e migration of the Normans across Europe is a well-known and much written about subject. Originating in the principality of Normandy that took its name from the ‘men of the north’ who came from Scandinavia to settle on the French coast from the ninth century onwards, the Normans then established themselves during the eleventh century in two main areas some , mil…
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, three mysterious texts stirredup much debate in the intellectual world: TheFama Fraternitatis(Fame ofthe Fraternity, 1614), theConfessioFraternitatis(Confession of the Fraternity,1615),and,differentfrombutrelatedtoboth,theChymischeHochzeit:ChristianiRosencreutz(Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, 1616).2 While theChemicalWeddingpresents a fict…
f a poll were carried out to establish which form of manuscript, the codex or the roll, the public associated more with the Middle Ages, the result would probably see the codex taking most votes. A monk handling a codex is a stereotypical image of and for the Middle Ages promoted by medieval evidence as much as by modern movie productions such as the film adaptation…
atsura no miya monogatari ("The Tale of Matsura," ca. 1190) is a classicalJapanese tale or romance that belongs to the same category of courtly fiction asMurasaki Shikibu's unsurpassed masterpiece, Genji monogatari ("The Tale ofGenji," ca. 1010). When compared with most of the best-known works of itsgenre, however, Matsura no miya monogatari stands o…
A contemporary, the literary critic Pavel Annenkov, points out that Kovalevsky’s generation was the first in Russia for which a university education was practically obligatory for a civil service career.2 The de-cade after the Napoleonic Wars was also a time of considerable intel-lectual turmoil among Russian students, who were well acquainted with the ideas that had led to revolution in Fran…
A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …
In May 1951, Francisco Franco attended an international social security congressin Madrid. In the audience were experts and officials from across Spain, LatinAmerica, and western Europe, including ministers from various foreign govern-ments and representatives from international bodies such as the InternationalLabour Organization (ILO). Addressing the conference, Franco told delegates thattwo f…
The Dutch limes zone roughly comprises a 50 km wide strip in the middle of the Netherlands, stretching from the North Sea until Germany over a distance of approximately 150 km from west to east. To the north, the zone is bordered by the course of the Rhine, which was established as the northern frontier of the Roman Empire around the middle of the first century CE. The Romans never …
In popular myth Nansen is the archetypal Scandinavian polar explorer – a manly, no- nonsense hero with little time for the sentimentality or plodding amateurism of his British contemporaries.1 However, Nansen’s account of this expedition, Farthest North (1897), reveals someone with a deeply romantic outlook whose musings on the Arctic ‘dreamland’ have much in common with the…
We believe that by joining forces and harmonizing diverse theories, sources and methods of different academic traditions like those from China and Japan, the field of global history receives a new impulse through diverse case studies. The constant participation of special-ists in this field is crucial, as they share their experiences and new …