-century history of Ely from its foundation, including the Danish sack, Hereward's resistance to the Normans, and the repercussions of Becket's martyrdom. This is the first ever translation from Latin into English of an important source for English and ecclesiastical history. The Liber Eliensis is an account of the history of the Isle of Ely compiled by a monk of Ely monastery in the later twelfth century. He uses evidence from the monastery's Latin and Old English archives, combined with chronicle data and biographies of saints and heroes, to tell the story of Ely in three parts. The first book, chiefly concerned with the abbesses of Ely (St Aethelthryth founded the house as a double house under female leadership), extends from the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity to the aftermath of the Danish sack; the second bookcovers 970-1109, when the Benedictine monastery was ruled by abbots, and includes an account of Hereward's resistance to William the Conqueror; the third book begins at the point when Ely first became the seat of a bishop, and extends to the compiler's own times, ending with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The translation does full justice to the compiler's gift for story-telling and his wide range of source material; it gives priority to the readings of the oldest manuscript of the Liber Eliensis, but covers all the material in the later but fuller recension of the Latin text presented in E.O. Blake's 1962 edition. The volume is completed with notes on the text and sources and an introductory essay. JANET FAIRWEATHER is a freelance researcher and translator, a member of the classics faculty, Cambridge University.

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In the long nineteenth century, the specter of lost manuscripts loomed in the imagination of antiquarians, historians, and writers. Whether by war, fire, neglect, or the ravages of time itself, the colonial history of the United States was perceived as a vanishing record, its archive a hoard of materially unsound, temporally fragmented, politically fraught, and endangered documents. Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation's attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national permanence. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and incongruous as the collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared origin story, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape. Even as old books embodied a receding past, historical reprints reflected the antebellum period's most pressing ideological crises, from religious schisms to sectionalism to territorial expansion. Organized around four colonial regional cultures that loomed large in nineteenth-century literary history—Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, and the Spanish Caribbean—Colonial Revivals examines the reprinted works that enshrined these historical narratives in American archives and minds for decades to come. Revived through reprinting, the obscure texts of colonial history became new again, deployed as harbingers, models, reminders, and warnings to a nineteenth-century readership increasingly fixated on the uncertain future of the nation and its material past.

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Was there more to medieval and Renaissance comedy than Chaucer and Shakespeare? Bien sûr. For a real taste of saucy early European humor, one must cross the Channel to France. There, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the sophisticated met the scatological in popular performances presented by roving troupes in public squares that skewered sex, politics, and religion. For centuries, the scripts for these outrageous, anonymously written shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. Now prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest of these farces to contemporary English-speaking audiences in "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries. Enders's translation captures the full richness of the colorful characters, irreverent humor, and over-the-top plotlines, all in a refreshingly uncensored American vernacular. Those who have never heard the one about the Cobbler, the Monk, the Wife, and the Gatekeeper should prepare to be shocked and entertained. "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries is populated by hilarious characters high and low. For medievalists, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers alike, Enders provides a wealth of information about the plays and their history. Helpful details abound for each play about plot, character development, sets, staging, costumes, and props. This performance-friendly collection offers in-depth guidance to actors, directors, dramaturges, teachers, and their students. "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries puts fifteenth-century French farce in its rightful place alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare, commedia dell'arte, and Molière—not to mention Monty Python. Vive la Farce!

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Durante sus años madrileños de oscura bohemia, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer escribió varios libretos de zarzuela. A los conocidos hasta ahora, se añade aquí El talismán, escrito en colaboración con su amigo Luís García Luna y que a su interés intrínseco suma que trabajó en su música Joaquín Espín y Guillén, notable compositor y, además, padre de Julia Espín, con quien el poeta vivió una intensa pasión. La enorme importancia que la música tuvo en la concepción de la poesía, Bécquer queda una vez más reforzada con nuevas pruebas documentales.En este libro se recuperan las partes conservadas del libreto y de la música, contextualizados y analizados por sus editores, Jesús Rubio Jiménez y Amy Liakopoulos, junto a dos estudios preliminares de Víctor Infantes, sobre las características del manuscrito, y de Miguel Ángel Lama, sobre las resonancias líricas de las letras becquerianas, así como un peritaje caligráfico de la letra becqueriana de Juan José Jiménez Praderas. Las modernas tecnologías p

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The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth century Tells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutions Combines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon past Reveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional liberties Includes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

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A new work from Judy Chicago, fifty years in the making: Judy Chicago: Revelations is the work she thought would never see the light of day. Her captivating narrative combatting the erasure of women from history unites seamlessly with illustrations first made in the 1970s and new work in a striking, contemporary design. Revelations is the work that Judy Chicago believed would never be published: a radical retelling of human history in the form of an illuminated manuscript, recovering stories of women that society sought to erase. Begun alongside her iconic installation The Dinner Party in the mid-1970s, and drawing on her intensive research into goddess worship and women's history, Revelations is foundational to Chicago's decades-long practice. It is at once a vibrant narrative and a work of art, fifty years in the making. Publication coincides with an exhibition at the Serpentine, London, from 22 May to 1 September, Judy Chicago's first solo presentation in a major London insti

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Robert Deshman wove together a dense and tightly structured nexus of Early Christian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and Ottonian manuscript illuminations, ivories, textiles, mosaics, and wall paintings on the one hand, and contemporary exegetical, liturgical, and political writings on the other. In so doing, he ultimately demonstrated the intrinsic connections among visual culture, theology, philosophy, political theory, and ecclesiastic doctrine and practice. Although he used the word only once in his own writings, at the very end of his career, Deshman was truly an interdisciplinary scholar of the first order. The thirteen articles collected in this volume were published between 1971 and 1997 (four posthumously) in six different journals and four edited books. Reprinting them is meant not only to make the articles more accessible but also to present a cohesive body of work (primarily on Anglo-Saxon art) that as a whole has yet to be surpassed or methodologically replaced in the scholarly literature.

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Concise, readable, and easy to navigate—a practical and thorough guide to conducting efficient and effective medical research Whether you’re a student, scholar, faculty member, or practicing healthcare professional, Research Methodology in the Health Sciences helps you improve your research skills and critically appraise original research and apply it in evidence-based patient care.This peerless guide describes the principles of biostatistics and provides detailed examples to build readers’ comprehension of the utility and applicability of bio-statistical tests, without going into the mathematical details of such tests. It covers principles of biomedical ethics in research and publication, review of the medical literature, how to write a dissertation, how to prepare and submit a research manuscript for publication in a journal, how to apply for a research grant to funding agencies, and much more. And all examples drawn exclusively from real healthcare scenarios to enhance the learning process.

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Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents.In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus’s contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.

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While conventional wisdom points to the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 as the gateway for the founding of the first Arab American national political organization, such advocacy in fact began with the Syrian nationalist movement, which emerged from immigration trends at the turn of the last century. Bringing this long-neglected history to life, The Making of Arab Americans overturns the notion of an Arab population that was too diverse to share common goals. Tracing the forgotten histories of the Free Syria Society, the New Syria Party, the Arab National League, and the Institute of Arab American Affairs, the book restores a timely aspect of our understanding of an area (then called Syria) that comprises modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Hani Bawardi examines the numerous Arab American political advocacy organizations that thrived before World War I, showing how they influenced Syrian and Arab nationalism. He further offers an in-depth analysis exploring how World War II helped introduce a new Arab American identity as priorities shifted and the quest for assimilation intensified. In addition, the book enriches our understanding of the years leading to the Cold War by tracing both the Arab National League’s transition to the Institute of Arab American Affairs and new campaigns to enhance mutual understanding between the United States and the Middle East. Illustrated with a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and manuscripts, The Making of Arab Americans provides crucial insight for contemporary dialogues.

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Moteuczoma, the last king who ruled the Aztec Empire, was rarely seen or heard by his subjects, yet his presence was felt throughout the capital city of Tenochtitlan, where his deeds were recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions on monuments and his command was expressed in highly refined ritual performances. What did Moteuczoma’s “fame” mean in the Aztec world? How was it created and maintained? In this innovative study, Patrick Hajovsky investigates the king’s inscribed and spoken name, showing how it distinguished his aura from those of his constituencies, especially other Aztec nobles, warriors, and merchants, who also vied for their own grandeur and fame. While Tenochtitlan reached its greatest size and complexity under Moteuczoma, the “Great Speaker” innovated upon fame by tying his very name to the Aztec royal office.As Moteuczoma’s fame transcends Aztec visual and oral culture, Hajovsky brings together a vast body of evidence, including Nahuatl language and poetry, indigenous pictorial manuscripts and written narratives, and archaeological and sculptural artifacts. The kaleidoscopic assortment of sources casts Moteuczoma as a divine king who, while inheriting the fame of past rulers, saw his own reputation become entwined with imperial politics, ideological narratives, and eternal gods. Hajovsky also reflects on posthumous narratives about Moteuczoma, which created a very different sense of his fame as a conquered subject. These contrasting aspects of fame offer important new insights into the politics of personhood and portraiture across Aztec and colonial-period sources.

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The third volume in BHRS's series of poll books and covers the years from the fall of Walpole to the rise of William Pitt the younger. This is the third volume in BHRS's series of poll books and covers the years from the fall of Walpole to the rise of William Pitt the younger. It was a period when Britain was constantly at war, when it suffered a dangerous Jacobite rebellion and when the American colonies were lost. Yet this constant warfare did not produce the revolutionary changes to the national and local economy that the Napoleonic wars subsequently created. There is only one complete poll book for the county (1774) but surviving lists from Bedford borough, including a partial poll book of 1747, enable political allegiance to be gauged. Lack of contested elections does not mean an absence of political activity. Detectable trends are illustrated from the Duke of Bedford's archives and the Hardwicke manuscripts in the British Library. They include the attempts of the Duke to increase his powers, which were successfully challenged by Bedford borough by the creation in 1769 of many new out-of-town freemen to detach it from his influence; the decline of formerly prominent political families; and, from the 1760s, the rise of the Whitbreads. The volume also details the political dimensions of the litigation over the appointment of the rector of St John's, Bedford; the administration of the Harpur Trust; and turnpike and enclosure acts.

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The 1920s and 30s were key decades for the history of American social science. The success of such quantitative disciplines as economics and psychology during World War I forced social scientists to reexamine their methods and practices and to consider recasting their field as a more objective science separated from its historical foundation in social reform. The debate that ensued, fiercely conducted in books, articles, correspondence, and even presidential addresses, made its way into every aspect of social science thought of the period and is the subject of this book. Mark C. Smith first provides a historical overview of the controversy over the nature and future of the social sciences in early twentieth-century America and, then through a series of intellectual biographies, offers an intensive study of the work and lives of major figures who participated in this debate. Using an extensive range of materials, from published sources to manuscript collections, Smith examines "objectivists"—economist Wesley Mitchell and political scientist Charles Merriam—and the more "purposive thinkers"—historian Charles Beard, sociologist Robert Lynd, and political scientist and neo-Freudian Harold Lasswell. He shows how the debate over objectivity and social purpose was central to their professional and personal lives as well as to an understanding of American social science between the two world wars. These biographies bring to vivid life a contentious moment in American intellectual history and reveal its significance in the shaping of social science in this country.

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Popular understanding of Zen Buddhism typically involves a stereotyped image of isolated individuals in meditation, contemplating nothingness. This book presents the "other side of Zen," by examining the movement's explosive growth during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) in Japan and by shedding light on the broader Japanese religious landscape during the era. Using newly-discovered manuscripts, Duncan Ryuken Williams argues that the success of Soto Zen was due neither to what is most often associated with the sect, Zen meditation, nor to the teachings of its medieval founder Dogen, but rather to the social benefits it conveyed. Zen Buddhism promised followers many tangible and attractive rewards, including the bestowal of such perquisites as healing, rain-making, and fire protection, as well as "funerary Zen" rites that assured salvation in the next world. Zen temples also provided for the orderly registration of the entire Japanese populace, as ordered by the Tokugawa government, which led to stable parish membership. Williams investigates both the sect's distinctive religious and ritual practices and its nonsectarian participation in broader currents of Japanese life. While much previous work on the subject has consisted of passages on great medieval Zen masters and their thoughts strung together and then published as "the history of Zen," Williams' work is based on care ul examination of archival sources including temple logbooks, prayer and funerary manuals, death registries, miracle tales of popular Buddhist deities, secret initiation papers, villagers' diaries, and fund-raising donor lists.

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When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, his heir, Carlos II, was three years old. In addition to this looming dynastic crisis, decades of enormous military commitments had left Spain a virtually bankrupt state with vulnerable frontiers and a depleted army. In Silvia Z. Mitchell’s revisionist account, Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman, Queen Regent Mariana of Austria emerges as a towering figure at court and on the international stage, while her key collaborators—the secretaries, ministers, and diplomats who have previously been ignored or undervalued—take their rightful place in history.Mitchell provides a nuanced account of Mariana of Austria’s ten-year regency (1665–75) of the global Spanish Empire and examines her subsequent role as queen mother. Drawing from previously unmined primary sources, including Council of State deliberations, diplomatic correspondence, Mariana’s and Carlos’s letters, royal household papers, manuscripts, and legal documents, Mitchell describes how, over the course of her regency, Mariana led the monarchy out of danger and helped redefine the military and diplomatic blocs of Europe in Spain’s favor. She follows Mariana’s exile from court and recounts how the dowager queen used her extensive connections and diplomatic experience to move the negotiations for her son’s marriage forward, effectively exploiting the process to regain her position.A new narrative of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy in the later seventeenth century, this volume advances our knowledge of women’s legitimate political entitlement in the early modern period. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of queenship, women’s studies, and early modern Spain.

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In the late-second century, Tatian the Assyrian constructed a new Gospel by intricately harmonizing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Tatian's work became known as the Diatessaron, since it was derived 'out of the four' eventually canonical Gospels. Though it circulated widely for centuries, the Diatessaron disappeared in antiquity. Nevertheless, numerous ancient and medieval harmonies survive in various languages. Some texts are altogether independent of the Diatessaron, while others are definitely related. Yet even Tatian's known descendants differ in large and small ways, so attempts at reconstruction have proven confounding. In this book James W. Barker forges a new path in Diatessaron studies. Covering the widest array of manuscript evidence to date, Tatian's Diatessaron reconstructs the compositional and editorial practices by which Tatian wrote his Gospel. By sorting every extant witnesses according to its narrative sequence, the macrostructure of Tatian's Gospel becomes clear. Despite many shared agreements, there remain significant divergences between eastern and western witnesses. This book argues that the eastern ones preserve Tatian's order, whereas the western texts descend from a fourth-century recension of the Diatessaron. Victor of Capua and his scribe used the recension to produce the Latin Codex Fuldensis in the sixth century. More controversially, Barker offers new evidence that late medieval texts such as the Middle Dutch Stuttgart harmony independently preserve traces of the western recension. This study uncovers the composition and reception history behind one of early Christianity's most elusive texts.

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A major and original contribution to the debate as to Chaucer's use and knowledge of Boccaccio, finding a new source for the "Shipman's Tale". A possible direct link between the two greatest literary collections of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, has long tantalized readers because these works share many stories, which are, moreover, placed in similar frames. And yet, although he identified many of his sources, Chaucer never mentioned Boccaccio; indeed when he retold the Decameron's final novella, his pilgrim, the Clerk, states that it was written by Petrarch. For these reasons, most scholars now believe that while Chaucer might have heard parts of the earlier collection when he was in Italy, he did not have it at hand as he wrote. This volumeaims to change our understanding of this question. It analyses the relationship between the "Shipman's Tale", originally written for the Wife of Bath, and Decameron 8.10, not seen before as a possible source. The book alsoargues that more important than the narratives that Chaucer borrowed is the literary technique that he learned from Boccaccio - to make tales from ideas. This technique, moreover, links the "Shipman's Tale" to the "Miller's Tale"and the new "Wife of Bath's Tale". Although at its core a hermeneutic argument, this book also delves into such important areas as alchemy, domestic space, economic history, folklore, Irish/English politics, manuscripts, and misogyny. FREDERICK M. BIGGS is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

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Eric J. Goldberg traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the late Roman Empire to the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis V, in a hunting accident in 987. He focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world. While hunting was central to elite lifestyles throughout these centuries, the Carolingians significantly altered this aristocratic activity in the later eighth and ninth centuries by making it a key symbol of Frankish kingship and political identity. This new connection emerged under Charlemagne, reached its high point under his son and heir Louis the Pious, and continued under Louis's immediate successors. Indeed, the emphasis on hunting as a badge of royal power and Frankishness would prove to be among the Carolingians' most significant and lasting legacies. Goldberg draws on written sources such as chronicles, law codes, charters, hagiography, and poetry as well as artistic and archaeological evidence to explore the changing nature of early medieval hunting and its connections to politics and society. Featuring more than sixty illustrations of hunting imagery found in mosaics, stone sculpture, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts, In the Manner of the Franks portrays a vibrant and dynamic culture that encompassed red deer and wild boar hunting, falconry, ritualized behavior, female spectatorship, and complex forms of specialized knowledge that united kings and nobles in a shared political culture, thus locating the origins of courtly hunting in the early Middle Ages.

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Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries.Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange.The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.

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Considered by many to be one of the most influential German Pietists, August Hermann Francke lived during a moment when an emphasis on conversion was beginning to produce small shifts in how the sacraments were defined—a harbinger of later, more dramatic changes to come in evangelical theology. In this book, Peter James Yoder uses Francke and his theology as a case study for the ecclesiological stirrings that led to the rise of evangelicalism and global Protestantism.Engaging extensively with Francke’s manuscript sermons and writings, Yoder approaches Francke’s life and religious thought through his theology of the sacraments. In doing so, Yoder delivers key insights into the structure of Francke's Pietist thought, providing a rich depiction of his conversion-driven theology and how it shaped his views of the sacraments and the church. The first in-depth study of Francke’s theology written for an English-speaking audience, this book supports recent scholarship in English that not only challenges long-held assumptions about Pietism but also argues for the role of Pietism’s influence on the changing religious landscape of the eighteenth century. Through his examination of Francke’s theology of the sacraments, Yoder presents a fresh view into the eighteenth-century ecclesiological developments that caused a rupture with the dogmas of the Reformation.Original and vital, this study recognizes Francke’s importance to the history of Pietism in Germany and beyond. It will become the standard reference on Francke for American audiences and will influence scholarship on Lutheranism, Pietism, early modern German studies, and eighteenth-century history and religion.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED DEBUT BOOK OF POETRY FROM LANA DEL REY, VIOLET BENT BACKWARDS OVER THE GRASS 'Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.' Lana Del Rey Lana’s breathtaking first book solidifies her further as 'the essential writer of her times' (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana’s typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is also brought to life in an unprecedented spoken word audiobook which features Lana Del Rey reading fourteen select poems from the book accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff.

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Composé à Constantinople vers 619 apr. J.-C., le commentaire aux Tables Faciles de Ptolémée attribué à Stéphanos d'Alexandrie est le premier traité byzantin d'astronomie. Il s'agit d'un mode d'emploi des tables de Ptolémée, rédigé dans un cadre scolaire et laissé à l'état de première ébauche. Fondé sur le Petit Commentaire de Théon d'Alexandrie, le texte est une adaptation des calculs astronomiques aux coordonnées de la capitale byzantine. L'auteur livre les procédés de calcul à partir des Tables Faciles ainsi qu'un exemple pour chaque problème astronomique. L'originalité du manuel est le nombre d'exemples donnés, l'emploi de tables spéciales pour le climat de Byzance et de l'ère chronologique de Constantin le Grand, et l'ajout de quelques scolies par l'empereur Héraclius. Cet ouvrage présente une étude de la tradition manuscrite et l'histoire du texte ainsi qu'une édition critique avec traduction française des chapitres 1 à 16 du manuel. Ceux-ci ont pour sujet les sections et la conversion du temps, l'horoscope, la culmination, la longitude solaire et lunaire, l'oblique du Soleil, la latitude de la Lune, les syzygies, les parallaxes et l'éclipse de Lune, et sont accompagnés d'un commentaire détaillé. Les chapitres 17 à 30 feront l'objet d'une publication ultérieure.

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Matthew Battles does not write stories that move, develop or unfold. He creates worlds that hiss, snap, and rattle, and decorates them with objects that brood in black, glassine silence, or crumble into dusty revelation. Characters are left to grab at scraps of reality sent whipping about them at hurricane force. Ideas "run faster than memory can sieve them from the flow," leaving vaporous reverie to fill the vacuum - dogs populate trees, demolition men bear holy forgeries, and a slick dark box siphons off synaptic vibrations. In "The Dogs in the Trees," man's best friends deliver an enigmatic rebuke. The protagonist of "The Sovereignties of Invention" is enthralled by a gadget that plumbs the depths of the stream of consciousness. In "The Manuscript of Belz," a librarian ponders the glamor of the book and the bloody limits of cultural experience. And "The Gnomon" seeks in Internet culture the same dark energies limned by Poe. Each story within waits, still, dark and deep, to yield its unique shock of uncanny truth.

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This study of the life and works of David Mallet (?1705-65) is the first study of Mallet for the past one hundred and fifty years and assesses the poet's significance within his own period, arguing that modern scholarship has unduly neglected this complex personality who represented changing notions in taste and aesthetics, the intersection between literature and politics, and fashioned professional personae for himself as controversial patriot-poet, party writer, historian, editor, dramatist, and spy. An Anglo-Scot, he negotiated national prejudices, Jacobite leanings, and_when he moved to London in the 1750s_adopted the cultural patriotism of the Hanoverians. The post-Union climate enabled him to make influential friends, such as Pope, Lyttleton, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield, who promoted his works and on whose behalf he wrote (mostly for pay), until his death. The book offers a comprehensive reconsideration of hitherto unknown manuscript material and contributes to dismantling Johnson's prejudiced view of Mallet, which to this day has tainted Mallet's critical reputation.

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Librarian Janet Johnson is puzzled when she is invited—and practically dragged—to her first meeting of the Rejected Writers’ Book Club. This quirky group of women would much rather celebrate one another’s rejected manuscripts over cups of tea and slices of lemon cake than actually publish a book. But good friends are exactly what Janet needs after moving to the small town of Southlea Bay, Washington. Just as the ladies are about to raise a teacup to their five hundredth rejection letter, they receive bad news that could destroy one member’s reputation—and disband the group forever. To save the club, Janet joins her fellow writers on a wild road trip to San Francisco in search of the local publisher who holds the key to a long-buried secret. As they race to the finish line, they’ll face their fears—landslides, haunted houses, handsome strangers, ungrateful children—and have the time of their lives. Revised edition: This edition of The Rejected Writers' Book Club includes editorial revisions.

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Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's desolation : souvenir began as a filling in of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarme's grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat. Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases cross at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full and no bees in the hive, no hive /

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Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground. Amy’s curiosity becomes her salvation, as she’s drawn closer and closer to the secret societies and crackpot philosophers that haunt the city’s abandoned warehouses and defunct train depots. All of it leads to an opportunity of a lifetime: an artist’s residency deep in the holographic halls of Q headquarters. It’s a dream come true—so long as she follows Q’s rules.

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Dorothy Molloy was a star in the making when Faber prepared her debut Hare Soup (2004) for publication, before tragedy struck, and she died four days before advance copies arrived. With its distinctive and unsettling mix of comedy and complicity, dark humour and disturbance (a feminist burlesque that has seen her work christened as 'gurlesque'), Hare Soup stripped the veneer from the niceties of relations in family life and the Catholic church, turning its inventive and sexually charged gaze to corruption and abuse in our most private spaces. The book rightly won accolades and admirers, and was followed by a further, posthumous collection, Gethsemane Day (2006) that was prepared from typescript. The Poems of Dorothy Molloy gathers these two collections alongside her manuscript work, which appeared as Long-Distance Swimmer (Salmon, 2009), and the remaining body of unpublished material to present a complete edition of poems to meet the growing readership of this startling talent.

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A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles.Bombay, 1950For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on Inspector Persis Wadia's desk.Uncovering a series of complex riddles written in verse, Persis - together with English forensic scientist Archie Blackfinch - is soon on the trail. But then they discover the first body.As the death toll mounts it becomes evident that someone else is also pursuing this priceless artefact and will stop at nothing to possess it . . .Harking back to an era of darkness, this second thriller in the Malabar House series pits Persis, once again, against her peers, a changing India, and an evil of limitless intent.Gripping, immersive, and full of Vaseem Khan's trademark wit, this is historical fiction at its finest.

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Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition, Modern Language Association This edition includes all of the known surviving writings of the poet Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-1784), several of which have been discovered since the last attempt at a complete edition was published in 2001. Of the fifty-seven poems, as well as their authoritative variants, forty-six were published during her lifetime. Versions of nine of them were published before September 1773. Wheatley Peters published thirty-eight works in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Only seven of her poems were published between 1773 and her death in 1784. Eleven poems survive only in manuscript versions. This edition also includes all of Wheatley Peters' extant prose writings: twenty-three letters and four subscription proposals. It includes as well the three known surviving letters written to Wheatley Peters. Wheatley Peters' writings are accompanied by an Introduction to her life and times, as well as extensive textual and explanatory notes.

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From the late third millennium BCE on, the adventures of Gilgamesh were well known throughout Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of fragmentary Akkadian-language fragments of versions of his tale at Bogazkoy, Ugarit, Emar, and Megiddo in Palestine demonstrates that tales of the hero's exploits had reached the periphery of the cuneiform world already in the Late Bronze Age. In addition to the manuscripts in the Hittite language recounting Gilgamesh's adventures, two Akkadian versions and fragmentary Hurrian renderings have turned up at the Hittite capital Hattusa. This volume offers an edition of the material from Bogazkoy, which has been of particular importance to modern scholars in reconstructing the epic and analyzing its development, since it documents a period in the history of the narrative's progressive restructuring and elaboration for which very few textual witnesses have yet been recovered from Mesopotamia itself. And it is this very Middle Babylonian or Kassite period to which scholarly consensus assigns the composition of the final, canonical, version of the epic.

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Written over the course of a quarter century, the nineteen essays reprinted in this volume reflect a continuing belief in the seriousness and complexity of the relationship between pictures and texts in medieval art. Professor Kessler has grouped his studies in three sections: Pictures and Scripture includes those essays which consider the various ways in which Christian pictorial representations are in continuous and varying dialogue with holy writ in Byzantium and the medieval west. Pictures in Scripture is about illustrated manuscripts, with six essays dealing with the complicated processes used to construct meaning in depictions within the texts they illustrate. Pictures as Scriptures contains nine essays which deal with pictorial cycles unassociated with the texts they serve, primarily monumental narratives in the Synagogue at Dura Europos and on the walls of Italian churches. Notes added to each article update the bibliography and consider issues that have been discussed in subsequent scholarly literature. There is a new preface and a comprehensive index.

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In love and happy, with a marriage that back home in Colombia people would kill for, Tom and Naomi Barnes, pursue their dream of prosperity and the perfect family in a London brimming with opportunity.While Tom works long hours for a super-hedge fund, Naomi becomes the ghostwriter for fellow prep school mum and Haitian immigrant Solange Wolf with whom she shares parallel lives. Tom becomes increasingly successful and soon the family are living the dream. But as money and prestige increase, Naomi can’t shake the paranoia that comes from accelerated wealth and a culture of maledicion.When Solange suddenly announces that the manuscript they have been working on was all based on secrets and lies, Naomi, whose own life is beginning to unravel, starts to doubt not only Solange’s grasp on reality but her own and she begins to seriously question the very foundation of her love and marriage to Tom, with devastating consequences.

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Most people know the late Lee Wulff as the world's foremost salmon angler. Few, if any, think of him as a skilled bush pilot and explorer. But he was both, as Lee reveals in this extraordinary memoir. Based on an unpublished manuscript that was rediscovered only recently by his widow, Joan Wulff, this book tells the story of Lee's years pioneering the Atlantic salmon and brook trout fisheries on the remote coasts of northeastern Newfoundland and Labrador. Having established a handful of outpost sporting camps by boat, Wulff quickly realized that getting clients and supplies in and out efficiently would require an airplane. So he cut a deal with Piper Aircraft and learned to fly a new bright-yellow J-3 Cub equipped with floats. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, he ferried his sports one-by-one into isolated lakes and rivers where the fishing went beyond their wildest dreams. Soar with Wulff through unpredictable mountain gusts, low over muskeg bogs, and blind through thick fog and smothering darkness. Meet his sons, Barry and Allan, and feel their father's pride as both become good anglers and valuable contributors to the operation of the camps. Get to know the warm, hard-working Newfoundlanders recruited as guides and camp staff. And share salmon pools with some of World War II's most notable generals, who fished with Lee during brief breaks from the horrors of the European front. Bush Pilot Angler is an unforgettable story of courage, flying, love, and fishing. It is a fitting tribute to Lee Wulff, an extraordinary man who fought tirelessly for the conversation of his beloved Atlantic salmon in Newfoundland and throughout North America.

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From its stirring legends to its stunning landscapes, Ireland is a living, breathing fairy-tale. Ignite your imagination with Moon Ireland. Inside you'll find:*Flexible itineraries from a two-week "Best of Ireland" adventure or a weekend in Dublin to 3-day tours of southern, northern, and coastal Ireland that can be combined into a longer trip*Strategic ideas for history buffs, outdoor adventurers, foodies, honeymooners, families, and more*Unique ideas and can't-miss experiences: Visit the Old Library at Trinity College for a look at Ireland's most famous illuminated manuscript or drive past picturesque castles along the Ring of Kerry. Marvel at the misty magnificence of the Cliffs of Moher, wander through a 6th-century monastery, and ferry to the enchanting Aran Islands. Soak up the bohemian spirit of Galway City, take an introspective minute at the Bogside Peace Murals, or spend a day cycling the Burren in County Clare. Head to a pub to order up a pint and enjoy a traditional meal while you experience Ireland's rollicking folk music scene*Honest insight from Ireland expert Camille DeAngelis*Full-colour photos and detailed maps throughout*Thorough background on the country's history, landscape, government, and culture*Helpful tools such as common local expressions and a guide to Irish cuisine and beverages, plus tips for travelling with children, seniors, travellers with disabilities, LGBTQ+ travellers, and travellers of color*Focused coverage of Dublin and its surroundings (including Meath, Louth, Wicklow, and Kildare), the Southeast, Cork, Kerry, Clare and Limerick, Galway, the Northwest, and Northern IrelandWith Moon Ireland's practical tips and local insight, you can experience the best of the Emerald Isle.Expanding your trip to the UK? Try Moon Edinburgh, Glasgow & the Isle of Skye or Moon London Walks.

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The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller has been remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of nineteenth-century men and women. In this new collection, the full range of her literary career is represented from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy. For the first time, the complete texts of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes are printed together, along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous "Autobiographical Romance" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian culture, mythology, and the BibleJeffrey Steele's introduction provides an important revision of Fuller's biography and literary career, tracing the growth of her feminism and her development into one of America's preeminent social critics. No other writer of Fuller's day could match the range of her experience. Growing up in the world of Boston intellectuals, she was the close friend of the Alcotts, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. But she also traveled adventurously to the western frontier, canoed down rapids with Chippewa Indians, visited the outcast and the poor in New York's institutions and prisons, and experienced the rigors of war during the bombardment of Rome. As a whole, this anthology provides the material to understand one of the most fascinating nineteenth-century American women writers.

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As a result of the expansion in the area of pharmaceutical medicine there is an ever-increasing need for educational resources. The Dictionary of Clinical Trials, Second Edition comprehensively explains the 3000 words and short phrases commonly used when designing, running, analysing and reporting clinical trials. This book is a quick, pocket reference tool to understand the common and less well-used terms within the discipline of clinical trials, and provides an alternative to the textbooks available. Terms are heavily cross-referenced, which helps the reader to understand how terms fit into the broad picture of clinical trials. Wide ranging, brief, pragmatic explanations of clinical trial terminology Scope includes medical, statistical, epidemiological, ethical, regulatory and data management terminology Thoroughly revised and expanded - increase of 280 terms from First Edition, reference to Cochrane included From the reviews of the First Edition: "This invaluable text explains the majority of clinical trial terms, in alphabetical order, that are likely to be found in clinical trial protocols, reports, regulatory guidelines, and published manuscripts... Fully comprehensive - provides definitions of clinical trial terms in one complete volume... Includes extensive use of graphs throughout." LA DOC STI "...covers a range of subject matter, with emphasis on medical, statistical, epidemiological and ethical terms... a useful adjunct to standard clinical trial texts... a reference source to keep within easy reach." TALANTA The Dictionary of Clinical Trials, Second Edition is a ‘must-have’ for all pharmaceutical companies who conduct a lot of clinical trials, in all or one therapeutic area. The book is also of interest for public health and health science workers, and for contract research organisations and departments of medicine, where medics are involved with clinical trials.

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This reference grammar provides a novel and detailed overview of Old Nubian, an extinct Nilo-Saharan language written in the Nubian kingdom of Makuria between the 8th and 15th centuries CE. Including more than 700 glossed examples sourced from manuscripts and inscriptions covering the entire written record, this standard work treats Old Nubian syntax, topic/focus constructions, subordination and coordination, verbal morphology including person, aspect, tense, pluractionality, affirmation, and negation, nominal morphology, derivation, and phonology. The grammar is aimed both at scholars working in the fields of Nubiology, Egyptology, and Near Eastern Studies curious to gain a better understanding of one of the lesser studied languages from the medieval period, and linguists interested in one of the few historical languages of which written records have survived on the African continent.

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Music was central to the medieval church's public worship: it was the essential medium of the Mass and the Divine Office. In this new critical edition, T. J. H. McCarthy presents the Latin text and the first English translation of Aribo's musical treatise, De musica and Sententiae. Written between 1070 and 1078, it is concerned with the workings of the liturgical music that Aribo and his contemporaries called Gregorian chant, and builds off of and responds to several contemporary treatises by Abbot Bern of Reichenau and his pupil Herman, Abbot William of Hirsau, Frutolf of Michelsberg, and Theoger of Metz. In the first new edition of the treatise in over sixty years, McCarthy addresses not only new approaches to the study of music history but newly discovered manuscripts of the treatise, paying careful attention to the diagrams that are integral to the coherence of the treatise.

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In October 1307 all the brothers of the military religious Order of the Temple in France were arrested on the instructions of King Philip IV and charged with heresy. In November, Pope Clement V instructed King Edward II of England to do likewise. This volume provides the first full edition of the four surviving texts of the trial proceedings that followed in Britain and Ireland; volume 2 supplies the translations into English. The trial of the Templars was the first major heresy trial in the British Isles, and the proceedings reveal the Episcopate's attempts to deal with this unprecedented situation, the varying procedures followed in different countries, and how testimonies were recorded and summarised for the Church Councils which eventually decided the fate of the Order of the Temple. The testimonies given during the trial contain a wealth of information about religious beliefs among the lay population of the British Isles (both the Templars and outsiders who gave evidence during the trial), national and international mobility of lay religious, the social function of the order of the Temple in the British Isles and its relations with society at large, and the organisation and operations of the Order of the Temple at a local, national and international level. Detailed introductions to each volume describe the manuscripts and how the material was compiled and arranged, and discuss the course of the proceedings and the value of the evidence they contain. Appendices in volume 2 (the translation) list the names of all the Templars mentioned during the proceedings, Templar houses and the locations of the proceedings in London.

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The Vatican Mythographers offers the first complete English translation of three important sources of knowledge about the survival of classical mythology from the Carolingian era to the High Middle Ages and beyond. The Latin texts were discovered in manuscripts in the Vatican library and published together in the nineteenth century. The three so-called Vatican Mythographers compiled, analyzed, interpreted, and transmitted a vast collection of myths for use by students, poets, and artists. In terms consonant with Christian purposes, they elucidated the fabulous narratives and underlying themes in the works of Ovid, Virgil, Statius, and other poets of antiquity. In so doing, the Vatican Mythographers provided handbooks that included descriptions of ancient rites and customs, curious etymologies, and, above all, moral allegories. Thus we learn that Bacchus is a naked youth who rides a tiger because drunkenness is never mature, denudes us of possessions, and begets ferocity; or that Ulysses, husband of Penelope, passed by the monstrous Scylla unharmed because a wise man bound to chastity overcomes lust. The extensive collection of myths illustrates how this material was used for moral lessons. To date, the works of the Vatican Mythographers have remained inaccessible to scholars and students without a good working knowledge of Latin. The translation thus fulfills a scholarly void. It is prefaced by an introduction that discusses the purposes of the Vatican Mythographers, the influences on them, and their place in medieval and Renaissance mythography. Of course, it also entertains with a host of stories whose undying appeal captivates, charms, inspires, instructs, and sometimes horrifies us. The book should have wide appeal for a whole range of university courses involving myth.

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The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. In the course of that century, the city's convents evolved from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in a religious community. Historian Sharon T. Strocchia analyzes this stunning growth of female monasticism, revealing the important roles these women and institutions played in the social, economic, and political history of Renaissance Florence. It became common practice during this time for unmarried women in elite society to enter convents. This unprecedented concentration of highly educated and well-connected women transformed convents into sites of great patronage and social and political influence. As their economic influence also grew, convents found new ways of supporting themselves; they established schools, produced manuscripts, and manufactured textiles. Strocchia has mined previously untapped archival materials to uncover how convents shaped one of the principal cities of Renaissance Europe. She demonstrates the importance of nuns and nunneries to the booming Florentine textile industry and shows the contributions that ordinary nuns made to Florentine life in their roles as scribes, stewards, artisans, teachers, and community leaders. In doing so, Strocchia argues that the ideals and institutions that defined Florence were influenced in great part by the city's powerful female monastics. Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence shows for the first time how religious women effected broad historical change and helped write the grand narrative of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The book is a valuable text for students and scholars in early modern European history, religion, women's studies, and economic history.

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Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa.Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.

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'Beautiful ... endless, brilliant unforgettable stories' Cerys Matthews, BBC Radio 6‘Combining myth and science, this breathtaking book [is] packed with stunning images' Daily MailAfter the enormous international success of The Phantom Atlas and The Golden Atlas, Edward Brooke-Hitching's brilliant book unveils some of the most beautiful maps and charts ever created during mankind's quest to map the skies above us. This richly illustrated treasury showcases the finest examples of celestial cartography - a glorious genre of map-making often overlooked by modern map books - as well as medieval manuscripts, masterpiece paintings, ancient star catalogues, antique instruments and other appealing curiosities. This is the sky as it has never been presented before: the realm of stars and planets, but also of gods, devils, weather wizards, flying sailors, medieval aliens, mythological animals and rampaging spirits. The reader is taken on a tour of star-obsessed cultures around the world, learning about Tibetan sky burials, star-covered Inuit dancing coats, Mongolian astral prophets and Sir William Herschel's 1781 discovery of Uranus, the first planet to be found since antiquity. Even stranger are the forgotten stories from European history, like the English belief of the Middle Ages in ships that sailed a sea above the clouds, 16th-century German UFO sightings and the Edwardian aristocrat who mistakenly mapped alien-made canals on the surface of Mars.As the intricacies of our universe are today being revealed with unprecedented clarity, there has never been a better time for a highly readable book as beautiful as the night sky to contextualise the scale of these achievements for the general reader.

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