The Zvi Yavetz Graduate School of Historical Studies

The database is a breakthrough revision in a digitized format of Reinhold Röhricht’s original Regesta regni Hierosolymitani  (1893-1904). The 2016 Revised Regesta offers an expanded and corrected calendar of all the charters, other legal or formal documents and letters and inscriptions originating  in the Latin East between 1098 and 1291.
All charters are rendered in English, in the hope that it will be useful to university teachers who want to introduce students to this extremely valuable range of medieval sources.

“The ability to write is not always the same thing as the ability to compose and comprehend in a fully textual way, for indeed one who writes (a scribe) may simply be a skilled practitioner […] Similarly, learning by hearing material and reciting aloud should not be confused with ignorance of reading[…]” (Mary Carruthers)

We seek to examine the variety of ways through which women engaged with medieval literary culture, and the role played by oral tradition and memory in what modern scholarship terms medieval literacy and the production of medieval texts, particularly in by women.
The goal of the panel(s) is to discuss different aspects of female literacy among the religious and the laity,  and rethink female literacy in a way that would shed light on how medieval women actively engaged with the literary culture, both sacred and secular, of their time and place.
We wish to table the suggestion that it may be time to move beyond the modern-day mechanical notion of literacy as movement of hands and eyes on a page.

We welcome papers on subjects including but not limited to:
* Gendered memory
* Writing from memory
* Acoustic/auditory reading and recollection
* Lay literacy
* Mnemonic triggers
* Personal memory, self-fashioning and identity
* Rethinking the terminology of literate and illiterate
* The image of the reading woman

We invite papers dealing with any discipline, region and medieval period, which  would tackle the subject from a variety of angles.
We seek proposals that draw on a broad range of methodologies for 15-20 minute papers. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words to Einat Klafter ([email protected]) by August 31st, 2017.

Please feel free to circulate among interested parties.

“The ability to write is not always the same thing as the ability to compose and comprehend in a fully textual way, for indeed one who writes (a scribe) may simply be a skilled practitioner […] Similarly, learning by hearing material and reciting aloud should not be confused with ignorance of reading[…]” (Mary Carruthers)

We seek to examine the variety of ways through which women engaged with medieval literary culture, and the role played by oral tradition and memory in what modern scholarship terms medieval literacy and the production of medieval texts, particularly in by women.

The goal of the panel(s) is to discuss different aspects of female literacy among the religious and the laity,  and rethink female literacy in a way that would shed light on how medieval women actively engaged with the literary culture, both sacred and secular, of their time and place.
We wish to table the suggestion that it may be time to move beyond the modern-day mechanical notion of literacy as movement of hands and eyes on a page.

We welcome papers on subjects including but not limited to:
* Gendered memory
* Writing from memory
* Acoustic/auditory reading and recollection
* Lay literacy
* Mnemonic triggers
* Personal memory, self-fashioning and identity
* Rethinking the terminology of literate and illiterate
* The image of the reading woman

We invite papers dealing with any discipline, region and medieval period, which  would tackle the subject from a variety of angles.
We seek proposals that draw on a broad range of methodologies for 15-20 minute papers. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words to Einat Klafter ([email protected]) by August 31st, 2017.

Please feel free to circulate among interested parties.

An interesting subject in military history is the Punic elephant warfare. 20th century scholars were convinced that the only source for professional personnel to train and ride elephants was India. Another assumption was that among the African forest elephants used by Carthage at least one of Hannibal’s elephants was an Asian elephant. The purposes of this paper are to suggest that: (a) those assumptions based on weak evidences do not stand. No Asian elephant was used by Carthage or any Indian personnel. The taming, training and riding of elephants in North West Africa was done by locals. (b) Therefore in the early stages of Punic elephant warfare the Carthaginians lacking the fundamentals of this art did not use their elephants effectively.
(c) Eventually this knowledge was brought to Carthage by a Spartan mercenary. (d) The Barca family’s commanders learned from him
and improved their elephant tactics from their own experience.

My thesis deals with the character and contribution of Vera Weizmann in the creation of patronage and art collecting in Israel during the Yishuv and the first decade of the State of Israel, with a focus on the appearance of Villa Weizmann in Rehovot. Her interest and involvement in shaping of the Villa's appearance is a case study allowing insight to the world of women who disappeared under the "Halo Effect" of their famous partners.

The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher SJ is among the prominent writers of seventeenth-century Europe, and his China illustrata (1667) was one of the most celebrated and influential works on China of the period. The present essay examines the contexts and sources for Kircher’s description of the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the foreign Qing dynasty, a monumental event of global significance that attracted the attention of European scholarly circles and foreign powers alike. Strangely, while Kircher’s network of social contacts provided him access to the best sources available on the matter, including eyewitnesses, as this essay outlines, his presentation of the events in China is odd, inaccurate, and, at times, misleading.
However, a closer examination of Kircher’s sources — especially the first-hand accounts of events from fellow-Jesuits visiting Rome — reveals tensions, disagreements, and conflicting narratives that existed within the Jesuit China mission during the transition period and might have influenced the author. Kircher’s intellectual enterprise was always intertwined with his religious piety and promotion of the Society of Jesus. Thus, this essay proposes that his ‘mistakes’ can be seen as an attempt to reconcile contradictory voices among the Jesuit missionaries and to offer a unified narrative to European readers, reshaped to fit the author’s devout vision of history as well as the religiopolitical needs of the Society of Jesus and its China mission.