Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West

Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe

The Andalusian jurist Ab? Bakr al-?ur??sh? (d. 1126) was once asked whether or not it was permissible to eat cheese imported into Alexandria from the Christian territories along the northern coastline of the Mediterranean. The question clearly intrigued al-?ur??sh?, since he went to considerable lengths to research the subject before issuing his final response. Naturally, he checked the princip...

Challenges in Annotating Medieval Latin Charters

No annotation guidelines concerning substandard Latin are presently available. This paper describes an annotation style of substandard Latin that supplements the method designed for standard Latin by the Perseus Latin Dependency Treebank and the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Each word of the corpus can be assigned only one morphological analysis. In our system, the analysis can be either function...

Magic and Femininity as Power in Medieval Literature

Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200)

A TALE FROM twelfth-century Germany introduces this lecture. It concerns, a kindly woman and her neighbour whose son was very ill. In an effort to help save the child, she produced a pebble and recommended to the child’s mother that she make a revitalising drink by steeping it in water. There was nothing unusual about this sort of domestic remedy, yet her wellintentioned iniative met with rebuf...

Lecture 5 : Latin Squares and Magic

Today's application is to magic! Not the friendship kind, though 1 ; instead, we're going to talk about magic squares, an incredibly old piece of mathematics that we can study using Latin squares. Definition. A magic square is a n × n grid filled with the integers {0, 1,. .. n 2 − 1}, such that • each number is used exactly once in our entire grid, and • the sum of all of the entries along any ...