Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators

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...

“i Saw the Lord”: Observations on the Christian Reception History of Isaiah 6

In the pages to follow I shall examine exegetical, doctrinal, hymnographic, and iconographic productions that illustrate the rich reception history of Isa 6 in early Christianity. It appears that the earliest, Christological interpretation of this text was superseded by a Trinitarian one and that the exegetical shift occurred first in doctrinal and exegetical writings, while hymnography and ico...

Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet

Slaves and Warriors in Early Medieval

The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the ...

Political Theology and the Theology of Politics: Carl Schmitt and Medieval Christian Political Thought1

In societies where religion plays a strong and important role, the institutions of the society reflect the religion. Yet in societies where religion plays a more secondary role to say that all political concepts are secularized theological concepts is an overstatement. While Carl Schmitt does make a persuasive argument on the role of religion in political thought, he is also mistaken. In this a...