Editor's Introduction: Esoteric Traditions in Medieval Japan

Esoteric healing traditions: a conceptual overview.

This paper presents, for the first time, a comprehensive scholarly examination of the history and principles of major traditions of esoteric healing. After a brief conceptual overview of esoteric religion and healing, summaries are provided of eight major esoteric traditions, including descriptions of beliefs and practices related to health, healing, and medicine. These include what are termed ...

Medieval herbals: the illustrative traditions

This nicely produced volume offers both more and less than its title promises. Begun as a dissertation on a group of late medieval herbals in Latin and French, including Wellcome 626, it studies the iconography of plants in a wide variety of manuscripts, from the Johnson papyrus, Wellcome 5753, written in Greek around AD 400, via Arabic manuscripts to Latin manuscripts of the fifteenth century ...

Comparing Offertory Melodies of Five Medieval Christian Chant Traditions

In this study, we compare the melodies of five medieval chant traditions: Gregorian, Old Roman, Milanese, Beneventan, and Mozarabic. We present a newly created dataset containing several hundreds of offertory melodies, which are the longest and most complex within the total body of chant melodies. For each tradition, we train ngram language models on a representation of the chants as sequence o...

Healthcare [Guest editors' introduction]

W e’re moving closer to realizing pervasive computing devices that can monitor our health status, both individually and as a community. Imagine what doctors could do with ECG data collected on a more regular basis, as people carry on their daily activities. The ability to monitor day-to-day heart data would profoundly affect how the medical community tracks our individual health status. Likewis...

Focus: Guest Editors’ Introduction