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...

This article examines a fifteenth-century remedy book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299, and describes its collection of 314 medieval medical prescriptions. The recipes are organised broadly from head to toe, and often several remedies are offered for the same complaint. Some individual recipes are transcribed with modern English translations. The few non-recipe texts are also noted. ...

RICHARD C. DALES, The scientific achievement of the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973, 8vo, pp. ix, 182, illus., $12.50. Professor Dales has selected extracts from primary sources to illustrate early medieval scientific thought, from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and presents them with lengthy introductions in the form of an historical narrative. There are...

Notions and interpretations of the peasantry of early medieval Castile evolved significantly during the twentieth century, along the lines of major historiographical changes. After a period largely dominated by the paradigm of legal and institutional history, the incorporation of social and economic approaches in the 1960s gave way to a significant increase in the volume of research and a deepe...

Dream narration has a lengthy history in the Western literary tradition, functioning as the earliest iteration of the frame story. Dream narratives can be found in the Bible, and in Greek and Latin classical literature, but perhaps reached a zenith during the Medieval period, when dream visions became a central narratological strategy in theological texts and secular romances alike. Deriving fr...

Throughout history, opium has been used as a base for the opioid class of drugs used to suppress the central nervous system. Opium is a substance extracted from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.). Its consumption and medicinal application date back to antiquity. In the medieval period, Avicenna, a famous Persian scholar (980-1037 AD) described poppy under the entry Afion of his medical enc...

A proxy rainfall record for northeastern South Africa based on carbon isotope analysis of four baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) trees shows centennial and decadal scale variability over the last 1,000 years. The record is in good agreement with a 200-year tree ring record from Zimbabwe, and it indicates the existence of a rainfall dipole between the summer and winter rainfall areas of South Afric...