Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems aim to teach a language providing technology and motivation to the user. They allow us to implement pedagogical content, motivational techniques and corrective feedback. On this basis, we present Medieval Adventure, which is a CALL system that aims to teach Portuguese’s basic levels to adults. Medieval Adventure teaches a second language mainly...

While the study of dental wear has enjoyed wide popularity for over 100 years, dental chipping, or microfractures of the tooth crown, has received little attention. Observations on dental chipping in populations from the Arctic (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska) and Europe (medieval Norway and Spain) reveal patterns of microtrauma that provide insights into the dietary and tooth-tool use behaviour o...

Food is one of the key elements for people to survive all over the time. Unlike today’s highly industrialized society, food and its production activities had much higher and significant impacts on the medieval English society. Food vastly changed medieval English’s life, and it is more evident when famines or population changes came. Thus, observing the food condition, their agricultural produc...

Neuropathic pain is supposed to be a post-renaissance described medical entity. Although it is often believed that John Fothergill (1712-1780) provided the first description of this condition in 1773, a review of the medieval Persian medical writings will show the fact that neuropathic pain was a medieval-originated concept. "Auojae Asab" [Nerve-originated Pain[ was used as a medical term in me...

Precipitation over the last 3800 years has been reconstructed using modern pollen calibration and precipitation data. A transfer function was then performed via the linear method of partial least squares. By calculating precipitation anomalies, it is estimated that precipitation deficits were greater than surpluses, reaching 21% and <9%, respectively. The period from 50 BC to 800 AD was the dri...

Although the connection between head and stomach and hence the condition known as "gastric headache" was well known to the ancients, it has received little attention since the early 20th century. Herein, we review the teachings of the medieval Persian physicians about the gastric headache along with the related signs, symptoms, types and causes. The medieval Persian scholars adopted the main id...

Medieval analyses of molecular propositions include many non-truthfunctional connectives in addition to the standard modern binary connectives (conjunction, disjunction, and conditional). Two types of non-truthfunctional molecular propositions considered by a number of 13thand 14th-century authors are temporal and local propositions, which combine atomic propositions with ‘while’ and ‘where’. D...

The aim of the present paper has been to explore the medieval evidence on miraculous healings of paralysis and to confront it with modern medical knowledge. Paralysis has been selected as a model for such a study and St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) as a model of a saintly healer. Analyzed were the primary sources and modern literature. Paralysis was found to be among the most frequent disea...

Popular texts typically assert that guilds of craftsmen `̀ monopolized’ ’ markets in medieval England. Norman Cantor’s Medieval Reader declares `̀ craft guilds’ . . . main purpose and activity was narrow regulation of industrial productivity in order to restrain competition’ ’ (Cantor 1994, p. 278). Douglass North’s Structure and Change in Economic History asserts `̀ . . . guilds organized to prot...

We present two new multi-proxy reconstructions of the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere (30–90 N) mean temperature: a two-millennia long reconstruction reaching back to 1 AD and a 500-yr long reconstruction reaching back to 1500 AD. The reconstructions are based on compilations of 32 and 91 proxies, respectively, of which only little more than half pass a screening procedure and are included i...