Disputed Statements

Matthew Hopkins, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1620

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Malcolm Gaskill tier 1

Matthew Hopkins, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1647

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Malcolm Gaskill tier 1

Maurice de Sully, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1120

He is recorded as having risen from a poor family, which was unusual for a twelfth century bishop and drew comment at the time; his birth is placed at the beginning of the twelfth century, conventionally around 1120, though no baptismal record survives to fix the year exactly.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica: Verified Biographies (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

May, Months of the Year

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Ovid's Fasti, book five (Loeb Classical Library edition, 1931), stages the derivation of Maius, the Latin name behind May, as an open contest rather than settling it: the poet has three separate speakers propose the goddess Maia, the maiores or elders of Roman society, and Maiestas, the personification of majesty, as the name's origin, and Ovid himself declines to decide among the three, leaving the question exactly as unresolved in his own poem as it remains in modern philology.

The rival derivations are ancient themselves rather than a modern dispute layered onto Ovid's account; Ovid stages Maia, the maiores and Maiestas as competing claimants in his own poem, and modern philology has not closed the question he left open.

Source Fasti, Ovid tier 1

May (Ma) መ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Maya, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2014) treats the claim that the Buddha had a mother, Maya, who died soon after his birth as uncontested within the tradition and historically unremarkable given high maternal mortality in the period. The dictionary's editors examine the elaborated details attached to her, the dream of the white elephant, the painless birth from her side, and her death on the seventh day after the birth, against the layered compilation history of the Buddhist biographical tradition, and find these belong to a hagiographical layer that develops over the several centuries following the Buddha's own lifetime, which is why historians treat them as legendary elaboration rather than as reported fact.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Maya, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity Detail

Currently States The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014) records that Maya, also called Mahamaya, queen of the Shakyas and mother of the Buddha, including the dream of a white elephant announcing his conception, the birth at Lumbini and her death seven days afterward followed by rebirth in the Trayastrimsa heaven, is known entirely through Buddhist biographical literature composed later than the events it narrates, with no contemporary source independently attesting to her.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Maya (Deceit), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Maya as the fourth of the four kashayas in Jain metaphysics, the passion of deceit or guile distinct from the unrelated pan-Indic doctrine of maya as cosmic illusion, is attested through the Tattvartha Sutra, the earliest surviving systematic Jain philosophical text, dated by most scholars to the second through fifth centuries CE. Padmanabh S. Jaini's The Jaina Path of Purification (University of California Press, 1979) is the standard scholarly source for this dating of the Tattvartha Sutra and the kashaya scheme it sets out.

Source The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini tier 1

Mbuti, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Mortals Enter the Pantheon

Currently States No recognised route from mortal to god

Colin Turnbull recorded no ancestor cult among the Mbuti, in contrast with the ancestral observance of their village neighbours. Later ethnographers have argued that Mbuti and village practice cannot be separated that cleanly, so the absence is a reading of the record rather than a settled fact.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Me ⲙ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Mechitza, Sacred Architecture

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Proponents trace a precedent to the Second Temple's Court of Women, given a temporary gallery built for the Sukkot water-drawing celebration; the fixed architectural mechitza in ordinary synagogue design developed later, through the medieval and early modern periods.

According To Judaism

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) tier 1

Medeina, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Some folklore sources trace her name to the Lithuanian word for forest, medis, but this connection is a folk etymology repeated in popular sources rather than a settled reading among specialists in Baltic linguistics, and the atlas records it as a proposed rather than a confirmed origin.

Source Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic People, Endre Bojtar tier 1

Meditation, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Secular mindfulness meditation descends chiefly from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, founded 1979.

Secular mindfulness meditation, as taught in clinics and workplaces today, descends chiefly from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 and drawn from Theravada vipassana instruction. Robert H. Sharf's Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, published in Numen in 1995, examines how the modern rhetoric of meditative experience arose. The method is historical and textual, tracing how the vocabulary of direct, experiential "mindfulness" developed through nineteenth and twentieth century reform movements, in dialogue with Western psychology and against colonial-era pressure to present Buddhism as rational and empirical. Sharf argues this is a significant reworking of Buddhist meditative practice for a new audience, not a direct, unaltered transmission from its originating monastic settings. The atlas records the lineage as adapted rather than unbroken.

Source Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, Robert H. Sharf tier 1

Meiyo (Honor), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Nitobe's codified seven-virtue scheme dates to his 1900 book; whether it reflects a continuous samurai ethic reaching back through Edo-period house codes and texts such as the Hagakure, or is substantially Nitobe's own Meiji-era synthesis for a Western readership, is a genuinely contested question among historians of Japan.

Source Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan, Oleg Benesch tier 1

Melqart, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States An annual egersis ("awakening") festival at Tyre, understood in Greek and Roman testimony as re-enacting Melqart's death and revival.

The egersis is attested only through outside Greek and Roman description rather than any surviving Phoenician liturgical text of its own, and scholars disagree on how literally to read its "death and resurrection" framing: some treat it as a genuine Phoenician dying-and-rising god pattern later projected onto Herakles by Greek interpreters, others as substantially a Greek reading imposed on a springtime renewal rite whose original Phoenician meaning is now unrecoverable in that much detail.

Source In Search of the Phoenicians, Josephine Quinn tier 1

Mem מ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Mem מ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Memorialism, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States How bare Zwingli's own position was is argued among historians of the Reformation

Two camps work from the same texts. One reads Zwingli's later confessions as a bare memorial in which nothing is given and the congregation only remembers. The other reads the same passages as affirming Christ present to the contemplating faith of the assembly, and treats the bare reading as a caricature inherited from his Lutheran opponents. Neither camp claims the texts settle it.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Whether menstrual restrictions across religious traditions are best read as a single category of taboo grounded in pollution is contested. Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb's edited volume Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (1988) argued against that blanket reading, showing that seclusion and restriction are treated as dangerous in some societies and as a source of power in others, and often as both at once within the same one, citing cases from the Ambubachi Mela at Kamakhya, where the goddess's own menstruation closes the temple and draws one of the largest gatherings in eastern India, to Leviticus's ritual impurity and the Quran's directed abstention. That argument is now the position most specialists hold, but most general reference works still default to the older pollution framing, which is why the standing is recorded as contested rather than settled in either direction.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States The blanket category of menstrual taboo, read as pollution, was argued against by Buckley and Gottlieb in 1988 and is no longer the default reading. It is still the framing most general reference works use.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1