Modern-day museums abound with ornate medieval and renaissance woven tapestries, which have been meticulously restored throughout the centuries. Although weaving can nowadays be described as a “dying art,” history tells a much different story about this trade and the abilities of 16 Century artisans. These masterful artisans could repair a woven textile such that the repair was virtually “invis...

This paper challenges the growing consensus in the literature (Stone, 2005; Dodds, 2007) that medieval English peasants and manorial managers were price responsive in their production decisions. Using prices of and acreages planted with wheat, barley, and oats on 49 manors held by the bishop of Winchester from 1349-70, we estimate price elasticities of supply for each grain in aggregate and on ...

Examination Committee Chair: András Kovács (Nationalism Studies Program, CEU) Members: Gerhard Jaritz (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU) Gábor Buzási (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Zsuzsanna Urbach (Museum of Fine Arts) Béla Zsolt Szakács (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU) Carsten Wilke (Departments of History, Medieval Studies, and Nationalism Program, CEU) External readers: Hans-W...

The possible role that tropical Pacific SSTs played in driving the megadroughts over North America during the medieval period is addressed. Fossil coral records from the Palmyra Atoll are used to derive tropical Pacific SSTs for the period from A.D. 1320 to A.D. 1462 and show overall colder conditions as well as extended multidecadal La Niña–like states. The reconstructed SSTs are used to force...

Spring-summer winds from the south move moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Plains. Rainfall in the growing season sustains prairie grasses that keep large dunes in the Nebraska Sand Hills immobile. Longitudinal dunes built during the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1000 years before the present) record the last major period of sand mobility. These dunes are oriented NW-SE and are compo...

Much information on medicine and the use of materia medica in the medieval period exists, but it is mainly based on the vast medical literature of that period both in the East and theWest. Such books composed in the Arab world cover various subjects: medical theories and doctrines, the maintenance of good health (regimen sanitatis) or preventive medicine, different diseases and ailments, and qu...

The western United States is experiencing a severe multiyear drought that is unprecedented in some hydroclimatic records. Using gridded drought reconstructions that cover most of the western United States over the past 1200 years, we show that this drought pales in comparison to an earlier period of elevated aridity and epic drought in AD 900 to 1300, an interval broadly consistent with the Med...

Two Himalayan ice cores display a factor-two decreasing trend of air content over the past two millennia, in contrast to the relatively stable values in Greenland and Antarctica ice cores over the same period. Because the air content can be related with the relative frequency and intensity of melt phenomena, its variations along the Himalayan ice cores provide an indication of summer temperatur...

Both direct and indirect evidence implies that England experienced a lengthy period of stagnant or declining population during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Black Death of 1348-1349 had brought about profound changes in England's agrarian economy, and this subsequent demographic depression is most commonly interpreted by historians as the result of plague mortality, recurrin...

Lighting either natural or not in the european medieval architecture (roman period) is studied and simulated around a special and famous example. "Notre-Dame de Paris" cathedral and its polychromy are studied for many years and, today the remains of polychromy are very reduced. This prestigious monument is then a unique opportunity to study the complex relationships between light, paint and gil...