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The aim of this paper is to reveal the specifics of spatial perception among the Greeks of the 8th century BC in terms of the mental reconstruction of imaginary mythical space by way of an example of their representation of the spatial direction of the west. The first part of our research is devoted to a consideration of the problem of the perception of the extreme west as a source of danger to the world order and the analysis of mental spatial images performing the function of psychological defense. In the second part of the paper, the opposite qualitative characteristics of the west as mythical space in its interconnection with mythical time are considered. We have thus attempted to demonstrate ambivalence in the perception of the west inherent in people with mythological thinking. The aim of this paper is to reveal the specifics of spatial perception among the Greeks of the 8th century BC in terms of the mental reconstruction of imaginary mythical space by way of an example of their representation of the spatial direction of the west. The first part of our research is devoted to a consideration of the problem of the perception of the extreme west as a source of danger to the world order and the analysis of mental spatial images performing the function of psychological defense. In the second part of the paper, the opposite qualitative characteristics of the west as mythical space in its interconnection with mythical time are considered. We have thus attempted to demonstrate ambivalence in the perception of the west inherent in people with mythological thinking.

The paper deals with the pledge in the Gortyn Laws of the 5th century BCE. It demonstrates that the pledge in Gortyn had a possessory character, so it assumed the transfer of ownership of the pledge to the pledgee. The subject of the pledge could be both movable and immovable property. There is neither hypothec nor sale on condition of release in Gortyn law. This fact can be explained by the absence of a land cadastre.

Among various reform impulses in the 15th century, the preaching of John of Capistrano, a famous Franciscan friar and an ardent preacher, played an important role in spreading strict observance and orthodoxy. During his tour through Central and Eastern Europe, which he undertook between 1451 and 1456 in the last years of his life, John exchanged several hundred letters (ca. 400) with the people in the countries through which he travelled. These then constitute an unparalleled corpus illustrating the history of Europe in the late 15th century (Mixson 2018: p. 23). After the publication of letters related to Poland (Kras 2018b) and the upcoming volume illustrating Hungarian matters, an edition of the correspondence between John of Capistrano and various people from Bohemia and Moravia is currently under preparation. These letters (ca. 150) include – among others – a group of two dozen polemical letters that John of Capistrano exchanged with the Hussite "heretics". This paper analyses one of the sharpest polemics, written by John of Borotín to John of Capistrano on 20 August 1451, by presenting its critical edition together with an English translation of the Latin text, as well as by resolving the question of the authorship attribution.

In 1912, during the dredging works of the river Kupa (in Sisak, today Croatia) a curse tablet was found by workers. Its text was published several times which showed differences in certain sections. On one hand it was due to the poor legibility of the text. On the other hand the reason of the discrepancies is that only some of the researchers could examine the tablet personally, the rest of them applied photographs or previous editors’ sketches which they interpreted in their own way. Because of the divergent readings, even establishing the correct text order of the outer and the inner side of the tablet has given rise to much controversy. Despite these problems, the text of this curse tablet has become a standing exemplar of vulgar Latin features on the course of the past 100 years, handbooks and publications on the Latin of imperial times refer its well-known “mistakes”. For obvious reasons, a new autopsy could not be delayed any longer. This paper aims to present a revised and interpreted reading of the Latin curse tablet from Siscia based on a recent autopsy.

The presented paper pursues two main aims. The first is to describe the development of the application of the genre ‘mirrors for princes’ to Byzantine literature in modern scientific works; the second, after defining recent general trends in scholarly approaches to Byzantine literature, is to judge the impact of these approaches on the criteria of genre taxonomy with respect to this particular genre.

Much of the scholarly discussion pertaining to epistemological assumptions regarding the earliest Christian authors has been framed by a series of dichotomies, placing “faith” and “religion” on one side and “reason” and “philosophy” on the other. I argue in this paper that uncritical use of these hard-to-define and overly general concepts as blanket categories to analyse Christian writings from the first three centuries CE inevitably causes major methodological issues and could be seen as heuristically unjustified. I suggest that a more frugal approach may be initiated by reconceptualizing the traditional “faith” vs. “reason” dichotomy in terms of the concept of personal and impersonal epistemic justification.