Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Maria Luisa  Ardizzone. Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+231.

The article focuses on the attribution of one gold and two copper coins discovered by the Russian Archaeological Mission of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Giza. Coins come from mixed fillings of the burial shafts of the Ancient Egyptian rock-cut tombs of the second half of the 3rd millennium B.C. According to the archaeological context, the coins belong to the stages of the destruction of ancient burials that took place during the Middle Ages and Modern times. One of the coins is a Mamluk fals dating back to the first half of the 14th century A.D., the other two belong to the 1830s — the Ottoman period in Egypt, and are attributed as gold a buchuk hayriye and its copper imitation. Coins are rare for the ancient necropolis and are mainly limited to specimens of the 19th–20th centuries. In general, taking into account the numerous finds of other objects — fragments of ceramic, porcelain and glass utensils, metal ware, glass and copper decorations, we can talk about the dynamic nature of human activity in the ancient Egyptian cemetery in the 2nd millennium A.D. Egyptians and European travelers used the ancient rock-cut tombs as permanent habitats or temporary sites, leaving material traces of their stay.

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Richard Mackenney, Venice as the Polity of Mercy: Guilds, Confraternities, and the Social Order, c. 1250–c. 1650. Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019, xiii, 471.

Mediaevistik ◽

10.3726/med.2019.01.167 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 551-552

Author(s):

Thomas Willard

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

Merchant Of Venice ◽

Legal Scholar ◽

University Of Toronto ◽

Italian Studies ◽

The Merchant Of Venice ◽

The Social ◽

University Town ◽

The University

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.

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Management of the Dutch Waddensea

Water Science & Technology ◽

10.2166/wst.1984.0081 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 16 (3-4) ◽

pp. 485-495 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

D Vreugdenhil

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Human Activities ◽

Nature Reserve ◽

The Other ◽

Hydrological Processes ◽

Dutch Government ◽

Shallow Sea ◽

Management Objectives ◽

Late Middle Ages

It was not until the late Middle Ages that the sea penetrated far into the interior of The Netherlands, thus flooding three quarters of a million hectares of land. Since then half a million hectares have been reclaimed from the sea. The Dutch Government chose to preserve the remaining quarter of a million hectares of shallow sea with mudflats of the Waddensea as a nature reserve. The management objectives are at one hand to preserve all characteristic habitats and species with a minimal interference by human activities in geomorphological and hydrological processes, and at the other hand to guarantee the safety against the sea of the inhabitants of the adjacent mainland and islands and to facilitate certain economic and recreational uses of the Waddensea without jeopardizing the natural qualities. These objectives are being elaborated in managementplans.

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Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

10.1093/oso/9780198777601.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Peter Coss

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Thirteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

The State ◽

The Other ◽

Great Work ◽

Early Middle Ages ◽

The One ◽

The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

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