Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Public Policy And Religion In The Pandemic: U.S. Constitution And The First Amendment, Stephen Covell, Diane Riggs, Cameron Borg

Modules for Teaching Pandemic Response and Religion in the USA

The following teaching module is designed for high school and college level instructors who seek to teach a lesson on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the relationship between church and state. The teaching module features a lesson plan, case studies, and assignments that can be incorporated as the instructor sees fit. This teaching module was created by Western Michigan University's Department of Comparative Religion.

Simon De Montfort Et Le Gouvernement : Statut Des Femmes Dans Les Statuts De Pamiers (Art. 46) Avant La Magna Carta, Marjolaine Raguin-Barthelmebs

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Promulgated at Pamiers (Languedoc, France), 1^stDecember 1212 by Simon de Montfort after its first great victory during the Albigensian Crusade, those Statutes (juridical texts) are known as the introductory act for the Coutume of Paris in Languedoc, and more specifically regarding heirs rights. Redacted for the administration of newly conquest territories, the establishment of peace and to promote catholic faith against heresy and Languedocians owners of the land, theses Statutes dispose on women in their three final articles. More particularly, the article 46 concerns nobles and heirs women and decides, thanks to matrimony institution, who (and how) they …

Disart: Redefining The Construct Of Participation, Jennifer Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

DisArt, an arts and culture organization based in Grand Rapids, MI, provided the cover art for the Spring 2018 issue of the Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). The piece, a somatic sculpture by Petra Kuppers, was featured at the 2015 DisArt Festival in Grand Rapids. Kuppers is a disability culture activist and community performance artist who connects people, both disabled and nondisabled, in public spaces. DisArt’s mission is to increase the participation of disabled people in our communities through disability art exhibitions, cutting edge public events, and consultation. In a recent interview, DisArt co-founders and executive directors, Dr. Christopher …

The Unifying Power Of Education, Keagan Potts, Jenji Learn

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

• Without Expertise or Experience: Philosophizing When Your Students Know You Know Nothing
• Segregated Students — Segregated Society: The Primacy of Education in Ending Hate
• Combatting Emerging Resegregation: Teaching Those in Power to Empower

The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne

The Medieval Globe

This study explores the relationship between documentary-legal prescriptions of slavery and actual practice in late medieval Ethiopia. It does so in light of a newly discovered edict against the enslavement of freeborn Christians and the commercial sale of Christians to non-Christian owners, issued in 1548 by King Gälawdéwos. It demonstrates that this edict emerged from a dramatic and violent encounter between the neighboring Sultanate of Adal, which was supported by Muslim powers, and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which had the support of expanding European powers in the region. The edict was therefore issued to reaffirm and clarify the principles …

Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez

The Medieval Globe

This article compares and contrasts pre-Columbian indigenous customary law regarding land possession and use with the legal norms and concepts gradually imposed and implemented by the Spanish colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Natives accepted oral histories of possession going back as many as ten generations as proof of a claim to land. Indigenous custom also provided that a family could claim as much land as it could use for as long as it could use it: labor established rights of possession and use. The Spanish introduced the concept of private property …

Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

The Medieval Globe

This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chinese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo Geniza holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the earliest dated and localized query about the status of ṣīnī vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded …

The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner

The Medieval Globe

This article models a methodology for recovering the substance and nature of the Aztec legal tradition by interrogating reports of precontact indigenous behavior in the works of early colonial ethnographers, as well as in pictorial manuscripts and their accompanying oral performances. It calls for a new, richly recontextualized approach to the study of a medieval civilization whose sophisticated legal and jurisprudential practices have been fundamentally obscured by a long process of decontextualization and the anachronistic applications of modern Western paradigms.

Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn

The Medieval Globe

This introduction presents and draws together the articles and themes featured in this special issue of The Medieval Globe, “Legal Worlds and Legal Encounters.”

The Medieval Globe 2.2 (2016)

The Medieval Globe

No abstract provided.

Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner

The Medieval Globe

This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal and other precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indian and early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for such comparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the fragmented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and spheres of authority existed side-by-side, make a direct comparison complex. Moreover, the time slippage between what scholarship understands to be the “early medieval” period in each region needs to be taken into account, particularly given the persistence of some provisions and the adapatation or abandonment of …

Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson

The Medieval Globe

Medieval sumptuary law has been receiving renewed scholarly attention in recent decades. But sumptuary laws, despite their ubiquity, have rarely been considered comprehensively and comparatively. This essay calls attention to this problem and suggests a number of topics for investigation, with specific reference to the first phase of European sumptuary legislation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that comparative study demonstrates that this chronology closely parallels the development of the so-called “Western fashion system” and that the ubiquity of sketchy or nonexistent enforcement is evidence for the symbolic importance of sumptuary legislation, rather than its instrumentality. Comparison across …

Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.

The Medieval Globe

In order to understand the legal use and significance of documents in medieval India, we need to start from the contemporaneous legal categories found in the Sanskrit scholastic corpus called dharmaśāstra. By comparing these categories with actual historical documents and inscriptions, we gain better insight into the encounter of pan-Indian legal discourse in Sanskrit and regional laws in vernacular languages. The points of congruence and transgression in this encounter will facilitate a nuanced history of documents and their use beyond unhelpfully broad categories of written and oral. A new translation of one major scholastic discussion of documents is presented as …

The Failure Of Counsel: Curial Corruption In Book Vi Of The Vox Clamantis, Robert J. Meindl

Accessus

The king's court is the final element in Gower's analysis of the law in Book VI of the Vox Clamantis prior to the speculum principis that is the book's climax. Having discussed the men of law, judges, sheriffs, jurors, and bailiffs in chapters one through six, the poet now finds fault in chapter seven with the various advisers who surround the king for the purpose of providing him useful counsel in governing the realm. They, too, are found wanting in an analysis of the current situation in England.

Crispr Humans: Ethics At The Edge Of Science, Insoo Hyun

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

No abstract provided.

The Wooden Doctrine: Basketball, Moral Character, And The Successful Life, Janelle Dewitt

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

No abstract provided.

The Germans And Their Nazi Past: To What Extent Have They Accepted Responsibility?, Martin Hille

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

No abstract provided.

Tilting Toward The Light: Translating The Medieval World On The Ming-Mongolian Frontier, Carla Nappi

The Medieval Globe

Ming China maintained relationships with neighboring peoples such as the Mongols by educating bureaucrats trained to translate many different foreign languages. While the reference works these men used were designed to facilitate their work, they also conveyed a specific vision of the past and a taxonomy of cultural differences that constitute valuable historical sources in their own right, illuminating the worldview of the Chinese-Mongolian frontier.

Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler

The Medieval Globe

This essay explores how the poetry collection Wakan rōeishū becomes an important allusive referent for two medieval Japanese works, the travelogue Kaidōki and the nō play Tsunemasa. In particular, it focuses on how Chinese poems from the collection become the means for describing Japanese spaces and their links to power, in the context of a changing political landscape.

The Painter, The Warrior, And The Sultan: The World Of Marco Polo In Three Portraits, Sharon Kinoshita

The Medieval Globe

In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial theory, Marco Polo is often cast as a quintessentially Western observer of Asian cultures. This essay seeks to break his text out of the binaries in which it is frequently understood. Returning the text to its original title, “The Description of the World,” it reconstructs the diversity of late thirteenth-century Asia through the portraits of three figures who were Marco’s contemporaries.

Towards A Connected History Of Equine Cultures In South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) Horses And “Horsemania” In Thirteenth-Century South India, Elizabeth Lambourn

The Medieval Globe

This article explores ways that the concept of equine cultures, developed thus far principally in European and/or early modern and colonial contexts, might translate to premodern South Asia. As a first contribution to a history of equine matters in South Asia, it focuses on the maritime circulation of horses from the Middle East to Peninsular India in the thirteenth century, examining the different ways that this phenomenon is recorded in textual and material sources and exploring their potential for writing a new, more connected history of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles

The Medieval Globe

Large numbers of outsiders were integrated into premodern Islamic society through the institution of slavery. Many were boys of non-Muslim parents drafted into the army, and some rose to become powerful political figures; in Egypt, after the death of Ayyubid sultan al-Salih (r. 1240–49), they formed a dynasty known as the Mamluks. For slave concubines, the route to power was different: Shajar al-Durr, the concubine of al-Salih, gained enormous status when she gave birth to his son and later governed as regent in her son’s name, converting to Islam after her husband’s death and then reigning as sultan in her …

Identity In Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich In The Interstices Of Medieval European History, Christian Raffensperger

The Medieval Globe

The politics of kinship and of monarchy in medieval eastern Europe are typically constructed within the framework of the modern nation-state, read back into the past. The example of Boris Kolomanovich, instead, highlights the horizontal interconnectivity of medieval Europe and its neighbors and demonstrates the malleability of individual identity within kinship webs, as well as the creation of situational kinship networks to advance individuals’ goals.

Periodization And “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation, Kathleen Davis, Michael Puett

The Medieval Globe

The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material effects of the becoming of the Middle Ages and its relationship to conditions of globalization. On the other hand, “the medieval globe” brings to bear a comparative focus that does not ask when and …

Editor’S Preface, Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

No abstract provided.

The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

No abstract provided.

Vulnerability, Preventability, And Responsibility: Exploring Some Normative Implications Of The Human Condition, Daniel E. Wueste

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Presented March 17, 2015. Papers presented for the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University.

“Nede Hath No Law”: The State Of Exception In Gower And Langland, Conrad J. Van Dijk

Accessus

This article discusses the use of the legal maxim necessity knows no law in the works of William Langland and John Gower. Whereas Langland’s usage has stirred up great controversy, Gower’s unique application of the canon law adage has received hardly any attention. On the surface, it is difficult to think of two authors less alike, and the way in which they relate the concept of necessity to different subjects (the poverty debate, fin amour) seems to support that feeling. Yet this article argues that reading Langland and Gower side by side is mutually illuminating. Specifically, this article reveals …

Anorexia/Bulimia, Transcendence, And The Potential Impact Of Romanticized/Sexualized Death Imagery, Heather D. Schild

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Presented November 10, 2014. Papers presented for the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University

Semper Venalis: Gower's Avaricious Lawyers, Robert Meindl

Accessus

The first three chapters of the sixth book of the Vox Clamantis (lines 1-248) comprise a harsh critique of the many avaricious lawyers who, in Gower’s opinion, have come to dominate their profession to the disadvantage of English society in the late fourteenth century. Driven exclusively by their appetite for possessions, they have forgotten the biblical model presented in Psalm 14 that specifies the obligation of the good man to assist without recompense his neighbor’s search for justice. Falsely claiming to be men of law and inheritors of the biblical model of the good man, the causidici (as Gower calls …