Publisher’s blurb which also has a detailed list of the contents: Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Filaha Texts Project and website at http://www.filaha.org which focuses on medieval Arabic farming manuals and their manuscripts. The FTP should be of interest to those engaged in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Historical Geography, Environmental History, Medieval History, Agricultural History and Traditional Knowledge.
The FTP sets out to publicise the latest research on the Arabic Books of Filaha, providing bio-bibliographic profiles on each of the authors, including notices of all existing manuscripts, published editions, etc. Also provided are a number of Arabic texts and English translations, as well as various scholarly resources (bibliography, glossaries, articles, etc). At the heart of the Project lies a collaborative translation platform that allows a text to be translated by multiple translators at the same time. Ultimately, we hope to be able to publish facsimiles of the manuscripts themselves and full English translations. We encourage all those interested to register as members of the FT Network (see Community page) allowing them to participate in the Forum and Translation Platform. The FTP is conceived as a collaborative project. Any corrections/suggestions and contributions in terms of articles, images, content, etc. will be most welcome.

This project is in many ways interesting for our project but especially because it makes available Arabic medieval texts  which are perfectly suited to add to our own research but also because of its community based research approach, which is something the MPS also wants to build on. We will follow the growth of this project with excitement!

Anne Van Arsdall, Helmut W. Klug, Paul Blanz: The mandrake plant and its legend: a new perspective.

This paper demonstrates how the contemporary legend about mandrake plant evolved from classical through early-modern times. A major misconception about the Middle Ages and the era directly preceding it is an assumption that the different elements of the mandrake legend were always widespread and well-known. Our paper stresses the importance of distinguishing different stages in the mandrake legend in the centuries from ca. A.D. 500 to 1500, showing that not all concepts we know today were associated with the plant at any given time or place in the past. We base our research strictly on historical documents (illustrations, literary and botanical/pharmaceutical texts) carefully correlated in time. Our findings bring an important corrective to many folkloristic assumptions about the mandrake legend that have been handed down and accepted at face value for years. In fact, more research is needed to pinpoint when and where various elements of the legend originated and how (and how far) they spread, especially for the time after the 12th century.

Digital version.

In my paper I want to specifically analyze the context in which spices are used and find out if my findings conform to existing theses. I base my findings on a broad corpus of recipe collections and my analysis is conducted rather on a semantic than a linguistic level!

PDF for downloading (Language = German): Helmut W. Klug: Zur Verwendung von Gewürzen in mittelalterlichen Kochrezpten

The paper will be published in 2011 in an anthology based on the PhD seminar “Binarität und Skalarität als kulturelle Ordnungsmuster – Kategorien und Typologien in den Kulturwissenschaften“ held by Wernfried Hofmeister, Bettina Rabelhofer und Klaus Rieser in the summer semester of 2010 at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.

The paper will be published in Medium Aevum Quotidianum.