The origins of dietetics understood as "the systematic control of food and drink in order to conserve health or combat disease"1 may be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus, written chiefly between 430 and 330 BC. In Tradition in medicine the author argues that in the beginning man must have eaten the same food as the animals, that is, the produce of the earth, fruits, vegetables and grass. Th...

interesting comments by earlier owners and readers. There are two appendices, one of documents, the other an up-to-date catalogue of Giovanni's manuscripts that supersedes those by Zazzeri and by Baader. Detailed attention is given to matters codicological, although information on Giovanni's scribes is not always easy to locate in the dense entries. Splendid photographs, of the library, of Giov...

We describe the reconstruction of a medieval building as an example of how the use of 3D computer graphics can facilitate the reconstruction of an ancient site. We suggest that different stages of a virtual reconstruction imply the use of different rendering techniques, as the style of visualization has a significant impact on both the reconstruction process and the presentation to non-expert v...

Il existait au Moyen-âge des pensées profondes et raffinées du choix social, surtout chez Ramon Llull, (ca 1232-1316) et Nicolaus Krebs, surnommé ‘de Cusa’ ou ‘Cusanus’ (1401-64). Deux règles fondamentales du choix social moderne, c'est-à-dire celles de Copeland (généralisation de la règle de Condorcet) et de Borda, ont été proposées par Llull et Cusanus plusieurs siècles avant l'«âge d'or» du ...

The available mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data do not point to clear genetic relationships between current Tuscans and the Bronze-Age inhabitants of Tuscany, the Etruscans. To understand how and when such a genetic discontinuity may have arisen, we extracted and typed the mtDNAs of 27 medieval Tuscans from an initial sample of 61, spanning a period between the 10th and 15th century AD. We then te...

[1] During the Medieval Climate Anomaly, North America experienced severe droughts and widespread mobilization of dune fields that persisted for decades. We use an atmosphere general circulation model, forced by a tropical Pacific sea surface temperature reconstruction and changes in the land surface consistent with estimates of dune mobilization (conceptualized as partial devegetation), to inv...

How was a medieval manuscript meant to be read? This is a question that has concerned me for a long time in my work with Old Swedish manuscripts from Vadstena Abbey. In many manuscripts we can find traces of the historical reading situation; for example, pointing hands, marginal notes, etc. Such signals had an important function for the medieval reader, but they are rarely put forward in modern...

Shotgun metagenomics provides a powerful assumption-free approach to the recovery of pathogen genomes from contemporary and historical material. We sequenced the metagenome of a calcified nodule from the skeleton of a 14th-century middle-aged male excavated from the medieval Sardinian settlement of Geridu. We obtained 6.5-fold coverage of a Brucella melitensis genome. Sequence reads from this g...

In this study we apply an evidence-based approach to model demographic fluctuations and their corresponding impact on land use during the Roman and early-medieval periods in the Rhine-Meuse delta in the present-day Netherlands. Past population numbers are reconstructed based on Roman and early-medieval settlement patterns. Corresponding impacts of these demographic fluctuations on potential lan...

This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal andother precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indianand early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for suchcomparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the frag­mented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and sphe...