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During the Middle Ages, the Western world translated the incredible Arabic scientific corpus and imported it into Western culture: Arabic philosophy, optics, and physics, as well as alchemy, astrology, and talismanic magic. The line between the scientific and the magical was blurred. According to popular lore, magicians of the Middle Ages were trained in the art of magic in &“magician schools&” located in various metropolitan areas, such as Naples, Athens, and Toledo. It was common knowledge that magic was learned and that cities had schools designed to teach the dark arts. The Spanish city of Toledo, for example, was so renowned for its magic training schools that &“the art of Toledo&...
"Presents and analyzes texts of learned magic written in medieval Central Europe (Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary), and attempts to identify their authors, readers, and collectors"--Provided by publisher.
This book explores an alternate history of the power and agency of 30 Hungarian queens over 400 years by a rigorous examination of the material culture connected with their lives. By researching the objects, images, and spaces, it demonstrates how these women expressed and displayed their power. Queens used material culture and space not only to demonstrate their own power to a wide, international audience, but also to consolidate their own position when it was weakened by external circumstances. Both the public and private image of the queen factors significantly in understanding in her own role at the strongly centralized Hungarian court, and, moreover, how her position and person strengthened and complemented that of the king.
What is a grimoire? The word has a familiar ring to many people, particularly as a consequence of such popular television dramas as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. But few people are sure exactly what it means. Put simply, grimoires are books of spells that were first recorded in the Ancient Middle East and which have developed and spread across much of the Western Hemisphere and beyond over the ensuing millennia. At their most benign, they contain charms and remedies for natural and supernatural ailments and advice on contacting spirits to help find treasures and protect from evil. But at their most sinister they provide instructions on how to manipulate people for corrupt purposes an...
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.
Defining 'magic' is a maddening task. Over the last century numerous philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and theologians have attempted to pin down its essential meaning, sometimes analysing it in such complex and abstruse depth that it all but loses its sense altogether. For this reason, many people often shy away from providing a detailed definition, assuming it is generally understood as the human control of supernatural forces. 'Magic' continues to pervade the popular imagination and idiom. People feel comfortable with its contemporary multiple meanings, unaware of the controversy, conflict, and debate its definition has caused over two and a half millennia. In common usage today ...
This book tells the story of government-sponsored wiretapping in Britain and the United States from the rise of telephony in the 1870s until the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It pays particular attention to the 1990s, which marked one of the most dramatic turns in the history of telecommunications interception. During that time, fiber optic and satellite networks rapidly replaced the copper-based analogue telephone system that had remained virtually unchanged since the 1870s. That remarkable technological advance facilitated the rise of the networked home computer, cellular telephony, and the Internet, and users hailed the dawn of the digital information age. However, security agencies such as ...
This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to create and use enciphered documents, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.
The high degree of internet penetration and its social (and linguistic) effects evidently influence how people, and especially the highly susceptible younger generations, use language. The primary aim of the book is not only to identify the characteristic features of the digital language variety (this has already been done by several works) but to examine how digital communication affects the language of other mediums of communication: orality, handwritten texts, digitally created but not digitally perceived, that is printed texts, including in particular advertisements (which quickly respond to linguistic change). Naturally, the book presents the characteristics of the digital language variety (and coins the term digilect) but only to give a framework to the impact analysis. It is important to document changes in progress and thus direct attention to potential outcomes. The current linguistic change is different from previous ones primarily in its speed and form of spreading, and it not only brings innovative grammatical forms and writing/spelling solutions but may also have far-reaching cultural and educational consequences in the long run.
First discovered in a Hungarian library in 1838, the Rohonc Codex keeps privileged company with some of the most famous unsolved writing systems in the world, notably the Voynich manuscript, the Phaistos Disk, and Linear A. Written entirely in cipher, this 400-year-old, 450-page-long, richly illustrated manuscript initially gained considerable attention but was later dismissed as an apparent forgery. No serious scholar would study it again until the turn of the twenty-first century. This engaging narrative follows historian Benedek Láng’s search to uncover the truth about this thoroughly mysterious book that has puzzled dozens of codebreakers. Láng surveys the fascinating theories associ...