During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them...
This dissertation investigates the evolution of national identification and assimilative trends among Germans who remained behind in the Czech lands from the end of the postwar expulsions in 1946 through the Czech Republic’s entry to the European Union in 2004. My primary lens of analysis is associational life, or formal...
“The Vicarious Middle Ages” investigates the religious and cultural history of proxy penance where medieval Christians believed that it was possible to suffer on behalf of another person. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth...
In March 1977 an exceptionally strong earthquake struck Romania ruled by the communist president and dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his regime. The policies and actions implemented and undertaken in the days, weeks, and year that followed were forms of aftershocks. The Ceauşescu regime modeled the 1977 earthquake recovery on previous...
This dissertation explores the extent to which Portuguese theologian, papal penitentiary, bishop, and abbot Andreas de Escobar, O.S.B. (1348-1448) benefited from contemporary trends in manuscript culture and thereby functioned as a late-medieval public intellectual. Recent research suggests that early-fifteenth-century university-trained theology masters used their expertise and authority to intervene into...
This project brings together five editions of a relatively under-studied grimoire, the
"Enchiridion Leonis Papæ", and analyses them for the first time in an academic format. The analysis examines what little has been written about the "Enchiridion Leonis Papæ" as well as its legendary associations with Pope Leo III and...