The discovery of the church of Rungholt, a landmark for the drowned medieval landscapes of the Wadden Sea World Heritage.

The UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea holds remains of a medieval cultural landscape shaped by interactions between man and natural forces. From the Netherlands to Denmark, human efforts of cultivating low-lying areas created a unique coastal landscape. Since the Middle Ages, storm floods widely drowned embanked cultural land and especially affected North Frisia (Germany), where once fertile marshland was permanently turned into tidal flats.

[Noblemen injured in fights and jousts in the field of tension between honour and ability].

Oliver Auge shows in this article that, in the late Middle Ages, the consequences of invalidity due to fighting and jousts ranged between exclusion and appreciation--a similar pattern to what can be observed in the ancient Roman Republic. As the majority of medieval sources do not provide any information concerning this topic, Auge concludes that affected nobles were either seen as disturbing elements within the society or they even regarded themselves as such. But they met with social approval as soon as they explicitly identified themselves as former participants of wars or jousts that had caused their invalidity or if their performance was above the norm.