This article argues that balm, or balsam, was, by the late medieval period, believed to be a panacea, capable of healing wounds and illnesses, and also preventing putrefaction. Natural history and pharmacological texts on balm from the ancient and late antique periods emphasized specific qualities of balm, especially its heat; these were condensed and repeated in medieval encyclopedias. The rar...

Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and or...

Medieval manuscripts or other written documents from that period contain valuable information about people, religion, and politics of the medieval period, making the study of medieval documents a necessary pre-requisite to gaining in-depth knowledge of medieval history. Although tool-less study of such documents is possible and has been ongoing for centuries, much subtle information remains loc...

Naturally occurring substances mentioned in medieval medical literatures currently have, and will continue to have, a crucial place in drug discovery. Avicenna was a Persian physician who is known as the most influential medical writers in the Middle ages. Avicenna`s Canon of Medicine, the most famous books in the history of medicine, presents a clear and organized summary of all the medical kn...

The treatment of medieval texts is a particular challenge for parsers. I compare how two dependency parsers, one graph-based, the other transition-based, perform on Old French, facing some typical problems of medieval texts: graphical variation, relatively free word order, and syntactic variation of several parameters over a diachronic period of about 300 years. Both parsers were trained and ev...

AIM To analyze and compare the demographic profiles and disease frequencies of early (6th-9th century) and late (10th-13th century) medieval skeletal series from continental Croatia. METHODS Age and sex distributions in three early (n=277) and six late (n=175) medieval skeletal series were compared. All skeletons were analyzed for the presence of dental enamel hypoplasia, periostitis, trauma,...

OBJECTIVES This study provides the first large scale analysis of the age at which adolescents in medieval England entered and completed the pubertal growth spurt. This new method has implications for expanding our knowledge of adolescent maturation across different time periods and regions. METHODS In total, 994 adolescent skeletons (10-25 years) from four urban sites in medieval England (AD ...

Hallux valgus is the abnormal lateral deviation of the great toe. The principal cause is biomechanical, specifically the habitual use of footwear which constricts the toes. In this study, descriptions of the anatomical changes of hallux valgus from published cadaveric and clinical studies were used to generate criteria for identifying the condition in ancient skeletal remains. The value of syst...