New Books in Medieval History

Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Dr. Raffaele Danna shows in The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600 (Harvard University Press, 2026), it was hundreds of ordinary merchants, schoolmasters, and artisans who nurtured these changes, thereby driving key advances in both commerce and mathematics.

Drawing on an original catalog of more than 1,200 practical arithmetic manuals, Dr. Danna charts the incremental spread of the new figures with unprecedented precision. While Italian merchants were the early adopters, it took nearly three centuries for Indo-Arabic numerals to become established in northern Europe. As Dr. Danna shows, adoption did not follow the routes of maritime trade. Rather, Indo-Arabic numerals moved gradually across the continent through inland networks of practitioners. Everywhere they went, the ten figures enhanced commercial practices and facilitated the emergence of a coherent language of mathematical craft. The growing social circulation of this knowledge, in turn, had a lasting impact on the economic trajectory of Western Europe. By the late sixteenth century, even academics were absorbing lessons from the vernacular tradition—a development that led to the first major breakthroughs in European mathematical theory since antiquity.

Combining economic history with the social history of mathematics, The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals illuminates the integral role of practical arithmetic in both intellectual and commercial transformations across Western Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from a medieval synagogue in Cairo.

Craig Perry examined these documents for his new book: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton University Press, 2026). The book dives into everyday documents, like wills and manumission deeds, to reconstruct how Jewish households in Egypt bought, sold, owned and freed enslaved people—and how they grappled with the morality of owning slaves, given Judaism’s own history.

Craig Perry is assistant professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and the coeditor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Francis Young, "Fairies: A History" (John Wiley & Sons, 2026)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A History (Polity, 2026) demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.
Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Dr. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed – but not destroyed – by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.
No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture – or the woods at the bottom of their garden – in the same way again.

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Nabil Ali, "Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes (Princeton UP, 2026) by Nabil Ali brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.
This unique book takes its title from an ink recipe derived from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which ingredients extracted from the bark are transformed, seemingly by magic, from brown to a yellow gold. But gold pigments can also be extracted from cornflower, crocus, greater celandine, myrrh, and turmeric. Ali shares his own accessible adaptations for preparing these and other recipes rooted in medieval craft traditions. Along the way, he provides an engaging and informative natural history of the plants used, alongside the broad spectrum of marvelous colors they produce.
Presenting original translations of medieval recipes taken from painters’ and illuminators’ technical manuscripts from the third century BCE through to the twenty-first century, alongside stunning botanical illustrations, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree is a captivating celebration of colors derived from nature.

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Rory Naismith, "Offa: King of the Mercians" (Yale UP, 2026)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Offa: King of the Mercians (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Rory Naismith presents an authoritative biography of Offa of Mercia, revealing his importance as the king who stood at the turning point of Anglo-Saxon history.

Offa ruled the Mercian heartland of the west midlands from 757 to 796. But while Alfred the Great and his dynasty are seen as agents of a new beginning that resulted in a unified Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Offa is best remembered as the builder of a great dyke and as a symbol of an older, divided order.

In this major new biography, Professor Naismith challenges this view. Professor Naismith reveals how Offa cemented Mercia’s position as the dominant force in the southern part of Britain, strengthened the internal cohesion of his domains, and laid the basis for a new model of kingship. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including charters, coins, and chronicles, Professor Naismith reveals Offa as a king who was ambitious and successful, and who carefully constructed his image and that of the royal family. Far from just one in a sequence of overlords, Offa had a lasting impact on how kingship was practised and conceived across England.

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Katherine Harvey, "The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living" (Reaktion, 2026)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

We often think of medieval medicine as strange, unhygienic and unscientific, but The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Katherine Harvey reveals a far richer story. Long before modern wellness trends, people in the Middle Ages were actively thinking about how to live well. They followed detailed health regimens, balanced diet with exercise, considered the effects of emotions and sought to avoid illness through environmental awareness and routine care. This book sheds light on the practical and surprisingly relatable ways medieval individuals cared for body and mind. Drawing from historical sources that echo today’s wellness concerns, it offers a fresh, thoughtful view of a misunderstood era. In understanding their world, we might see our own in a new, more connected light.

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Elisheva Baumgarten, "Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026).

Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies.

Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them.

Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival.

About the Guest

Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life.

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Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton UP, 2026).

Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.

From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal.

Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world.

About the Guest

Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life.

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Karima Moyer-Nocchi, "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Today, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food, a staple of weeknight dinners, family gatherings, and Soul Food restaurants. Humble though the dish may seem, its history is filled with surprising twists and turns. Renaissance cardinals and popes dined on elaborate pasta-and-cheese concoctions laced with costly spices. In the eighteenth century, wealthy young Englishmen made macaroni a symbol of continental sophistication. Black women, whose contribution has long been overshadowed, played a crucial role in establishing the dish as an American tradition from the nation’s founding through the Civil Rights Movement.

The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America (Columbia UP, 2026) by Dr. Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a delectable history of macaroni and cheese, tracing an extraordinary journey of cultural exchange and social change. Karima Moyer-Nocchi reveals the religious, political, and industrial forces that shaped its evolution alongside stories of the unsung figures who crafted the dish as we know it today: enslaved cooks who preserved and adapted traditions, immigrant chefs who introduced new variations, and practical homemakers looking to nourish their families with an affordable meal. She emphasizes the adaptability of macaroni and cheese, which in different times has served as both an indulgence on the elite table and sustenance to those struggling to survive, crossing borders, social classes, and cultural divides. Deeply researched and rich with enticing details, this book uncovers the creativity and resilience that brought a beloved food to our tables. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese also shares centuries of recipes—from ancient Roman authors to celebrity chefs, reworked for modern kitchens—that provide a hands-on way to experience the evolution of this iconic dish.

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E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by headlong change. Honored as a "mother" by subsequent Frankish kings and as a holy woman by her nuns and devotees, Radegund enjoyed a reputation for righteousness that spread throughout the whole of medieval Europe, with later queens emulating her pious achievements. For generations, she defined medieval queenship, female monastic practice, and the expectations associated with holy women. Today, she is often envisioned as a pan-European saint.

Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. E. T. Dailey presents a new interpretation of this remarkable woman, examining her vibrant life and legacy. Dr. Dailey shows how she succeeded in establishing a place for herself within this difficult and dangerous world, despite the trials she faced. He also demonstrates how Radegund achieved a position of prominence as a woman in a foreign land without resorting to the violence and intrigue that characterized the lives of other prominent women during this period. Based on a wealth of English, French, and German scholarship, this book will equip experts and lay readers with a concise, authoritative, and accessible portrait of Radegund.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg presents a lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.

The devil’s cows, impudent camels, or damsels animated by the devil: late medieval and early modern authors used these descriptors and more to talk about dancers, particularly women. Yet, dance was not always considered entirely sinful or connected primarily to women: in some early medieval texts, dancers were exhorted to dance to God, arm-in-arm with their neighbors, and parishes were filled with danced expressions of faith. What led to the transformation of dancers from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil?

Drawing on the evidence from medieval and early modern sermons, and in particular the narratives of the cursed carolers and the dance of Salome, this book explores these changing understandings of dance as they relate to religion, gender, sin, and community within the English parish. In parishes both before and during the English Reformations, dance played an integral role in creating, maintaining, uniting, or fracturing community. But as theological understandings of sacrilege, sin, and proper worship changed, the meanings of dance and gender shifted as well. Redefining dance had tangible ramifications for the men and women of the parish, as new definitions of what it meant to perform one’s gender collided with discourses about holiness and transgression, leading to closer scrutiny and monitoring of the bodies of the faithful.

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Lucy Donkin, "Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Lucy Donkin’s Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2022) illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in Medieval Western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces.

The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. “The ground beneath our feet goes unnoticed for the most part. Yet it guides our steps and shapes our identity in many ways. We obey or disregard markings that indicate where to cross the road, stand back from the edge of the platform, or position ourselves on a sports pitch…Differencing convention in homes and places of worship remind us that our own treatment of the surface is culturally constructed."

Dr. Donkin argues that “In the Middle Ages too, the surface of the ground conveyed information to those who stood on it, prompted physical and imaginative responses, and marked out individual and groups in accordance with the values and concerns of the time. Indeed, in some respects, it played a greater role today in articulating space and identity, especially within ecclesiastical settings…. This book focuses on Medieval interaction with holy ground, within and beyond the church interior, asking how these shaped both place and people.”

By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Dr. Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.

Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Dr. Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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A. Bagliani and N, Şenocak, "A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050-1300" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A People's Church brings together a distinguished international group of historians to provide a sweeping introduction to Christian religious life and institutions in medieval Italy. Each essay treats a single theme as broadly as possible, highlighting both the unique aspects of medieval Christianity on the Italian peninsula and the beliefs and practices it shared with other Christian societies. Because of its long tradition of communal self-governance, Christianity in medieval Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else, was truly a "people's church." At the same time, its exceptional urban wealth and literacy rates, along with its rich and varied intellectual and artistic culture, led to diverse forms of religious devotion and institutions. Contributors: Maria Pia Alberzoni on heresy; Frances Andrews on urban religion; Cécile Caby on monasticism; Giovanna Casagrande on mendicants; George Dameron on Florence; Antonella Degl'Innocenti on saints; Marina Gazzini on lay confraternities; Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples. Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her current research focuses on cleaning gilded wooden frames using gels.

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Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest?

Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025), makes a different argument: That the region’s medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights, and the spreading Muslim faith.

Professor Yossef Rapoport of Queen Mary University London is a historian of the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 CE. Among his publications are books on marriage and divorce in late medieval Cairo and Damascus, on the fourteenth-century religious reformer Ibn Taymiyya, and on medieval Islamic maps.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Becoming Arab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The book draws from various genres of writings, including biographies and hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Qur’an commentaries and juristic compilations to capture the tensions and practices around tomb and relic veneration. Some of the discussion of Muslim relic veneration are polemical as they aim to establish some boundaries around similar pious practices amongst Jewish and Christian communities. In the process, we learn that there were indeed debates with regards to the post-mortem “traces” or “athar” of Muhammad’s tomb, which then impacted how spaces associated with him were also perceived, as well as other prophetic figures like Ibrahim (Abraham) or Daniel. Such examples raise conceptual questions of absence and presence and Prophet Muhammad’s capacity for intercession and obligatory versus non-obligatory rituals. In charting these early Muslim debates and narratives, Bursi masterfully captures the differing approaches Muslims had to holy bodies and sacred spaces. The book will be of interest to scholars who think about early Islamic history and also for scholars who work on contemporary Islamic material and shrine cultures.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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Nena Vandeweerdt, "Women and Work Through a Comparative Lens: Gender and the Urban Labor Markets of Premodern Brabant and Biscay" (Leuven UP, 2025)

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Women and Work Through a Comparative Lens: Gender and the Urban Labor Markets of Premodern Brabant and Biscay explores women's economic roles in late medieval and early modern Europe, particularly through the lens of craft guilds and regional comparisons with the aim emphasising the visibility of women’s economic activities in premodern Europe. The book explains the nature of guilds at this period, emphasising their male-dominated nature that limited women's formal participation while still allowing them to play significant roles within household economies. Among other topical issues examined in the book are the institutional factors that shaped women's economic roles in the 16th century, with details on how households in Brabant functioned as economic units with women managing income and administration. Also, the book explained how institutions such as guilds, households, informal markets, and town governments shaped women's economic opportunities in the 16th century.

Through a comparative approach, the book allows for a deeper understanding of women's visibility and economic conditions, particularly through the analysis of taxation registers and the public versus private nature of women’s work in different trades. The book contains a more nuanced comparison between specific regions in Europe, including Brabant and Biscay, to provide explanation on the North-South divide. The adoption of a comparative approach in the book enables a detailed analysis of women's labor opportunities including the fish trade, bread trade, itinerant informal trading, merchant activity and artisan work by examining two distinct regions. This comparative method reveals the complexities of women's economic positions and the varying factors that shaped their experiences cutting across town policy which placed restrictions due to guild influences.

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ (22) Olugbodi Mariam | LinkedIn, Mariam Olugbodi (0000-0001-5027-6644) - ORCID and User:Margob28 - Meta

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Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe" (Routledge, 2022)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about?

Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit those distant places themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the 21st century. In this conversation we talk about how this volume goes about broadening both the geographical scope and methodological approaches to reading medieval sources.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in the seventh century, this supposed revelation presented a new, salvific role for the Roman Empire, whose last emperor, it prophesied, would help bring about the end of the ages. In this first book-length study of Pseudo-Methodius, Christopher J. Bonura uncovers the under-appreciated Syriac origins of this apocalyptic tract, revealing it as a remarkable response to political realities faced by Christians living under a new Islamic regime. Tracing the spread of Pseudo-Methodius from the early medieval Mediterranean to its dissemination via the printing presses of early modern Europe, Bonura then demonstrates how different cultures used this new vision of empire’s role in the end times to reconfigure their own realities. The book also features a new, complete, and annotated English translation of the Syriac text of Pseudo-Methodius.

New books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Christopher J. Bonura is Assistant Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and Visiting Assistant Professor Costigan Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Washington.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers.

Sara Petrosillo's Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jamie Kreiner, "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction" (Liveright, 2023)

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright, 2023) by Dr. Jamie Kreiner presents a revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later.

Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Dr. Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.

Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Dr. Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds—from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

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Helen J. Nicholson, "Women and the Crusades" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration.

Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0000

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation.

Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.

This book is open access, you can find the download link here. You can find the statistics and social network analysis in this book as well as links to Prof. Mazanec's codes in this book.

You can find the online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation here.

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Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this statement really mean at all, and how have Muslims historically understood it? How did this simple report become a doctrine in the Islamic tradition? What does this hadith mean for Muslims today, in an increasingly interreligious atmosphere and especially for those living in the West or in other non-Muslim-majority contexts? Finally, why do humans invest so much in being different and displaying their difference from those they declare as an ‘other’?

These and many other questions are answered in Youshaa Patel’s exciting book The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, published in 2022 with Yale University Press. The book explores the issue of difference and frames the hadith as significant to Muslim interreligious encounters, showing that ideas and examples of imitation—and Muslims’ understanding of the concept—have changed throughout times and in different contexts. And the debate around issues of religious difference, imitation, and Muslims’ effort to distinguish themselves from non-Muslims tells us about how Muslims understand and define religion.

In our conversation today, we discuss the origins of the book, some of its main arguments and findings, the prophetic reports on imitation—specifically the hadith that “whoever imitates a people becomes one of them”—its role in establishing a Sunni orthodoxy given that the hadith or the concept of tashabbuh is not found in Shii collections, and influential scholars and thinkers’ development of the concept, individuals such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi. We also discuss examples of small differences that are not to be imitated, and Patel explains the significance and value of these small differences, which are quite powerful and symbolic. Our conversation ends with the relevance of imitation and emulation for today’s Muslims, including Muhammad Abduh’s Transvaal fatwa on, among other things, Muslims wearing European hats or Muslims doing Christian European things and how other Muslim scholars responded to this fatwa.

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Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:53:00 -0000

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to ‘atoms’ or ‘droplets’ and extending to the silent spaces of eternity. They might measure time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars or the progress of the seasons, even as the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock was making time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.

Gillian Adler is Associate Professor of Literature and Esther Raushenbush Chair in Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She is the author of Chaucer and the Ethics of Time (2022)

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.

In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions. It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises.

Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.

Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.

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Andrea Maraschi and Francesca Tasca, "Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024) by Dr. Andrea Maraschi & Dr. Francesca Tasca, readers will find stories about medieval heresies and “magic” from an unusual perspective: that of food studies. The time span ranges from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, while the geographical scope includes regions as different as North Africa, Spain, Ireland, continental Europe, the Holy land, and Central Asia.

Food, heresies, and magical boundaries in the Middle Ages explores the power of food in creating and breaking down boundaries between different groups, or in establishing a contact with other worlds, be they the occult sides of nature, or the supernatural. The book emphasizes the role of food in crafting and carrying identity, and in transferring virtues and powers of natural elements into the eater’s body. Which foods and drinks made someone a heretic? Could they be purified? Which food offerings forged a connection with the otherworld? Which recipes allowed gaining access to the hidden powers within nature?

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Judith Jesch, "The Saga of the Earls of Orkney" (Birlinn, 2025)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Saga of the Earls of Orkney (Birlinn, 2025), Professor Judith Jesch presents a fascinating history of the Earldom of Orkney, which was established in the Viking Age, records the adventures, feuds and battles of powerful Norsemen during its first three centuries. The medieval earls of Orkney owed allegiance to the kings of Norway but their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland to Sweden and Russia, and they travelled as far as Narbonne, Crete and Jerusalem. Advised by bishops and formidable women, they and their henchmen jockeyed for power with each other and with neighbouring rulers in Scotland, often with murderous outcomes. In between the high politics and violence, the world of the earls was one of piety, poetry and feasting.

The Saga also provides rare glimpses of culture and everyday life in northern Scotland when it was central to the Viking diaspora. Set in a recognisable landscape, it mentions features, sites and even buildings that can still be seen today.

This new translation of the manuscripts of the Saga uses an innovative approach to presenting medieval sources to non-specialist audiences, highlighting textual variations that affect its interpretation. It also reflects saga style and language more closely than previous translations and is ideal for both research and reading aloud. This is an essential, detailed and up-to-date resource for academics and general readers who wish to know more about Viking and Norse Scotland.

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Arthur Bahr, "Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both a material and literary object.
In this book, Arthur Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do.

Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Gian Piero Persiani, "Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan" (Brill, 2025)

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Waka poetry was all the rage in tenth-century, courtly Japan. Every educated person composed it, emperors and consorts sponsored it, and societal interest in it was at an all-time high. Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan (Brill, 2025) offers an unprecedentedly broad and vivid portrayal of this season of literary flourishing, revealing the multitude of factors that contributed to it, as well as the social, political, and cultural reasons behind waka’s rise.
Deftly combining sociological theory and social and intellectual history with insightful readings of a wealth of primary texts—some never before discussed in English—the book is both a history of waka in the Heian period and a study of Heian court society through the lens of waka.

Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars sought to harness supernatural power. They tried to summon spirits, predict the future, and even prolong life. Alongside science and religion, magic lay at the very heart of culture.

In this beautifully illustrated account The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts (Yale UP, 2025), Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores the medieval fascination with magic through twenty extraordinary illuminated manuscripts. These books were highly sought after, commissioned by kings and stored in great libraries. They include an astronomical compendium made for Charlemagne’s son; The Sworn Book of Honorius, used by a secret society of trained magicians; and the highly influential Picatrix. This vivid new history shows how attitudes to magic and science changed over the medieval period—and produced great works of art as they did so.

Anne Lawrence-Mathers is professor of history at University of Reading. She is the author of Medieval Meteorology and The True History of Merlin the Magician and coauthor of Magic and Medieval Society.

YouTube Channel: here

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Michael Staunton, "Thomas Becket and His World" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Thomas Becket and His World (Reaktion Books, 2025) explores the turbulent life and violent death of Thomas Becket, one of the most controversial figures of the Middle Ages. From a London merchant’s son to royal chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury, Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 elevated him to England’s most celebrated saint. Michael Staunton looks at Becket’s complex and contested legacy, drawing from Becket's own words and those of his contemporaries.

Based on extensive contemporary medieval sources, this account offers a fresh perspective on Thomas Becket’s life and places him within the broader landscape of twelfth-century England and Europe – a time of rapid change, conflict and achievement. Thomas Becket and His World is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about this pivotal figure in medieval history.

Michael Staunton is Professor of Medieval History at University College Dublin. He is an internationally recognized expert on Thomas Becket. His books include The Historians of Angevin England (2017).

YouTube Channel: here

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Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women--from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.

Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

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Max Adams and Colm O’Brien, "Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field" (Birlinn, 2025)

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The story of the lands between the Forth and Humber from the end of the Roman period to the Viking kingdom of York is one of the most richly fascinating in British history. This the age of Lindisfarne and of Bede; of the dramatic hills, valleys and ancient routeways that link the Irish Sea and the North Sea; of names that resonate even now: Edwin, Oswald, Hild, Cuthbert, Wilfrid; of conquest, conversion and the legacies of intellectual giants.

Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field (Birlinn, 2025) by Max Adams and Colm O’Brien is a history of Early Medieval Northumbria that explores themes of landscape, power, creativity and intellect. Fresh archaeological evidence and research in historical geography shed light on the fascinating story of how land was managed, exploited and deployed as an expression of power by both secular and ecclesiastical forces, and aspects such as the role of élite women in shaping politics and religion is given new focus. Dr. Adams and Dr. O’ Brien show conclusively how Northumbria’s political, cultural and religious elements coalesced to forge a creative powerhouse which shaped the world we have inherited.

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John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Castle: A History (Yale University Press, 2022) Dr. John Goodall presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the present day.

The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses—they were hubs of life, activity, and imagination.

Dr. John Goodall weaves together the history of the British castle across the span of a millennium, from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, through the voices of those who witnessed it. Drawing on chronicles, poems, letters, and novels, including the work of figures like Gawain Poet, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse, Dr. Goodall explores the importance of the castle in our culture and society.

From the medieval period to Civil War engagements, right up to modern manifestations in Harry Potter, Dr. Goodall reveals that the castle has always been put to different uses, and to this day continues to serve as a source of inspiration.

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Eric Halsey, "State Builders from the Steppe: A History of The First Bulgarian Empire" (This is RETHINK, 2025)

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

State Builders from the Steppe: A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (This is RETHINK, 2025) explores how the Proto-Bulgarians were able to build both an empire and an identity amidst the turmoil of the Balkans in the Early Middle Ages. From creating the Cyrillic Alphabet and crowning the first ever Tsar to defeating the first Arab invasion of Europe and nearly conquering the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, the history of the First Bulgarian Empire is equal parts fascinating and dramatic. In this episode, Eric Halsey joins me to discuss the little-known history of the First Bulgarian Empire, its nomadic pastoralist origins, why the empire collapsed, and its legacies in Bulgaria today.

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Anastasija Ropa, "The Medieval Horse" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Anastasija Ropa joins Jana Byars to talk about The Medieval Horse (Reaktion, 2025), a book that explores the role of horses across the medieval world, from the Kievan Rus' and Scandinavia to Central Europe, Byzantium, the Arab world and Asia, including China and India. Covering the early medieval period to the late Middle Ages, it examines how horses shaped societies, warfare and culture and how their legacy persists in traditional equestrian sports today. Drawing on little-known primary sources, artefacts, and the author’s hands-on experience with historical horsemanship, the book offers a vivid account of the deep connection between people and horses. Combining scholarly insight with practical knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study of medieval horses in Europe and Asia to date.

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Elizabeth Currie, "Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio" (Reaktion, 2025)

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In late sixteenth-century Rome, artists found inspiration in bustling streets and taverns, depicting soldiers, Romani fortune tellers, sex workers and servants among the city’s poorest inhabitants. Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Elizabeth Currie explores these hidden lives, uncovering how the stories of ordinary people are preserved through their clothing and appearances in art. Written records highlight the harsh conditions faced by marginalized groups, while prints and paintings often promoted visual stereotypes. With fresh interpretations of notable works by Caravaggio and his followers, this book reveals the complex social meanings of dress and the ways art captured and shaped the real-life struggles of early modern Italy’s lower classes.

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John Blair, "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton UP, 2025) by Professor John Blair provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, Dr. Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

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Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.

Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Thomas Smith, is grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presents numerous new manuscript witnesses. The book argues that some of the letters are post hoc “inventions”, composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary “reality”, it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary “confections”, they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

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Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture.

In Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Dr. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur’s round table and in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic’s peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction.

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Rosemary Admiral, "Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Rosemary Admiral provides a groundbreaking history of women’s legal engagement in Marinid Morocco between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries that fundamentally challenges contemporary assumptions about women’s relationships to Islamic legal traditions. Drawing on a rich collection of fatwas (legal documents) from Fez and surrounding areas, Dr. Admiral demonstrates how women—some without formal education—strategically navigated complex legal landscapes to protect their interests, expand their rights, and reshape social dynamics.

Contrary to prevailing narratives that portray Islamic law as a monolithic, oppressive system, the book shows how women actively co-produced legal interpretations. They used sophisticated strategies like contract stipulations, exploring plurality in legal opinions, and consulting local scholars to renegotiate marriage terms and expand their rights. These women did not view the legal system as an enemy, but as an instrument for challenging misdeeds and addressing community needs.

Dr. Admiral draws attention to the historical practice and implementation of the Maliki school of Islamic law in an area that remained outside of Ottoman control. She highlights women’s engagement with Islamic law as deeply embedded in support systems encompassing families, communities, and legal structures, and makes visible women’s agency and power.

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Karen Stollznow, "Bitch: The Journey of a Word" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word – it's not always entirely clear what it means. Bitch is a chameleon. There are good bitches and bad bitches; sexy bitches and psycho bitches; boss bitches and even perfect bitches.

Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Stollznow presents an eye-opening deep-dive account that takes us on a journey spanning a millennium, from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog through to its myriad meanings today, proving that sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. It traces the colorful history and ever-changing meaning of this powerful and controversial word, and its relevance within broader issues of feminism, gender, race, and sexuality. Despite centuries of censorship and attempts to ban it, bitch has stood the test of time. You may wonder: is the word going away anytime soon? Bitch, please.

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Katherine L. French, "Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Katherine French looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.
Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Dr. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, Dr. French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and Dr. French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

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Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan, Dr. Hartnell explains the historic popularity of this gruesome image and why the Wound Man continues to intrigue us today.
Drawing on a wealth of original research, Dr. Hartnell traces the many lives of the Wound Man, from its origins in late medieval Bohemia to its vivid reincarnations in hundreds of manuscripts and printed books over more than three hundred years. Transporting readers beyond the specifics of bodily injury, Dr. Hartnell demonstrates how the Wound Man’s body was at once an encyclopedic repository of surgical knowledge, a fantastic literary and religious muse, a catalyst for shifting media landscapes, and a cross-cultural artistic feat that reached diverse audiences around the world. The Wound Man, we discover, held profound importance not only for healers and patients but also for scribes, students, nuns, monks, printmakers, and poets.
Marvelously illustrated, Wound Man sheds light on the entwined histories of art and medicine, showing how premodern medical diagrams represent a unique site of contact between sickness, cure, painting, and print.

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Steve Tibble, "Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood" (Yale UP, 2025)

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

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Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025) traces Prague's origins in the ninth century through the end of the Cold War. Highlights include the golden ages of Charles IV and Rudolph II; the religious conflicts of the Hussite and Thirty Years Wars; the rich culture of Europe's largest Jewish community; the rivalry between the city's German and Czech speakers; the World Wars and Nazi occupation; and the Communist era. Prague: The Heart of Europe highlights the complex culture of the city where Mozart premiered his magnificent Don Giovanni and where Franz Kafka wrote his foreboding tales.

Cynthia Paces is Professor of History at the College of New Jersey.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biography of Æthelstan (d. 939), the early medieval king whose territorial conquests and shrewd statesmanship united the peoples, languages, and cultures that would come to be known as the “kingdom of the English.” In this panoramic work, Dr. Woodman blends masterful storytelling with the latest scholarship to paint a multifaceted portrait of this immensely important but neglected figure, a man celebrated in his day as much for his benevolence, piety, and love of learning as he was for his ambitious reign.
Set against the backdrop of warring powers in early medieval Europe, The First King of England sheds new light on Æthelstan’s early life, his spectacular military victories and the innovative way he governed his kingdom, his fostering of the church, the deft political alliances he forged with Europe’s royal houses, and his death and enduring legacy. It begins with the reigns of Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder, Æthelstan’s grandfather and father, describing how they consolidated and expanded the “kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” But it was Æthelstan who would declare himself the first king of all England when, in 927, he conquered the viking kingdom at York, required the submission of a Scottish king, and secured an annual tribute from the Welsh kings.
Beautifully illustrated and breathtaking in scope, The First King of England is the most comprehensive, up-to-date biography of Æthelstan available, bringing a magisterial richness of detail to the life of a consequential British monarch whose strategic and political sophistication was unprecedented for his time.

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press.

The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized.

Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Daisy Livingston, "Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Archives are not only sources for history but have their own histories too, which shape how historians can tell stories of the past. In Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Daisy Livingston explores the archival history of one of the most powerful polities of the late-medieval Middle East: the ‘Mamluk’ sultanate of Cairo. Relying on surviving original documents, Livingston focuses on archival practices connected to waqf, the pious endowments that became one of the characteristic features of late-medieval Islamic societies. By centering a close exploration of documents connected to processes of endowment and property exchange, this book sheds light on a startling culture of document accumulation that was shared by the diverse social groups involved in founding and managing endowments: sultans and emirs, qadis, legal notaries, and scribes. Emphasizing the documents’ life cycles from production, to preservation, to disposal and loss, it argues for the use of surviving documents to tell their own archival histories.

Daisy Livingston is Associate Professor of Medieval Islamic History in the Department of History at Durham University. As a historian of the medieval Middle East, in particular Egypt between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, her research focuses on various aspects of documentary culture, especially histories of archiving.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Michelle P. Brown, "Bede and the Theory of Everything" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion Books, 2023) investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673–735), foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and ‘the father of English history’. It examines his notable feats, including calculating the first tide-tables; playing a role in the creation of the Ceolfrith Bibles and the Lindisfarne Gospels; writing the earliest extant Old English poetry and the earliest translation of part of the Bible into English; and composing his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, with its single dating system. Despite never leaving Northumbria, Bede also wrote a guide to the Holy Land. Michelle P. Brown, an authority on the period, describes new discoveries regarding Bede’s handwriting, his research programme and his previously lost Old English translation of St John’s Gospel, dictated on his deathbed.

Michelle P. Brown is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and was formerly Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. Her books include Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion, 2023).

YouTube Channel here.

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Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic.

Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Nabil Yasien Mohamed, "Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty" (Routledge, 2024)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Focusing on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) – one of the foremost scholars and authorities in the Muslim world who is central to the Islamic intellectual tradition – this book embarks on a study of doubt (shakk) and certainty (yaqīn) in his epistemology.

Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty (Routledge, 2024) looks at Ghazālī’s attitude to philosophical demonstration and Sufism as a means to certainty. In early scholarship surrounding Ghazālī, he has often been blamed as the one who single-handedly offered the death-blow to philosophy in the Muslim world. In much of contemporary scholarship, Ghazālī is understood to prefer philosophy as the ultimate means to certainty, granting Sufism a secondary status. Hence, much of previous scholarship has either focused on Ghazālī as a Sufi or as a philosopher; this book takes a parallel approach, and acknowledges each discipline in its right place. It analyses Ghazālī’s approach to acquiring certainty, his methodological scepticism, his foundationalism, his attitude to authoritative instruction (taʿlim), and the place of philosophical demonstration and Sufism in his epistemology.

Offering a systematic and comprehensive approach to Ghazālī’s epistemology, this book is a valuable resource for scholars of Islamic philosophy and Sufism in particular, and for educated readers of Islamic studies in general.

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David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.

Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar with a lifelong passion for Middle Eastern and Inner Asian history. His 1981 book, several times republished, A Journey through Afghanistan, earned praise from Owen Lattimore, the then doyen of Inner Asian studies in America and the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. His most recent book, Three Asian Divas, describes the important role of elite women entertainers in the transmission of traditional Asian culture.

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Anne M. Blackburn, "Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries new kingdoms emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Sovereignty in these new kingdoms was expressed in terms we understand today as coming from ‘Theravada Buddhism’. Crucial to this tradition was the Pali language. Anne Blackburn’s new book, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena 1200-1550, examines the ‘intensification of connections’ between these polities in the region she calls, the ‘Bay of Bengal-Plus’: that is, the Bay of Bengal, the Coromandel Coast of India, Sri Lanka, the maritime and riverine areas of Burma, and the Mon and Tai territories of mainland Southeast Asia. The book highlights the importance of Pali textuality for the emerging Buddhist kingdoms of Dambadeniya, Sukhothai, Haripunjaya (present-day Lamphun in northern Thailand), Chiang Mai, Ayutthaya, and Hamsavati in lower Burma – Bago today. This was the heartland of what Blackburn calls, the ‘Pali arena’. This book is an important contribution to the emerging scholarship on the intellectual history of the early Theravada Buddhist kingdoms in South and Southeast Asia in the second millennium CE.

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Jo Teeuwisse, "Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened" (Ebury Press, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Fake news about the past is fake history.

Did Hugo Boss design the Nazi uniforms?
Did medieval people think the world was flat?
Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx?

*Spoiler Alert* The answer to all those questions is no.

From the famous quote 'Let them eat cake' - mistakenly attributed to Marie Antoinette - to the apocryphal horns that adorned Viking helmets, fake history continues to shape the story we tell about who we are and how we got here. With doctored photographs, AI-generated images and false claims about the past circulating in the news and on social media, separating fact from fiction seems harder than ever before.

Today I talked to Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, better known as "The Fake History Hunter." She is on a one-woman mission to hunt down fake history and reclaim the truth for the rest of us. And she is the author of Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened (Ebury Press, 2022).

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse is a widely-recognised historical authority for her work on social media debunking historical 'facts'. For over 20 years, Jo has studied, taught and researched history and is an expert in the daily life of Medieval Europe, life in the 1930s and 1940s, and the history of crime. She has worked as a historical consultant teaching in museums, advising on documentaries and carrying out research for films.

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Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and negotiated authority. It begins with the dynasty's origins and its dynastic union with Poland, milestones that have shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the dynasty's reign. The volume places significant emphasis on the role of royal consorts, thereby broadening traditional gender-focused perspectives. Far from being mere accessories, queens had a considerable influence on governance, economic matters, and diplomacy. The cultural impact of Jagiellon rule is analysed through interactions with humanists and the intellectual milieu of the court.

The performative aspects of Jagiellon power, including the use of words, gestures, and even intentional silences, are examined as powerful tools of articulation. Emotional factors that influence governance and intricate dynastic relationships are explored, revealing how political decisions, especially constitutional reforms, are made more rapidly when faced with perceived dynastic vulnerabilities. In Poland, the rise of parliamentary institutions under the earlier Jagiellon monarchs epitomises the concept of negotiated authority, underscoring the growing political role of the nobility.

This volume thus provides a multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of the Jagiellon dynasty's legacy in political, cultural, and gender-related spheres, enhancing understanding of European history.

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How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching.

Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here

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Craig E. Bertolet and Susan Nakley eds., "The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer" (Routledge, 2024)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (Routledge, 2024) offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teach, learn, and write about Chaucer’s works complete with awareness of their reach, their limitations, and occlusions on a global field of culture.

Interviewees:

Craig E. Bertolet is Hollifield Professor of English at Auburn University.

Susan Nakley is Professor and Associate Chair of English at St. Joseph’s University, New York.

Shoshana Adler is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.
Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?
Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.

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John Eldevik, "Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and Its Manuscript Contexts" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and its Manuscript Contexts by John Eldevik

During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a utopian fantasy, but a way to bring contemporary political and theological questions into sharper focus. In this new study, John Eldevik shows how the manuscripts that transmitted the story of Prester John reflect the ways contemporary audiences processed ideas about religious conflict and helped them imagine a new, global dimension of Christianity. It includes an appendix with a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John.

John Eldevik is Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton (New York State), and has previously published on medieval social and religious history.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Richard D. Oram, "A Land Won from Waste: Scotland AD 400-1400" (Birlinn, 2025)

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife.

A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor Richard Oram takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to the depths of the war-torn and plague-ravaged fourteenth century. Departing from traditional frameworks that divide Scotland’s history into periods based on kings’ reigns or major political events, discussion instead follows the major shifts in climate that divide these fourteen centuries into epochs, each with its own distinct characteristics. Starting amidst the fields and forests shaped across the eight millennia of Scotland’s prehistory, where we encounter the imprint of past generations of hunters and gatherers, farmers and fishermen, as well as the legacies of climate impacts and pathogens, the book explores the depths of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the long climb back to the ‘Golden Age’ of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Medieval Climate Anomaly, to end with the slide through crop-failure, famine, war and disease of what is reputed to be the ‘worst century in human history’.

Also listen to Dr. Oram’s previous New Books Network interview on the “sequel” to this book, covering the period 1400-1850: Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age.

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Anna Wainwright, "Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance" (U Delaware Press, 2025)

Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy (University of Delaware Press, 2025) investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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Judith Vitale, "The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Although Japan was never conquered by the Mongol empire, the 1274 and 1281 Mongol invasions were commemorated, remembered, and imagined in Japanese historical writings. How did history books, genealogies, gazetteers, local histories, and artworks represent the Mongol invasions? What role did the idea of the invasions play in the creation of cultural identity? In The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024) Judith Vitale takes on these questions, carefully exploring how the Mongol invasions featured in the creation of national culture in Japan.

The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan is thus about Japanese history, but also about how history is created, how the past is remembered, and how history can be used as fuel for both patriotism and nationalism. It should be of interest to those in Japanese Studies, East Asian History, and anyone curious about how national histories are created.

Interested readers (and listeners!) should also check out another book Judith was involved with, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023), which was co-edited with Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, and Oleg Benesch, and featured on the NBN!

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Asa Simon Mittman, "Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2024) by Dr. Asa Simon Mittman brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace.

In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Simon Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Dr. Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically “mislocating” Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories.

Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Dr. Mittman’s thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.

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Faith Tibble, "Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings" (T&T Clark, 2025)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Jesus' Crown of Thorns has become one of the most ubiquitous features of Christian religious art, but was the original crown anything like the crown of popular medieval art and piety? The image conjured by art history is that of a bloodied, beaten Jesus, wearing a cruelly fashioned, woven crown made of sharp thorns. But this image is deeply misleading, based on a fundamental misunderstanding and possible mistranslation.

In The Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Faith Tibble rectifies this misunderstanding, showing how The Crown of Thorns underwent a yet unrecognized artistic evolution. Dr. Tibble tracks the artistic progression of the Crown of Thorns from its first depiction in the 4th century, until the 11th century, when it begins to exhibit the artistic trends that are still recognizable today. In doing so, Dr. Tibble adds new perspective to our understanding of the ideologies associated with medieval Christianity - victory, humility, perseverance - and how those ideologies are exemplified in depictions of the Crown of Thorns. Dr. Tibble demonstrates the profound and unintended consequences of a simple misunderstanding of the Gospels, and examines an unexpected trajectory in European art.

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Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward.

Bin Yang writes about these linkages between China, the Maldives and the Indian Ocean in his recent book Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c 1100-1620 (Columbia University Press: 2024)

Bin Yang is a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong. His books include Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Columbia University Press: 2008) and Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Columbia University Press: 2019).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Discovered But Forgotten. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Letizia Osti, "History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity.

In History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2024), Letizia Osti provides the first full-length English-language study devoted to al-Suli, illustrating how investigating the life, times and works of such a complex individual can serve as a fil rouge for tackling broader, contested concepts, such as biography, autobiography, court culture, and written culture. The result is an exploration of the ways in which the Abbasid court made sense of the past and, in general, of what 'historiography' means in a medieval Arabic context.

Letizia Osti is Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the University of Milan, where she has taught since 2007. She earned her PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of St. Andrews, and is a member of the School of Abbasid Studies and other scholarly societies. Her research has been published widely in journals such as the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures, and she is the co-author of the 2013 study Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court.

Samuel Thrope is Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. He is the translator of Iranian author Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s 1963 Israel travelogue The Israeli Republic (Restless Books, 2017) and, with Dr. Domenico Agostini, of the ancient Iranian Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, records about items including cowrie shells and ambergris, and much more, Bin Yang argues that the Maldives — and the Indian Ocean world — shaped the Chinese empire.

Discovered but Forgotten is a far-reaching and ambitious book that showcases both imperial China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean world and how to do maritime history and global history, even when that means working with incomplete records and fragments of porcelain. This book should interest readers curious about East Asian history and global history, as well as anyone who doesn't yet know how important ambergris was to maritime trade and Ming China (spoiler: the answer is very).

In addition to Discovered but Forgotten, interested listeners (and readers!) should also seek out Bin's previous books, especially Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019).

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Bruce L. Venarde, "The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2024) provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English.

The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

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Catalin-Stefan Popa, "The Making of Syriac Jerusalem" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This book discusses hagiographic, historiographical, hymnological, and theological sources that contributed to the formation of the sacred picture of the physical as well as metaphysical Jerusalem in the literature of two Eastern Christian denominations, East and West Syrians.

Popa analyses the question of Syrian beliefs about the Holy City, their interaction with holy places, and how they travelled in the Holy Land. He also explores how they imagined and reflected the theology of this itinerary through literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, set alongside a well-defined local tradition that was at times at odds with Jerusalem. Even though the image of Jerusalem as a land of sacred spaces is unanimously accepted in the history of Christianity, there were also various competing positions and attitudes. This often promoted the attempt at mitigating and replacing Jerusalem’s sacred centrality to the Christian experience with local sacred heritage, which is also explored in this study. Popa argues that despite this rhetoric of artificial boundaries, the general picture epitomises a fluid and animated intersection of Syriac Christians with the Holy City especially in the medieval era and the subsequent period, through a standardised process of pilgrimage, well-integrated in the custom of advanced Christian life and monastic canon.

The Making of Syriac Jerusalem (Routledge, 2023) is suitable for students and scholars working on the history, literature, and theology of Syriac Christianity in the late antique and medieval periods.

Catalin-Stefan Popa is Research Professor in Church History at the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. He holds his Ph.D. from Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany (2016). In 2021 he received the venia legendi (habilitation) at Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria. He published articles, and edited volumes on Syriac and Oriental ecclesiastical history, exegesis, and literature, including the monograph Gīwargīs I. (660–680). Ostsyrische Christologie in frühislamischer Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016). He is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Syriac Annals of Romanian Academy (SARA).

New Books in Syriac Studies is presented by Kristian Heal.

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Melissa Vise, "The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Dr. Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe.

The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Dr. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Martha Bayless, "Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The people of early England (c. 450–1100 CE) enjoyed numerous kinds of entertainment, recreation and pleasure, but the scattered records of such things have made the larger picture challenging to assemble. Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Dr. Martha Bayless illuminates the merrier aspects of early English life, extending our understanding of the full range of early medieval English culture. It shows why entertainment and festivity were not merely trivial aspects of culture, but had important functions, in ritual, in community-building, in assuming power, and in resistance to power. Among the activities explored are child's play; drinking and feasting; music, dance, and performance; the pleasures of literature, festivals and celebrations; hunting and sport; and games.

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Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium.

The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.

Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

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Exploring Muslim Sicily with Nuha Alshaar and Shainool Jiwa

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode Saeed Khan and Hizer Mir take a trip to Muslim Sicily, via a new book edited by Nuha Alshaar. They are also joined for this conversation by Shainool Jiwa, one of the authors whose work is featured in this edited volume. They discuss the period from around 800 CE to the mid-13th century, one characterised by a large Muslim presence which still exerts an important, though sometimes forgotten, influence on the present. This episode is one of our Forgotten Ummah episodes, where we discuss Muslimness in places not traditionally thought of as ‘Muslim’.

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Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern medium, there has hitherto been little scholarship devoted to them.

The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) explores the distinct nature of medievalism in digital games across a range of themes, from the portrayal of grotesque yet romantic conflict to conflicting depictions of the Church and religion. It likewise considers the distinctions between medievalist games and those of other periods, underlining their emphasis on fantasy, roleplay and hardcore elements, and their consequences for depictions of morality, race, gender and sexuality. Ultimately the book argues that while medievalist games are thoroughly influenced by medievalist and ludic tropes, they are nonetheless representative of a distinct new form of medievalism. It engages with the vast literature surrounding historical game studies, game design, and medievalism, and considers hundreds of games from across genres, from Assassin's Creed and Baldur's Gate to Crusader Kings and The Witcher series. In doing so, it provides a vital illustration of the state of the field and a cornerstone for future research and teaching.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue and rehousing of Christian slaves who, like Balthild herself, had been caught up in the human-trafficking practices of the mid-seventh century.

Implicated in the violent politics of the era, Balthild spent the remainder of her life in the convent of Chelles where a unique cache of surviving relics and personal items, including her hair, were protected and dispersed as relics over the following centuries. In the nineteenth century, Balthild's anti-slave trade policies were recalled for new audiences when she was adopted as an icon for the cause of the abolition of the slave trade and installed as one of the twenty illustrious women whose statues are situated in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

Although critical to her age, because of the remote time period and the specialized nature of the sources, Balthild is little known today. Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint (Oxford UP, 2024) will correct this oversight by shining a light on a fascinating and courageous figure whose legacy long outlived the era to which she belonged.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Isabel Moreira is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

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Caroline Dunn, "Ladies-in-waiting in Medieval England" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source–based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen’s chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the era and were sophisticated players who earned significant rewards. They had both family and personal interests to advance – through employment they linked kin and court, and through marriage they built bridges between families. Whether royal or aristocratic, ladies-in-waiting worked within gendered spaces, building female-dominated social networks, while also operating within a masculine milieu that offered courtiers of both sexes access to power. Working from a range of sources wider than the subjective anecdote, Dunn presents the first scholarly treatment of medieval English ladies-in-waiting.

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Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future.

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Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations.

The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.

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Gemma Hollman, "Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens" (Abbeville Press, 2024)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Medieval women ruled over kingdoms, abbeys, and households; produced stunning works of art and craft; and did the hard work that kept ordinary families fed and clothed. Though women’s contributions were often diminished or completely ignored in written accounts, art tells a different story: women appear everywhere, from the margins of illuminated manuscripts to grand tapestries. In Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens (Abbeville Press, 2024), historian Gemma Hollman uses the visual as well as the written record to uncover the real lives of medieval European women.

Hollman traces the lives of women across society, dedicating chapters to nuns like Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, mystic, and polymath; courtiers like Christine de Pisan, author of pioneering works on women’s role in society; warriors like Joan of Arc; and the everyday women whose names are lost to history. Illustrated with nearly 200 varied and fascinating works of medieval art, Women in the Middle Ages offers a new perspective on the lives and contributions of medieval women and how they were portrayed. This book is a treasure for anyone interested in the Middle Ages or women’s history.

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Peter Ramey, "The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary" (Angelico Press, 2023)

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While generations of students know that Beowulf represents a confluence of Christianity and paganism, this version—informed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of language as the repository of myth—opens the hood to track the poem’s inner religious workings. It brings to light the essential Old English vocabulary, incorporating into the translation the divine titles used for God, specific names for evil and nonhuman creatures, and the precise language employed for providence and fate, along with terminology for kinship and heroism. Such features are not found in any other modern English translation, including Tolkien’s, whose text was never intended for publication. The Word-Hoard Beowulf draws upon Tolkien’s ideas and commentaries, however, to render a poem whose metaphysical vision takes front and center, delivering a richly restorative version of this early medieval masterpiece. The text is preceded by an introduction detailing the poem’s religious motivations and cultural context, and is accompanied by an expansive commentary. In short, this version allows readers to perceive precisely how in Beowulf (as Tolkien puts it) “the new Scripture and the old tradition touched and ignited” to produce the earliest English epic.

Peter Ramey is Associate Professor of English at Northern State University, where he teaches courses on medieval English literature, Latin, and linguistics. He has published articles on Beowulf and on Old and Middle English in Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and other scholarly journals, while also writing for a broader audience in his essays in Public Discourse and Front Porch Republic.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

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Mary Flannery, "Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer’s life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came to be known not only as the father of English poetry but also as England’s “merry bard.”

Mary Flannery is the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, her publications include Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England.

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Andrew Jotischky, "The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History" (Yale UP, 2024)

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages?

Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art.

The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History (Yale UP, 2024) brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.

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Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton UP, 2024), Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce.

Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

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Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious European writings to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God's endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of Christians to Islam, the sinfulness of crusaders, and the morality of violence.

Reinvigorating debates in medieval postcolonialism, drawing on emotion studies, and excavating a rich multilingual archive, this book is a major contribution to the cultural history of the crusades. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

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Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century" (York Medieval Press, 2023)

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing?

Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians.

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Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty" (Pen and Sword History, 2024)

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international identity. Each year, millions of people walk around the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Hever Castle, plus many other historical sites, taking in and hoping to glean some sense of the man and the myth, and yet there is a period from Henry VIII’s life which remains largely overlooked, a period in which he chose not to execute wives, servants or ministers, but instead turned on another group entirely - his own family.

Like practically all members of the nobility of the time, Henry VIII descended from King Edward III, which ensured a ready-made crop of royal cousins were in abundance at his court, and awkwardly for the king, these cousins often possessed much greater claims to the throne than he did. The house of Tudor was one which should never have been, let alone taken the throne. Upstarts in every sense of the word, their ancestry, whilst (almost) noble, was by no means as grand as many a family in England, and it is against this backdrop that Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty (Pen & Sword, 2024) by Dr. Adam Pennington was created.

The Pole family, the subjects of the story, were royalty in secret. Lady Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the family matriarch, was a niece of King Edward IV and Richard III, making her a first cousin of Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor queen consort, and thus a first cousin once removed of Henry VIII. Margaret Pole was, therefore, one of the most senior members of the nobility at the Tudor court, and through her, her sons, her daughter, and her grandchildren possessed a dangerous name and dangerous bloodline, which put them on a collision course with the most volatile man ever to sit the throne of England. They were the old guard, the house of Plantagenet, the greatest ruling dynasty in English history, the true royal family, and this, coupled with the monumental shifts which England underwent during the reign of Henry VIII, all but ensured their destruction. For centuries, their story has been overlooked, or at best, fleetingly covered, but when one digs deep, a story as audacious and juicy as it’s possible to be soon emerges.

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Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralised governments.

Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe rethinks state formation as a process of decentralisation, exploring how these governments willingly left power to lesser political players. It challenges the assumption that the rise of states made lordship obsolete, showing instead how distributing authority among local lords reinforced the development of new political systems.

The contributors tackle this fresh perspective on lordship and state formation from two complementary angles. Detailed snapshots of lordship in France and the Low Countries assess the political significance of different aspects of lordly power. Historiographical essays discuss frameworks for understanding relationships between lordship and the state in contexts across Europe. These comparative perspectives establish an innovative approach to a key question in political history.

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Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest, Professor Joseph Stern, will discuss Maimonides’ unique understanding of the afterlife, per his recent article, "A Guide to the AfterDeath: Maimonides on olam ha-ba’", Religious Studies (2024), 60, S74–S90

Professor Josef Stern is a renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy and thought, specializing in the works of Moses Maimonides. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he has contributed significantly to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly the intersection of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history.

With a deep focus on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and religious thought, Professor Stern has published extensively on themes such as skepticism, intellectual perfection, and the nature of religious language. His work often bridges Jewish thought with broader philosophical traditions, including Aristotelian and Islamic philosophies.

Known for his clear, incisive analysis and ability to connect historical ideas to contemporary debates, Professor Stern remains a leading voice in Maimonidean scholarship. His recent studies on concepts like Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come) provide fresh insights into Maimonides' revolutionary vision of the afterlife and human perfection.

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Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why.

Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384–85, and the major famine of 1374–76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation—which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics.

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Bianca M. Lopez, "Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Bianca Lopez takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Dr. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory.

Dr. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

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Alec Goldstein, "Maimonides on the Book of Exodus" (Kodesh Press, 2019)

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Alec Goldstein about Maimonides on the Book of Exodus (Kodesh Press, 2019).

Rabbi Moses son of Maimon, known in Hebrew as Rambam and in English as Maimonides, is one of Judaism’s most influential and enduring figures. His works have shaped Jewish thought for centuries, combining legal precision, philosophical brilliance, and profound spirituality. While Maimonides never authored a linear commentary on the Torah, his writings are replete with references to and interpretations of biblical verses. These insights offer a glimpse into his unique approach to understanding the narratives, commandments, and themes of the Torah.

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Yehudah Cohn, trans., "Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) contains the first known sonnets written in Hebrew. Their author is Immanuel of Rome, an intensely studied yet little-known 14th-century poet, who adapted the quantitative meter of Arabic and Hebrew poetry from al-Andalous to the syllabic meter of romance poetry. These poems are part of Immanuel’s most studied book, Maḥbarot, a collection of poetic tales conceived between satire and allegory, which combine the Arabic maqama with the stilnovistic poetic form immortalized by Dante. Widely published during its author’s lifetime and in the following centuries, the Maḥbarot as a whole has never been translated into any language.

Immanuel lived in the Papal city during a period of great turmoil between the communal experience and the Papal exile to Avignon. He moved with ease in the Roman Jewish and non-Jewish worlds that were actively involved in translation. Writing in a milieu where Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Greek, and the vernaculars were concurrent languages, Immanuel left us brilliant verses in Hebrew and vernacular. He was an admired biblical commentator whose references spanned from the Talmud and Maimonides to Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy.

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Anthony Bale, "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes" (Norton, 2024)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A captivating journey of the expansive world of medieval travel, from London to Constantinople to the court of China and beyond.

Europeans of the Middle Ages were the first to use travel guides to orient their wanderings, as they moved through a world punctuated with miraculous wonders and beguiling encounters. In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites readers on an odyssey across the medieval world, recounting the advice that circulated among those venturing to the road for pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and war.

Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens. He takes us from the streets of Rome, more ruin than tourist spot, and tours of the Khan’s court in Beijing to Mamluk-controlled Jerusalem, where we ride asses across the holy terrain, and bustling bazaars of Tabriz.

We also learn of rumored fantastical places, like ones where lambs grow on trees and giant canes grow fruit made of gems. And we are offered a glimpse of what non-European travelers thought of the West on their own travels.

Using previously untranslated contemporaneous documents from a colorful range of travelers, and from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, North Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes (Norton, 2024) is a witty and unforgettable exploration of how Europeans understood—and often misunderstood—the larger world.

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Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region.

Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the reformed community; one that served to preserve and protect their religious tradition while also expanding its reach among the more fragmented and localized elites of the period.

Rewriting Buddhism is available for free open-access download at uclpress.com/buddhism.

Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, kingship and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley.

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Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the few remaining examples of the once more prevalent urbanized bridge type.

Drawing from early Florentine chronicles and previously unpublished archival documents, The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Theresa Flanigan traces the history of the Ponte Vecchio, focusing on the current bridge’s construction after the flood of 1333. Much of the Ponte Vecchio’s original fourteenth-century appearance is now obscured beneath later accretions, often mistakenly interpreted as original to its medieval character. To the contrary, as argued in this book and illustrated by new reconstruction drawings, the mid-trecento Ponte Vecchio’s vaulted substructure was technically advanced, its urban superstructure was designed in accordance with contemporary Florentine urban planning strategies, and its "beautiful and honorable" appearance was maintained by government regulations. The documents also reveal new information about the commission and rental of its famous shops.

Relying on these sources, this study offers a more complete history of the Ponte Vecchio, adding significantly to what is currently known about the bridge’s patronage and construction, as well as the aims of civic architecture and urban planning in late medieval Florence.

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Hartley Lachter, "Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish history were in fact necessary steps toward redemption.

Lachter argues that these works, mostly composed between the early 14th century and the generation affected by the Spanish expulsion in the early 16th century, enabled Jewish readers to make sense of the troubling misfortunes of their own time. Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism (Stanford UP, 2024) uncovers the remarkable variety of ways that kabbalists deployed esoteric tradition to argue that God had not abandoned the Jews to the inscrutable forces of history. Instead, they suggested to readers that Jews are history's primary actors, and that despite their small numbers and lack of military power, Jews nonetheless secretly push history forward. For scholars of Jewish mysticism and medieval Jewish history, Lachter articulates how premodern mystical texts can be crucial sources of insight into how Jews understood the meaning of history.

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Herald van der Linde, "Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia's Greatest Empire" (Monsoon Books, 2024)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527.

Today, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit is an important source of national pride in today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia: Even the Indonesian coat of arms, with its garuda and the motto “Unity in Diversity”, is rooted in the Majapahit era.

But the tale of Majapahit–as told in Herald van der Linde’s book, Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Monsoon Books: 2024)–is a story of mythical kings, conquest, betrayal, and intrigue, as Indonesian royals jostled for position…and at times fought off external enemies like the Mongols.

Herald van der Linde has travelled, lived and worked in Indonesia and Hong Kong since the 90s. He is also the author of Jakarta: History of a Misunderstood City (Marshall Cavendish International: 2022)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Majapahit. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic.

Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert’s contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic’s relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away—but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century, members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert the Great discusses the philosopher’s own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries.

In the end, Disenchanting Albert the Great tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who himself would not be disenchanted until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time.

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Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

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Denys Turner, "Dante the Theologian" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole.

That is the starting-point of Dante the Theologian (Cambridge UP, 2022). In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians of fourteenth-century Christian thought, or as interpreters of the religious issues of our own times. Expertly guiding his readers through the structure and content of the Commedia, Denys Turner reveals – in pacy and muscular prose – how Dante's aim for his masterpiece is to effect what it signifies. It is this quasi-sacramental character that renders it above all a theological treatise: whose meaning is intelligible only through poetry. Turner's Dante 'knows that both poetry and theology are necessary to the essential task and that each without the other is deficient.'

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James Mallinson, "The Dattatreyayogasastra" (Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 2024)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This book introduces, edits and translates the Dattātreyayogaśātra, a Sanskrit text on yoga composed in about 1200 CE in South India. It teaches four types of yoga practice but devotes the majority of its 193 verses to haṭhayoga, which it divides into two varieties, one which consists of the eight auxiliaries first taught by Patañjali and one which has nine physical methods. It is thus the first text to combine the aṣṭāṅga system of Patañjali with physical techniques, and its teachings were highly influential on later authors and commentators of yoga texts. The book is addressed primarily to scholars but will also be of interest to students and practitioners of yoga.

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Phillip Lieberman, "The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West (Cambridge UP, 2022), Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history--that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade. Here, he presents an alternative account that reveals the complexity of interfaith relations in early Islam. Using Jewish and Islamic chronicles, legal materials, and the rich documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza, Lieberman demonstrates that Jews initially remained on the rural periphery after the Islamic conquest of Iraq. Gradually, they assimilated to an emerging Islamicate identity as the new religion took shape, sapping towns and villages of their strength. Simultaneously, a small, elite group of merchants and communal leaders migrated westward. Lieberman here explores their formative influence on the Jewish communities of the southern Mediterranean that flourished under Islamic conquest.

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Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Dr. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance.

These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which—as Norako argues—also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper.

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Lisa Nielson, "Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the early medieval Islamicate period (800–1400 CE), discourses concerned with music and musicians were wide-ranging and contentious, and expressed in works on music theory and philosophy as well as literature and poetry. But in spite of attempts by influential scholars and political leaders to limit or control musical expression, music and sound permeated all layers of the social structure.

Lisa Nielson here presents a rich social history of music, musicianship and the role of musicians in the early Islamicate era. Focusing primarily on Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem, Lisa Nielson draws on a wide variety of textual sources written for and about musicians and their professional/private environments – including chronicles, literary sources, memoirs and musical treatises – as well as the disciplinary approaches of musicology to offer insights into musical performances and the lives of musicians. In the process, Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History (Bloomsbury, 2021) sheds light onto the dynamics of medieval Islamicate courts, as well as how slavery, gender, status and religion intersected with music in courtly life. It will appeal to scholars of the Islamicate world and historical musicologists.

Lisa Nielson is an Anisfield-Wolf Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA.. She received her PhD from the University of Maine at Orono, USA and holds a bachelor's and master's degree in music performance and pedagogy.

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Filippo Gianferrari, "Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship.

In Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2024), Filippo Gianferrari demonstrate that Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture.

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Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of mediaeval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in mediaeval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past.

For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analysing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in mediaeval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.

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Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion" (Oneworld, 2024)

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.

The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it's about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say - a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.

From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via Song dynasty China, medieval Europe and Soviet Russia, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion (Oneworld, 2024) sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.

Nicholas Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of a number of books including Darwin and God, The Evolution of the West and Atheists. He has presented a BBC Radio 4 series on The Secret History of Science and Religion, and has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, Prospect and more. He lives in London.

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Georgia Henley, "Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Georgia Henley considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages.

Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

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Subhashini Kaligotla, "Shiva's Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India" (Yale UP, 2022)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance.

In Shiva's Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale UP, 2022), Subhashini Kaligotla situates these buildings in the cosmopolitan milieu of Deccan India and considers how their makers and awestruck visitors would have seen them in their day. Kaligotla reconstructs how architects and builders approached the sites, including their use of ornamentation, responsiveness to courtly values such as pleasure and play, and ingenious juxtaposition of the first millennium's Nagara and Dravida aesthetics, a blend largely unique to Deccan plateau architecture. With over 130 color illustrations, this original book elucidates the Deccan's special place in the lexicon of medieval South Asian architecture.

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Bihani Sarkar, "Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (I. B. Tauris, 2021), this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises - much of them translated for the first time into English - to provide a complete history of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries.

Looking at Kalidasa, the most celebrated writer of Sanskrit poetry and drama (kavya), this book argues that constructions of absence and grief are central to Kalidasa's compositions and that these 'tragic middles' are much more sophisticated than previously understood. For Kalidasa, tragic middles are modes of thinking, in which he confronts theological and philosophical issues. Through a close literary analysis of the tragic middle in five of his works, the Abhijñanasakuntala, the Raghuva?sa, the Kumarasambhava, the Vikramorvasiya and the Meghaduta, Sarkar demonstrates the importance of tragedy for classical Indian poetry and drama in the early centuries of the common era. These depictions from the Indian literary sphere, by their particular function and interest in the phenomenology of grief, challenge and reshape in a wholly new way our received understanding of tragedy.

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Toni Alimi, "Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) provides a major reassessment of this monumental figure in the Western religious and political tradition, tracing the remarkably close connections between Augustine’s understanding of slavery and his broader thought.

Augustine is most often read through the lens of Greek philosophy and the theology of Christian writers such as Paul and Ambrose, yet his debt to Roman thought is seldom appreciated. Toni Alimi reminds us that the author of Confessions and City of God was also a Roman citizen and argues that some of the thinkers who most significantly shaped his intellectual development were Romans such as Cicero, Seneca, Lactantius, and Varro—Romans who had much to say about slavery and its relationship to civic life. Alimi shows how Augustine, a keen and influential student of these figures, related chattel slavery and slavery to God, and sheds light on Augustinianism’s complicity in Christianity’s long entanglement with slavery.

An illuminating work of scholarship, Slaves of God reveals how slavery was integral to Augustine’s views about law, rule, accountability, and citizenship, and breaks new ground on the topic of slavery in late antique and medieval political thought.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Toni Alimi is Assistant Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Dennis Wuerthner, "Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English translation of one of the oldest extant Korean source materials. The scholar, Yi Illo (1152–1220), filled this collection with poetry by himself and diverse writers, ranging from Chinese master poets and Koryŏ-era kings, to long-forgotten lower-level officials and rural scholars. The verse compositions are embedded in short narratives by Yi that provide context for the poems, a combination called sihwa.

The book contains a comprehensive introduction that explores the lives of Yi Illo and his contemporaries, and the political landscape at the time this collection came into being. The translation itself is richly annotated to provide context to the allusions and to explore possible meanings.

The publication is an excellent resource for readers interested in the political and social environment of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392) and for anyone with a love for poetry and prose.

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner is assistant professor of East Asian literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures, at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Ruhr University in Bochum and his main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context.

Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.

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Sharon Kinoshita, "Marco Polo and His World" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sharon Kinoshita talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Marco Polo and His World (Reaktion Press, 2024). A lavishly illustrated tour of the famed adventurer's globetrotting travels, written by a celebrated translator of Polo's writings. At the age of seventeen, Marco Polo left his Venetian home on a continent-spanning adventure that lasted for nearly a quarter century. Imprisoned in Genoa five years later, he collaborated with Arthurian romance writer Rustichello of Pisa on a work they called The Description of the World. That book recounted "all the greatest marvels and great diversities of Greater Armenia, Persia, the Tartars, India, and many other provinces," a story that made Polo famous for all time. In Marco Polo and His World, Sharon Kinoshita brings these marvels to life, describing the myriad commodities, plants, people, and animals that Marco encountered and recorded. Copiously illustrated, this book offers a vibrant introduction to Marco Polo's astounding adventures.

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John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new book, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (Yale University Press, 2016), which offers readers both an account of Frederick’s life and his posthumous image as a German ruler. Freed begins by describing the historical background of 12th century Germany, setting Frederick’s succession to the throne within the context of medieval dynastic politics. From there he recounts Frederick’s campaigns against both the papacy and the Italian communes, his subsequent efforts to strengthen his rule in Germany, and his death in the Near East while participating in the Third Crusade. Though an undercurrent of frustrated ambition ran throughout many of his efforts, Frederick nonetheless became a symbol of a united Germany by the 19th century and, in the process, achieved a stature as a sovereign that belied the complicated realities of the world in which he lived.

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Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.

Amidst this diversity, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 (Open Book, 2024) offers readers sympathetic and immersive insight into the religious realities of its subjects. To this end, this book identifies two perspectives: one uncovers hidden meanings and unexpected connections, while the other restricts Jesus to the space and time of human history. Minds that believed in Jesus, and those that opposed him, made use of both perspectives to make sense of their worlds.

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Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED!

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Christopher Paul Clohessy, "Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî" (Gorgias Press, 2020)

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020).

As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she would remain for a few historic days, challenging the wickedness of the Islamic leadership, defending the actions of her brother, initiating the commemorative rituals, protecting and nurturing the new Imâm, al-Ḥusayn's son ʿAlî b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlî b. Abî Ṭâlib, until he could take his rightful place. This is her story.

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

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James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and high officials at the Chinese court valued commerce in the region, where rare commodities could be obtained and vassal kingdoms showed less belligerence than did northern ones. Trade routes along this Southwest Silk Road traverse the homelands of numerous non-Han peoples.

In The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation (University of Washington Press, 2024), James A. Anderson investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what James A. Anderson calls the "Dong world," a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. The process of state formation that arose through trade coincided with the differentiation of peoples who were later labeled as distinct ethnicities. Exploration of this formative period at the nexus of the Chinese empire, the Dali kingdom, and the Vietnamese kingdom reveals a nuanced picture of the Chinese province of Yunnan and its southern neighbors preceding Mongol efforts to impose a new administrative order in the region. These communities shared a regional identity and a lively history of interaction well before northern occupiers classified its inhabitants as "national minorities" of China.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University.

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Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon.

Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today's challenges--finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality--threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

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Steve Tibble, "Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press, 2024), Dr. Steve Tibble presents a vivid new history of the criminal underworld in the medieval Holy Land.

The religious wars of the crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence.

In the first history of its kind, Dr. Tibble explores the criminal underbelly of the crusades. From gangsters and bandits to muggers and pirates, Tibble presents extraordinary evidence of an illicit underworld. He shows how the real problem in the region stemmed not from religion but from young men. Dislocated, disinhibited, and present in disturbingly large numbers, they were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.

Crusader Criminals charts the downward spiral of desensitisation that grew out of the horrors of incessant warfare—and in doing so uncovers some of the most surprising stories of the time.

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Michael Livingston, "Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history, a defining part of the national myth. This groundbreaking study by Michael Livingston presents a new interpretation of Henry V's great victory.

King Henry V's victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history. From Shakespeare's “band of brothers” speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the world.

The English invasion of France in 1415 saw them take the French port of Harfleur after a long siege, following which Henry was left with a sick and weakened army, which he chose to march across Normandy to the port of Calais against the wishes of his senior commanders. The French had assembled a superior force and shadowed the English Army before finally blocking its route. The battle that followed was an overwhelming victory for the English, with the French suffering horrific casualties. Agincourt opened the door for Henry V's further conquests in France.

Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a new look at this famous battle. Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself. It is a thrilling new history that not only rewrites the battle as we know it, but also provides fresh insights into the men who fought and died there.

An acclaimed conflict analyst, Michael Livingston has twice won the Distinguished Book Prize from the international Society for Military History (2017, 2020) and is the author of numerous popular history books, including Never Greater Slaughter and Crécy: Battle of Five Kings. He serves as Distinguished Professor at The Citadel.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

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Zrinka Stahuljak, "Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Dr. Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles mediaeval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

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Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, "Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State" (Faber & Faber, 2024)

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) offers a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England.

Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history.

Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.

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Edel Bhreathnach, "Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The history of monasticism in early Ireland is dominated by its flourishing during the sixth and seventh centuries, a period dominated by Columba of Iona and Columbanus of Bobbio, and later by the 'reform' spearheaded by Malachy of Armagh during the twelfth century. But what of monasticism in Ireland during the intervening period? Regarded as different from ' mainstream' Anglo-Saxon and continental monasticism, monastic life in Ireland has not been fully understood in scholarly discussions about the existence of distinct ' monasticisms' throughout Christianity.

The Irish sources, many written in the vernacular, are not accessible and are viewed as unconventional. The secularization of monasticism in Ireland has overshadowed evidence for a thriving lived monasticism. Edel Bhreathnach's book Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250 (Four Courts Press, 2024) concentrates on those men and women who followed a monastic life, especially between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and who maintained a universal monastic ideology while incorporating monasticism into their own cultural environment.

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Martha Rampton, "Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith.

As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2024)

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neighbors. Persia, India and China all burned cash trying to sustain their own herds of horses–-with little success.

And it all starts from humble beginnings: Horses domesticated for their milk, too small for anyone but children to ride.

David Chaffetz, regular Asian Review of Books contributor, member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and author of A Journey through Afghanistan and Three Asian Divas, has traveled extensively in Asia for more than forty years.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Raiders, Rulers and Traders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Aleksander Pluskowski, "The Teutonic Knights: Rise and Fall of a Religious Corporation" (Reaktion, 2024)

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Aleksander Pluskowski of the University of Reading joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Teutonic Knights: Rise and Fall of a Religious Corporation, out 2024 with Reaktion Books. A gripping account of the rise and fall of the last great medieval military order. This book provides a concise and incisive introduction to the knights of the Teutonic Order, the last of the great military orders established in the twelfth century.

The book traces the Order's evolution from a crusader field hospital into a major territorial ruler in northeastern Europe. Notably, the knights constructed distinctive fortified convents, including their headquarters in Western Christendom's largest castle. The narrative concludes with the Order's fifteenth-century decline due to the combined effects of a devastating war with Poland-Lithuania and the Protestant Reformation. The result is an accessible overview of this pivotal corporation in European history.

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Cyrus Ali Zargar, "Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ʿaṭṭār" (SUNY Press, 2024)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s writings have greatly influenced Persian Sufism, but what do we know of him as a thinker? Engaging his diverse writings from poetry to stories, Cyrus Ali Zargar’s Religion of Live: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ‘Attar (SUNY Press, 2024) captures for us some of ‘Attar’s worldviews, especially as it is rooted in a Persian and Muslim historical context. The book gives us insights to ‘Attar’s take on moral psychology, ethics, and intellectual debates he was responding to, such as with philosophers and legal scholars. Zargar captures ‘Attar’s religion of love, which takes us to the edge of infidelity and at times even crosses its threshold only to better understand the experience of union with the Beloved (Divine) that mystics have discussed across traditions. This book will be of interest to listeners who are curious about Persian literature, Sufism, Islamic philosophy and mysticism generally.

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Abbey Stockstill, "Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities.

The contours of mediaeval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Dr. Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s mediaeval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital.

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Lesley Smith, "Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Lesley Smith of Oxford University joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life (University of Chicago Press, 2023). It has been 140 years since a full biography of William of Auvergne (1180?-1249), which may come as a surprise, given that William was an important gateway of Greek and Arabic thought and philosophy to western Europe in the thirteenth century, and one of the earliest writers in the medieval Latin west on demonology. Lesley Smith's aims in this book are two-fold: first, to take a closer look at William, the human being, how he saw the world and his place in it; and to uncover William's interactions with his Parisian congregation through the nearly 600 sermons he left after his death.

Smith has mined these writings, unremarked in previous scholarship, to give us a different perspective on the schoolmaster, bishop of Paris, and strict theologian we have come to know: a preacher who spoke and ministered not just to the powerful and elite, but also to commoners, to the poor, and to the less fortunate. Through a study of the sermons, Smith creates a broader landscape of William's thought and life, highlighting his attention to the importance--and limits--of language, and his attempts to find a way to address the concerns of the larger populace. In his preaching, we get a sense of the balance William achieved, in the way he communicated religious teachings, in his understanding of the concerns of ordinary Parisians, and in his awareness of the ebb and flow of daily life in a medieval city. The book will interest scholars of intellectual history and philosophy, religion, and literary studies more broadly for Smith's innovative method of excavating the sermons in pursuit of William the person, and his humanity. An altogether "new" William for the twenty-first century.

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Sara J. Charles, "The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Sara J. Charles takes the reader on an immersive journey through mediaeval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a mediaeval narrator – including a parchment-maker, scribe and illuminator – introducing various aspects of manuscript production.

Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

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Cordelia Heß, "The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden" (de Gruyter, 2021)

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. Cordelia Heß's The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden (de Gruyter, 2021), the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era.

Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period.

Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

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Katharine Sykes, "Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Katharine Sykes joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Symbolic Representation in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2024). In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical.

Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

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Nicholas Orme, "Going to Church in Medieval England" (Yale UP, 2021)

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For people in medieval England, the parish church was an integral part of their community. In Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021), Nicholas Orme describes how parish churches operated and details the roles they played in the lives of their parishioners. While there was a considerable variety of experience over the centuries and between the parishes throughout England, the basic practices in them largely remained the same. These were supervised by a range of people, both lay and clerical, who staged the Mass and managed the church’s everyday operations. Their activities touched on the lives of the members of the community in a variety of ways, from regular attendance at daily and weekly services to celebrations marking the seasons and the great events of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, and comfort in sickness and death. And while the English Reformation transformed the relationship between England and the Roman Catholic Church, Orme shows how some of the changes associated with it were already underway before it began, while much of what went on in parish churches remained as before.

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Nancy M. Bradbury, "Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this elegantly written study Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary.

In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Dr. Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers.

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Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world.

The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light.

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Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, "The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nuria Silleras-Fernandez explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Dr. Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason.

Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Dr. Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in mediaeval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

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Tabitha Stanmore, "Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic" (Bloombury, 2024)

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Imagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?

In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life's many challenges.

In historian Tabitha Stanmore's beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.

Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (Bloombury, 2024) is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.

Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic.

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Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Denva Gallant, "Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life.

In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.

By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.

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Nicola Clark, "The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens" (Norton, 2024)

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Every Tudor Queen had ladies-in-waiting. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the Queen's ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets. But they also held a unique power. A quiet word behind the scenes, an appropriately timed gift, a well-negotiated marriage alliance were all forms of political agency wielded expertly by women.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (W. W. Norton, 2024) by Dr. Nicola Clark explores the daily lives of ladies-in-waiting, revealing the secrets of recruitment, costume, what they ate, where (and with whom) they slept. We meet María de Salinas, who travelled to England with Catherine of Aragon when just a teenager and spied for her during the divorce from Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn's lady-in-waiting Jane Parker was instrumental in the execution of not one, but two queens. And maid-of-honour Anne Basset kept her place through the last four consorts, negotiating the conflicting loyalties of her birth family, her mistress the Queen, and even the desires of the King himself. As Henry changed wives, and changed the very fabric of the country's structure besides, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn't exist before. The Waiting Game is the first time their vital story has been told.

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Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh, "The Philosopher Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence from the Tenth Century" (NYU Press, 2019/22)

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to James Montgomery, one of the translators of The Philosopher Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence from the Tenth Century, two volumes (NYU Press, 2019 and 2022). About the book:

Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī to the philosopher and historian Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.

The correspondence between al-Tawḥīdī and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers. Alternately whimsical and tragic, trivial and profound, al-Tawḥīdī's questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content.

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Suganya Anandakichenin, "For My Blemishless Lord: Commentaries on Tiruppāṇāḻvār's Amalaṉ Āti Pirāṉ" (de Gruyter, 2023)

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For My Blemishless Lord (de Gruyter, 2023) presents the text and translation of the exquisite poem Amalaṉ Āti Pirāṉ by Tiruppāṇ Āḻvār, which is part of the Śrīvaiṣṇava canon, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (6th- 9thcenturies CE), as well as of the three Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries in Tamil-Sanskrit Manipravala (13th- 14th centuries) by key figures in the medieval religious history of South Asia, namely, Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai, Aḻakiya Maṇavāḷa Perumāḷ Nāyaṉār, and Vedānta Deśika. Offering the first fully annotated, complete translation of these exegetical writings, this volume analyses the language, commentary techniques, and the theological positions of, as well as cultural, religious and other allusions made by these commentators, placing them in their literary, social and religious backgrounds, during a period of budding dissent within the Śrīvaiṣṇava community, to which they contributed at least in part. This rich resource is made available in English for the first time for students of Tamil and Manipravala, theology, religious history, and philology.

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Tahera Qutbuddin, trans., "Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī" (Brill, 2024)

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Nahj al-Balagha is among the most powerful, consequential, and linguistically brilliant masterpieces of Arabic and of Islamic thought and literature. Based on the orations, letters, and sayings of wisdom of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), the first Imam or successor to Prophet Muhammad in Shi‘i Islam and the fourth caliph in Sunni Islam, this oral treasure was compiled and brought together as a text by the late tenth/early eleventh scholar and poet Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015).

In this episode I speak with Professor Tahera Qutbuddin who has provided us with a majestic and brilliant complete English translation of Nahj al-Balagha titled Nahj al-Balāgha: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ‘Alī (Brill, 2024), a parallel English-Arabic text published open access by Brill. The publication of this volume is an event of seismic importance in the study of Islam, religion, and Arabic. Qutbuddin’s translation is animated with the purpose of rendering the Arabic text of Nahj al-Balagha in English in a fashion that amplifies its literary and philosophical potency, a task at which she excels throughout the translation. The experience of reading this translation is nothing short of a deeply moving, philosophically enriching, and linguistically powerful rhapsody. In addition to an eminently user friendly translation with the particular sections and moments of Nahj al-Balagha clearly marked out, Qutbuddin also presents an erudite account of the text’s reception, reception history, and archival density. This outstanding volume will also be a joy to teach and use as primary source material in a range of courses on Islam, religion, Arabic, and the Humanities more broadly.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Claire Weeda, "Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion" (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity.

Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.

Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500.

Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

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Thea Gomelauri, "The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry" (Taylor Institution Library, 2023)

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From a remote mountain village in the Caucasian mountains of Georgia came the most surprising discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls: a rare, beautiful, and valuable Hebrew Bible known as the Lailashi Codex.

In ancient tradition, scribal art possesses supernatural powers. The provenance of this Codex is shrouded in mystery. Questions about the authorship and ownership surround this ancient work of treasure and secrets. The Codex, written as a labor of love by a scribe of rare skill, was hidden from public view until now.

The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry (Taylor Institution Library, 2023) explores the history and content of this extraordinary work, the earliest surviving nearly complete medieval Hebrew manuscript of the Pentateuch with Masoretic vocalization adorned with intricate micrography.

This book examines the story of the Codex through international controversies, repossessions, and local rivalry, particularly under Communist rule and the volatile politics of the post-Soviet era.

For the first time, readers can see the well-preserved leaves adorned with micrographic designs and read details regarding the composition and layout of the manuscript, vertical inscriptions, enigmatic mnemonic devices, missing folios, spelling variations, and micrographic shapes. It includes a full index of the biblical text and introduces the content of the genius scribe. The volume contains rich archival photos and Jewish historical documents.

For photographs of the manuscript and more information, visit the Oxford Interfaith Forum website.

Sohini Pillai, "Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 30 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Sohini Pillai's Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford UP, 2024) is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or "devotion" focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna.

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Daniel Matt et al., "The Zohar: Pritzker Edition" (Stanford UP, 2004-2017)

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in a lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, features mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy.

The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford UP, 2004-2017) volumes present the first translation ever made from a critical Aramaic text of the Zohar, which has been established by Professor Daniel C. Matt (along with Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker) based on a wide range of original manuscripts. Every one of the twelve volumes provides extensive commentary, appearing at the bottom of each page, clarifying the kabbalistic symbolism and terminology, and citing sources and parallels from biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic texts.

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Sari Nusseibeh, "Avicenna's Al-Shifā': Oriental Philosophy" (Routledge, 2018)

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sari Nusseibeh's book Avicenna's Al-Shifā': Oriental Philosophy (Routledge, 2018) deals with the philosophy of Ibn Sina - Avicenna as he was known in the Latin West- a Persian Muslim who lived in the eleventh century, considered one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy.

Although much has been written about Avicenna, and especially about his major philosophical work, Al-Shifa, this book presents the rationalist Avicenna in an entirely new light, showing him to have presented a theory where our claims of knowledge about the world are in effect just that, claims, and must therefore be underwritten by our faith in God. His project enlists arguments in psychology as well as in language and logic. In a sense, the ceiling he puts on the reach of reason can be compared with later rationalists in the Western tradition, from Descartes to Kant -though, unlike Descartes, he does not deem it necessary to reconstruct his theory of knowledge via a proof of the existence of God. Indeed, Avicenna's theory presents the concept of God as being necessarily presupposed by our theory of knowledge, and God as the Necessary Being who is presupposed by an existing world where nothing of itself is what it is by an intrinsic nature, and must therefore be as it is due to an external cause. The detailed and original analysis of Avicenna's work here is presented as what he considered to be his own, or 'oriental' philosophy.

Presenting an innovative interpretation of Avicenna's thought, this book will appeal to scholars working on classical Islamic philosophy, kalām and the History of Logic.

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Karen Sullivan, "Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.

While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.

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Siân E. Grønlie, "The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The historical narratives of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have much in common with Icelandic saga literature: both are invested in origins and genealogy, place-names, family history, sibling rivalry, conflict and its resolution. Yet the comparison between these two literatures is rarely made, and biblical translations in Old Norse-Icelandic have been neglected as a focus of literary study.

The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Siân E. Grønlie aims to redress this neglect. It shows how the likeness between biblical narrative and saga narrative has shaped the reception of the Old Testament in medieval Iceland, even through multiple layers of translation and exegesis.

It draws on a wide variety of texts, including homilies, saints' lives, world histories, encyclopaedic works, and the biblical translations collectively known as Stjórn, to explore how medieval Icelanders engaged with Old Testament narrative in the light of their own vernacular tradition of storytelling. And above all, it argues that the medieval Icelanders understood and recognised in these well-known biblical stories a narrative art that was strikingly akin to their own.

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Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)

Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their uncertainties about the future, from the serious to the mundane, in a variety of ways. One of the most commonly surviving prognostic methods in medieval manuscripts is onomancy: the branch of divination that predicts the future from calculations based on the numbers that correlate to the letters of personal names. However, despite its ubiquity, it has been relatively little studied.

Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death (York Medieval Press, 2024) by Dr. Joanne Edge analyses the intellectual and physical contexts of onomantic texts in some 65 manuscripts of British provenance between around 1150 and 1500, focusing on its two main varieties It demonstrates that onomancies were copied, owned and used by a people from a wide range of literate society in late medieval England: medical practitioners; the gentry and aristocracy; university scholars; and monks. And it seeks to answer the question of why a divinatory device, condemned in canon law as "Pythagorean necromancy", enjoyed such popularity in mainstream books of religion, medicine, and scholasticism.

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Y. Tzvi Langermann, "Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew" (Brill, 2023)

Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

All can agree that the achievement of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) set the standard for subsequent works of "Jewish philosophy". But just what were the contours of philosophical-scientific inquiry that Maimonides replaced? A fairly large array of diverse texts have been studied, but no comprehensive picture has yet emerged. The newly discovered Hebrew dialogue published here, Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2023), has points of contact of various depth with most of the major works of pre-Maimonidean thought. It shares as well influences from without, especially from the Islamic kalam. The dialogue thus presents, in an engaging literary form, a clear and detailed snapshot of pre-Maimonidean philosophy and science.

Y. Tzvi Langermann teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

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Lucy Barnhouse, "Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Tue, 07 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Lucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred -- and been invested with moral weight -- in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals' legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect hospitals' resources. This status could also, however, be invoked to impose limits on who could serve in and be served by hospitals. As recent scholarship demonstrates, disputes over whom hospitals should serve, and how, find parallels in other periods of history and current debates.

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Sean Griffin, "The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 07 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sean Griffin's book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus (Cambridge UP, 2019), takes on the question of the source materials for the Primary Chronicle, one of the most important texts for the study of medieval Russia. Griffin argues that key portions of the Chronicle have their origin in Byzantine liturgy. This thesis has broad implications for what is and can be known about the early Rus.' Griffin further argues that Rus' state power had a direct interest in liturgy, and he is carrying this interest forward into a forthcoming book on technologies of power in present-day Russia. Listeners interested in this latter topic should be interested in the present interview; the manner in which the Russian state has sacralized its power illustrates fascinating continuities, from the early Rus' to the present day.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Zahra Ayubi, "Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Sat, 04 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.

M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca.

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Sheilagh Ogilvie, "The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), Sheilagh Ogilvie offers a wide-ranging examination of what guilds did and how they affected pre-modern economies. As Ogilvie explains, guilds were particularized institutions which created and enforced privileges for their members while denying them to outsiders. This authority was granted to them by rulers and governments, and depended on their intricate relationship with the public authorities. Their privileges entitled guilds to determine who could participate in a profession, the quality of the items their members produced, and the technological innovations their members could adopt. Ogilvie looks at all aspects of guild activities to show their wide-ranging impact on the economies of their time, and the ways they pursued their members’ interests even when it stifled growth for the rest of society.

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Jason Birch, "The Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Goraksanatha" (Institut Francais de Pondichery, 2024)

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Lineage of Immortals (Sanskrit Amaraugha) is the earliest account of a fourfold system of yoga in which a physical practice called Haṭha is taught as the means to a deep state of meditation known as Rājayoga. The Amaraugha was composed in Sanskrit during the twelfth century and attributed to the author Gorakṣanātha. The physical yoga practices have a pre-history in a tantric Buddhist milieu but were here adapted for a Śaiva audience. The treatise explains how Śaiva yogis move kuṇḍalinī, unite Śakti with Śiva, and achieve Rājayoga. Three hundred years later, the author of the Haṭhapradīpikā incorporated almost all the Amaraugha's verses on Haṭhayoga into his own work, which became a definitive exposition of physical yoga. The study of the Amaraugha reveals not only the genesis of Haṭha and Rājayoga but also the creation of the most influential model of Haṭhayoga in the early modern period.

The Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Goraksanatha (Institut Francais de Pondichery, 2024) presents the first critical edition and annotated translation of the Amaraugha, as well as a later recension, called the Amaraughaprabodha, with an introduction that explores the profound significance of both works for the history of yoga.

Jason Birch was awarded his doctorate at the University of Oxford and is a Senior Research Fellow of the Light on Hatha project, hosted at SOAS University of London and the University of Marburg. He is co-Director of the Yogacintāmaṇiproject at the University of Massachusetts Boston and an Associate Researcher of the Suśruta project at the University of Alberta. He has published articles on the history of Haṭha and Rājayoga, and co-authored a book on plastic surgery in the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. From 2015 to 2020, he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow of the ERC-funded Haṭha Yoga Project. He is a founding member of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the peer-reviewed Journal of Yoga Studies.

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John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise.

In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in mediaeval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians.

Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumours circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Dr. Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.

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Stephen Morillo, "War and Conflict in the Middle Ages" (Polity Press, 2022)

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000

In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages (Polity, 2022), Dr. Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or as late as 1800 CE, an age shaped by climate change and pandemics at both ends. Examining armed conflict at all levels, and ranging across China and the central Asian steppes to southwest Asia, western Europe, and beyond, Morillo explores the technological, social, cultural, and environmental determinants of warfare and the tools and tactics used by warriors on land and at sea.

Part I explains the geographical, political, and technological rules that shaped patterns of military activity everywhere. Part II explores how these rules played out in various historical contexts. Armed conflict played a central role in the making of the medieval world, and medieval people used war and conflict to create, expand, and defend their communities and identities. But the devastating effects of climate change and epidemic disease continually reshaped these communities and the nature of their conflicts.

Broad in its scope and rich in detail, War and Conflict in the Middle Ages will be the go-to guide for students and aficionados of military history, medieval history, and global history.

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Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of the Church in early Ireland.

The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most important are two Latin lives written a century or more after her death. The first was composed by a churchman named Cogitosus and tells of her many miracles of healing and helping the poor. The second source, known as the Vita Prima, continues the tradition with more tales of marvellous deeds and journeys throughout the island. Both Latin sources are a treasure house of information not just about the legends of Brigid but also daily life, the role of women, and the spread of Christianity in Ireland.

Philip Freeman's Two Lives of Saint Brigid (Four Courts Press, 2024) for the first time presents together an English translation of both the Life of Brigid by Cogitosus and the Vita Prima, along with the Latin text of both carefully edited from the best medieval manuscripts. Also included are an introduction, notes, and commentary to help general readers, students, and scholars in reading these fascinating stories of St. Brigid.

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Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm.

In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.

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Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023) analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred between different social groups and settings.

Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late mediaeval Italy. Instead, it was an ambiguous term to be deployed strategically, describing a wide range of social relationships such as allies, collaborators, servants, patrons, rivals, and enemies. Drawing on the use of the language of friendship in the letters, correspondence poems, dedications, narratives, and treatises composed by Dante and his interlocutors, Dr. Coggeshall examines the way they skillfully negotiated around the dilemmas that friendship raised in the spheres of mediaeval Italian literary society. The book addresses instances of inclusivity and exclusivity, collaboration and self-interest, hierarchy and equality, and alterity and identity. Employing literary, historical, and sociological analysis, On Amistà presents a genealogy for the innovative and tactical use of the terms of friendship among the works of late mediaeval Italian authors.

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Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. His previous books include A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities; Streams of gold, Rivers of Blood; Romanland, and, as translator and editor, Prokopios’ The Secret History. In 2019, he began hosting the podcast “Byzantium & Friends.”

Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

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Translating a Śrī Vidyā Text: The Cidvilāsastava of Amṛtānanda

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Cidvilāsastava is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the esoteric contemplation of ritual found within the Śrīvidyā tradition and Śaiva tantra in general. This short forty-verse hymn offers esoteric knowledge and creative contemplations (bhāvanā) for critical steps in the ritual worship of Tripurasundarī. Although belonging to the Śrīvidyā tradition, the Cidvilāsastava will likely be of great interest to all who perform pūjā as many of the verses deal with topics and procedures that are common to all traditional forms of ritual worship. The full tex is available here.

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Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months.

Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012; paperback 2023) closely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity--and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions--during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony.

The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.

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William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern.

This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.

William Bain is Associate Professor of International Relations at National University of Singapore. He is the author of Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (OUP, 2003) and editor of, and contributor to, Medieval Foundations of International Relations (Routledge, 2016) and The Empire of Security and the Safety of the People (Routledge, 2006). He has written widely on the theory of international society and the history of international thought.

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Shakuntala Gawde, "Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha" (Dev Publishers, 2023)

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. Book gives an exhaustive introduction dealing with Purāṇas, the growth of Vaiṣṇnavism and Narratology with special reference to Bhāgavata Purāṇa which sets precursor to the further analysis. It undertakes hermeneutic interpretation of episodes – Lord Kṛṣṇa’s birth story, Lifting of Govardhana Mountain, Syamantaka jewel, exploits of Pūtanā and other demons, uprooting of Arjuna trees, the expulsion of Kāliya, Gopīcīraharaṇam, Rāsapaῆcādhyāyī, story of Kubjā, story of Śrīdāman and Rukmiṇī Svayaṁvara.

All these narratives are categorised into three themes – 1) Assimilation and acculturation 2) Exploits of demons and 3) Bhakti Narratives. The Narrative structure of each episode is analysed to derive the meaning from it. Theoretical frameworks developed by K. Ayyappa Paniker, Genette and Roland Barthes are applied to the selected narratives of the tenth skandha of Bhāg. P. to understand the deeper meaning of the narratives. The toolbox approach is taken into consideration while doing textual exegesis and hermeneutic interpretation. It explores socio-historical, psychological and philosophical aspects of the above narratives through textual analysis of the tenth skandha of Bhāgavata Purāṇa using the tools like intertextuality and intratextuality.

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Ada Maria Kuskowski, "Vernacular Law; Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the mediaeval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualised in writing.

In Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Ada Maria Kuskowski uses French lawbooks known as coutumiers to trace the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.

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Eva De Clercq, ed. and trans., "The Life of Padma" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama's exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship.

The second volume recounts Rama's exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities--rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana's marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama's honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita's disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana.

Eva De Clercq's The Life of Padma (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani's critical edition.

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Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Michael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this book examines 202 literary manuscripts from the period 1350 to 1500. First, this study suggests that most surviving manuscripts fall into four categories, depending on the proximity and relationship of that manuscript's scribes and readers. But beyond proposing these new categories, this book also looks at the history of writing practices, and demonstrates the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England.

As a result, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentered affair, one that took place within these numerous, modest, yet complex, bureaucracies. But this book also argues that, because literary production arose in such scattered bureaucracies, manuscripts were local products, produced within the cultural and economic milieu of their users. Manuscripts thus form a fundamentally different sort of cultural artefact than the printed books with which we are familiar--a form of centralized, urbanized, and commercialized textual production that was just over the historical horizon in late medieval England.

Michael Johnston earned a BA in English and Religious Studies from John Carroll University in 2000, a M.Litt. in Mediaeval English from the University of St Andrews in 2002, and a PhD from Ohio State University in 2007. He is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University and he researches and teaches about literature and culture in late medieval England, with a specialization in the history of the book and Piers Plowman.

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Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Tudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers.

The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers from the Tudor period provide crucial information about the textual organisation of the social network centred on the Tudor government. Whole libraries have been written using this archive, but until now nobody has had access to the macroscopic tools that allow us to ask questions such as: What are the reasons for the structure of the Tudor government's intelligence network? What was it geographical reach and coverage? Can we use network data to show patterns of surveillance? What role did women play in these government networks? And what biases are there in the data?

The authors employ methods from the field of network science, translating key concepts and approaches into a language accessible to literary scholars and historians, and illustrating them with examples drawn from this fantastically rich archive. Each chapter is the product of a set of thematically organised 'experiments', which show how particular methods can help to ask and answer research questions specific to the State Papers archive, but also have applications for other large bodies of humanities data. The fundamental aim of this book, therefore, is not merely to provide an innovative perspective on Tudor politics; it also aspires to introduce an entirely new audience to the methods and applications of network science, and to suggest the suitability of these methods for a range of humanistic inquiry.

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Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

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Anthony Kaldellis, "Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Though commonly used today to identify a polity that lasted for over a millennium, the label “Byzantine empire” is an anachronism imposed by more recent generations. As Anthony Kaldellis explains in Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Harvard University Press, 2019), this has contributed to the denial of the ethnic identity that most denizens of the empire had of themselves as Romans. Kaldellis traces the origins of this process of denial to the 8th century CE, with the papacy’s turn to the Franks as their protectors. The efforts by the Catholic Church to de-legitimize the Eastern Empire as the legatee of ancient Rome denied the self-identification of its residents as Romans, one that is reflected in much of the surviving literature from this era. This identity was so widely embraced by the residents of the empire as to make it a largely homogenous state ethnically throughout much of its existence, one that absorbed many of the bands of people from other ethnic groups who migrated to the empire over the centuries of its existence.

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Laura Flannigan, "Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace.

Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Laura Flannigan presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late mediaeval and early modern England. Delving into the rich but little-studied archive of the royal Court of Requests, it reconstructs collaborations between sovereigns and subjects on the formulation of an important governmental ideal: justice. Examining the institutional and social dimensions of this point of contact, this study places ordinary people, their knowledge and demands at the heart of a judicial revolution unfolding within the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet it also demonstrates that directing extraordinary royal justice into ordinary procedures created as many problems as it solved.

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Beatrice Heuser, "War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

War is often thought of mainly the concern of professional soldiers and maybe politicians as well. However, philosophers and theorists of varying types have addressed the issue of war in its many aspects. This is because war has numerous political, ethical, philosophical, and even legal elements. When is the right time to go to war? What is a legitimate reason to go to war? Who has the proper authority to declare war? Who should serve and fight in war? These and other questions have been debated since the times of Antiquity to the present day. Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Jewish and Christian religious traditions have formed the foundations for the majority of Western thinking concerning the nature of war. In her book War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2022), Beatrice Hesuer traces the nearly 2,500 year history of how these ideas have shaped Western conceptions of war.

Beatrice Heuser holds the Chair in International Relations at Glasgow University. From 1991-2003 she taught at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, ultimately as Chair of International and Strategic Studies. She has also taught at Sciences Po' and the Universities Paris I, IV (Sorbonne), and VIII (St Denis), and at two German universities. From 1997-1998, she worked in the International Staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Between 2003-2007 she was Director for Research at the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. She is also the host of the Talking Strategy podcast for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Santideva's 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist classic, "The Guide to the Practices of Awakening" (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years.

In Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury, 2023), Stephen Harris guides us through a philosophical exploration of Santideva's masterpiece, introducing us to his understanding of the compassionate bodhisattva, who vows to liberate the entire universe from suffering. Individual chapters provide studies of the bodhisattva virtues of generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom, illustrating the role each plays in Santideva's account of well-being and moral development. Harris also provides an in-depth analysis of many of Santideva's most influential arguments, demonstrating how he employs reasoning as a method to cultivate moral character.

As the first book-length English language philosophical study of Santideva's most influential text, this will be essential reading for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics, as well as for anyone interested in intercultural ethics and the philosophy of well-being.

Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion.

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Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and the Crusaders themselves. Nic Morton recreates this world, exploring how each faction sought to advance its own interests by any means possible, adapting its warcraft to better respond to the threats posed by their rivals. Strategies and tactics employed by the pastoral societies of the Central Asian steppe were pitted against the armies of the agricultural societies of Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the Islamic World, galvanising commanders to adapt their practices in response to their foes.

In this episode, Nic joins me again to discuss histories of nomadic peoples fighting with and against the Crusader armies; what military history can tell us about the economic, social, and cultural history of the medieval Near East; and why Crusader history is still relevant to us today.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Brian Gastle et al., "The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (Medieval Institute Press, 2023)

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

John Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover’s Confession") is one of the most important English works of the fourteenth century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover’s confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Medieval Institute Press, 2023) is the first translation of the entire (33,000-line) poem, including its Latin verses and glosses. The book was edited and translated by Brian Gastle and Catherine Carter, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway.

Nikki Roulo received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023 and her scholarly interests include fools in early modern literature, seventeenth-century drama, poetics, and jestbooks.

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Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.

Dr. Karen Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Karen is working on a forthcoming book that explores the Islamic conception of the Mediterranean and mapping.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Elizabeth Eva Leach, "Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How was music important to medieval society? In Medieval Sex Lives:The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP, 2023), Prof Elizabeth Eva Leach, a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford explores the history and content of the Douce 308 manuscript to tell the story of the cultural and sexual scripts that framed courtly life in the Medieval era. The book tells the long history of the idea of courtly love, as well as using contemporary theories and cultural practices to re-examine the songs and lyrics in the manuscript. A fascinating and absorbing read, the book will be of interest to humanities scholars and more widely to anyone interested in the history of music, sex, and sexuality. You can also find out more about the book here on Prof Leach’s blog.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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Virginia Chieffo Raguin, "The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration.

Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury and Cologne, and takes us from Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle to Swiss guildhalls, Iran’s Pink Mosque, Tiffany’s chapel for the World Exposition, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and more. As she reveals, the art of stained glass relies on not only a single maker, but the relationship between the physical site, the patron’s aims, the work’s legibility for the spectator and the prevailing style of the era. This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume for anyone interested in stained-glass works.

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Martyn Whittock, "American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America" (Pegasus Books, 2023)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A vivid and illuminating new history--separate fact from fiction, myth from legend--exploring the early Vikings settlements in North America.

Vikings are an enduring subject of fascination. The combination of adventure, mythology, violence, and exploration continues to grip our attention. As a result, for more than a millennium the Vikings have traveled far and wide, not least across the turbulent seas of our minds and imaginations.

The geographical reach of the Norse was extraordinary. For centuries medieval sagas, first recorded in Iceland, claimed that Vikings reached North America around the year 1000. This book explores that claim, separating fact from fiction and myth from mischief, to assess the enduring legacy of this claim in America. The search for "American Vikings" connects a vast range of different areas; from the latest archaeological evidence for their actual settlement in North America to the myth-making of nineteenth-century Scandinavian pioneers in the Midwest; and from ancient adventurers to the political ideologies in the twenty-first century. It is a journey from the high seas of a millennium ago to the swirling waters and dark undercurrents of the online world of today.

No doubt, the warlike Vikings would have understood how their image could be "weaponized." In the same way, they would probably have grasped how their dramatic, violent, passionate, and discordant mythologies could appeal to our era and cultural setting. They might, though, have been more surprised at how their image has been commercialized and commodified. A vivid new history by a master of the form, American Vikings (Pegasus Books, 2023) explores how the Norse first sailed into the lands, and then into the imaginations, of America.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order.

As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews.

Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in an effort to define "us."

Analyzing anti-Muslim sentiment in texts and images produced across Europe and the Middle East over a thousand years, the author shows how Christians intentionally distorted reality by alleging that Muslims are just like Jews. They did so not only to justify assaults against Muslims on theological grounds but also to motivate fellow believers to live as "good" Christians. The disdain premodern polemicists expressed for Islam and Judaism was never really about these religions. They sought to promote their own visions of Christianity―a dynamic that similarly animates portrayals of Muslims and Jews today.

David M. Freidenreich is Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College and author of Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law

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Jonathan Sumption, "Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 5" (Faber & Faber, 2023)

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Triumph and Illusion (Faber & Faber, 2023) is the final volume of Jonathan Sumption's epic history of the Hundred Years War. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later.

This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of the two principal nation-states of western Europe. It brought an end to four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France, separating two countries whose fortunes had once been closely intertwined. It created a new sense of national identity in both countries. The legacy of these events would influence their divergent fortunes for centuries to come.

Behind the clash of arms stood some of the most remarkable personalities of the age: the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent who ruled much of France from Paris and Rouen; Charles VII of France, underrated in both countries, who patiently rebuilt his kingdom after the disasters of his early years; the captains who populate the pages of Shakespeare - Fastolf, Montagu, Talbot, Dunois and, above all, the extraordinary figure of Joan of Arc who changed the course of the war in a few weeks at the age of seventeen.

Jonathan, Lord Sumption is the author of the justly acclaimed, five volume history of the Hundred Years’ War. In his professional life, he served for six years as a Justice of the British Supreme Court. He is a graduate of Eton & Oxford.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University.

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Peter Brown, "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Over the past seven decades, Peter Brown has transformed our collective understanding of the late Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages alike, establishing Late Antiquity (ca. 250-800 CE) as a distinctive era of creative religious, social, and intellectual ferment. This was the time of the prophet Muhammad, of Augustine of Hippo, of Byzantium’s heyday. Peter Brown published his revolutionary life-and-times study of Augustine while at Oxford, in the 1960s, and a further dozen studies have followed in the course of a professorial career at Berkeley and Princeton. Yet Brown’s transformative approach to Antiquity and the Middle Ages has roots in a worldview conditioned by the experience of growing up Protestant in the Republic of Ireland, with an extensive family tradition of professional service “abroad” across the British Empire (Brown’s own father worked as a railway engineer in Sudan).

In Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press, 2023), Peter Brown weaves together the diverse threads of his own life and times, serving up a beautifully written, richly sourced autobiography that is at once also a family history, a portrait of post-independence Ireland, a collective intellectual biography spanning several generations of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic (some known to Brown only through their writing, others as mentors, friends, and students), a sociology of academic knowledge, and an authoritative historiographical essay. Journeys of the Mind is a genre-bending book, earnest in dissecting the pitfalls of knowledge production about the past but also optimistic about the historical profession—and, in particular, about the field of Late Antiquity as a wellspring of lessons for the future.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.

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Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, "The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0000

In the current context, where Vladimir Putin justifies his war against Ukraine by insisting on an inevitable, unbroken teleology that binds Kyiv to Moscow, he need to critically reexamine such interpretations is painfully evident.

Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski's book The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom (Reaktion Books, 2023) takes a brave and important step in that direction by charting a history of Kyivan Rus’ through the framework of a history of families. The Ruling Families of Rus is not polemical; rather, through an erudite and trenchant exploration of the region’s history through local families and the marriages that manifested their priorities and strategies, this book reveals a fascinating history that brings us much closer to how ruling elites at the time approached and understood their world while also including women in histories that have often been told by “reading past” the roles women played. In short, this fascinating examination of the development of Rus, Lithuania, Muscovy, and Tver and their relationships with the Mongols, Byzantines, and others reveals a history close to the sources and quite different from the one Vladimir Putin tells.

The Ruling Families of Rus will appeal to scholars interested in the medieval history of eastern Europe. It contains beautifully produced illustrations and contextualized stories that will be a treasured resource for those who teach about this region and period. Have a listen to this conversation to get a sense of why.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Robert Houghton, "Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Middle Ages have provided rich source material for physical and digital games from Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed. Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games (Bloomsbury, 2023) addresses the many ways in which different formats and genre of games represent the period. It considers the restrictions placed on these representations by the mechanical and gameplay requirements of the medium and by audience expectations of these products and the period., highlighting innovative attempts to overcome these limitations through game design and play.

Playing the Middle Ages considers a number of important and timely issues within the field including: one, the connection between medieval games and political nationalistic rhetoric; two, trends in the presentation of religion, warfare and other aspects of medieval society and their connection to modern culture; three, the problematic representations of race; and four, the place of gender and sexuality within these games and the broader gaming community.

The book draws on the experience of a wide-ranging and international group of academics across disciplines and from games designers. Through this combination of expertise, it provides a unique perspective on the representation of the Middle Ages in modern games and drives key discussions in the fields of history and game design.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Abigail Agresta, "The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived?

In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period.

Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.

Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History.

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Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023), political scientist Anna Grzymała-Busse corrects a long-standing distortion in the study of state formation in Europe, writing religion back into the story and examining, at once pithily and methodically, the multiple contributions of the Roman Church to the emergence of modern practices of secular statehood. Sacred Foundations expands the conventional geography of medieval European state practice and brings to bear a range of innovative data analysis, showing that not only the papacy, but also a host of individuals and institutions subsumed under the Church contributed to medieval Europe’s territorial fragmentation (especially in Germanic and Italian lands), to the genesis of state institutions and civil law, and to the emergence of a culture of taxation by consent. Sometimes through rivalry, sometimes through emulation, kings across medieval Europe acquired the necessary tools to multiply human capital, drive institutional innovation, and ultimately best the papacy at its own long-standing efforts at administration and secular rule.

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D. L. d'Avray, "The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400-c.1600" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state?

From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems,

The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and is the only book of its kind.

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Roslyn Weiss, "Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings" (Library of the Jewish People, 2023)

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Roslyn Weiss, editor of Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings (Library of the Jewish People, 2023).

Hasdai Crescas spent his life in public service - as a rabbi and community leader in desperate times in 14th-century Spain. Despite having limited time for writing, he produced several important works, which Collected Writings presents in their entirety. The first of these, Epistle to the Jews of Avignon, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish riots in Aragon in 1391, chronicling the unimaginable horrors the Jewish communities endured - mass conversions, suicides, deaths, and the loss of great Torah scholars - as well as his own personal tragedy, the murder of his only son, "a lamb without blemish."

To counter Christian efforts to convert Jews, Crescas composed two polemical works, only one of which has survived, The Refutation of the Christian Principles. Written in 1397-8, it offers reasoned arguments to challenge ten principles of Christianity. A great halakhist, Crescas penned many responsa, some of which are known because they were quoted by later halakhists. But only one extant work contains halakhic material - the Passover Sermon, dealing (in part) with the laws of Passover. Because of the urgent communal demands on his time, Crescas was unable to complete Lamp of the Lord, the two-volume work which was to be his response to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and Guide of the Perplexed. His magisterial work, Light of the Lord, a work of intellectual rigor and deep religious sensibility, was his answer only to the Guide. In this brilliant work, completed in 1410, just before his death, Crescas rejects the purely intellectual Aristotelian God in favor of Judaism's God of love. It is a work suffused with love for God, the Torah, the rabbinic tradition, and the Jewish people.

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Nader Kadhem, "Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker from Bahrain, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world. Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, imagining, and representing black people as a subject of study in Arabic writings. Kadhem explores the narratives of Africanism in the Arab imaginary from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century to show how racism toward black people is ingrained in the Arab world, offering a comprehensive account of the representations of blackness and black people in Arab cultural narratives - including the Quran, the hadith, and Arabic literature, geography, and history.

Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) examines the pejorative image of black people in Arab cultural discourse through three perspectives: the controversial anthropological concept that culture defines what it means to be human; the biblical narrative of Noah cursing his son Ham’s descendants - understood to be darker-skinned - with servitude; and Greco-Roman physiognomy, philosophy, medicine, and geography. Describing the shifting standards of inclusion that have positioned Arab identity in opposition to blackness, Kadhem argues that in the cultural imaginary of the Arab world, black people are widely conflated with the Other. Analyzing canonical Arabic texts through the lens of English, French, and German theory, Africanism traces the history of racism in Arab culture. Africanism digs deep into the cultural constructions of blacks in all aspects of the Arab imaginary, including language, religion, philosophy, literature, geography, and history.

Author: Nader Kadhem is a professor emeritus of cultural studies at the University of Bahrain. Kadhim authored many literature and cultural criticism articles and studies published in Bahraini Arabic media. He has published 16 books that can be found here.

Translator: Amir Al-Azraki is an Arab-Canadian playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, Associate Professor, and Coordinator of the Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program, Renison University College, University of Waterloo. His research interests include Arab Theatre, Afro-Arab Cultural Heritage and Representation, and Literary Translation (Arabic-English)

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on X @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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Jenny Benham, "International Law in Europe, 700–1200" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book further sheds light on issues such as compliance, enforcement, deterrence, authority and jurisdiction, challenging traditional ideas over their role and function in the history of international law.

International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations.

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Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. In Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Tabitha Stanmore brings this world to light.

Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.

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Joeri Teeuwisse, "Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened" (Ebury Press, 2022)

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Fake news about the past is fake history.

Did Hugo Boss design the Nazi uniforms?
Did medieval people think the world was flat?
Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx?

*Spoiler Alert* The answer to all those questions is no.

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Steven B. Bowman, "Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Steven B. Bowman about his book Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel (Wayne State UP, 2022).

Sepher Yosippon was written in Hebrew by a medieval historian noted by modern scholars for its eloquent style. This is the first known chronicle of Jewish history and legend from Adam to the destruction of the Second Temple, this is the first known text since the canonical histories written by Flavius Josephus in Greek and later translated by Christian scholars into Latin.

Sepher Yosippon has been cited and referred to by scholars, poets, and authors as the authentic source for ancient Israel for over a millennium, until overshadowed by the twentieth-century Hebrew translations of Josephus. It is based on Pseudo Hegesippus's fourth-century anti-Jewish summary of Josephus's Jewish War. However, the anonymous author [a.k.a. Joseph ben Gurion Hacohen] also consulted with the Latin versions of Josephus's works available to him. At the same time, he included a wealth of Second Temple literature as well as Roman and Christian sources. This book contains Steven Bowman's translation of the complete text of David Flusser's standard Hebrew edition of Sepher Yosippon, which includes the later medieval interpolations referring to Jesus. The present English edition also contains the translator's introduction as well as a preface by the fifteenth-century publisher of the book.

The anonymous author of this text remains unique for his approach to history, his use of sources, and his almost secular attitude, which challenges the modern picture of medieval Jews living in a religious age. In his influential novel, A Guest for the Night, the Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon emphasized the importance of Sepher Yosippon as a valuable reading to understand human nature. Bowman's translation of Flusser's notes, as well as his own scholarship, offers a well-wrought story for scholars and students interested in Jewish legend and history in the medieval period, Jewish studies, medieval literature, and folklore studies.

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Rebecca Hardie, "Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.

Rebecca Hardie is a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Managing Editor of the Living Handbook of Temporal Communities in the Excellence Cluster 2020 “Temporal Communities.”

Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple.

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Don Hollway, "Battle for the Island Kingdom: The Struggle for England's Destiny 1000-1066" (Osprey, 2023)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In a saga reminiscent of Game of Thrones and Battle for the Island Kingdom: The Struggle for England's Destiny 1000-1066 (Osprey, 2023) reveals the life-and-death struggle for power which changed the course of history. The six decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars and intrigues, in which three peoples vied for supremacy over the island kingdom. In this epic retelling, Don Hollway (The Last Viking) recounts the clashes of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, their warlords and their conniving queens.

It begins with the Viking Cnut the Great, forging three nations into his North Sea Empire while his Saxon wife Aelfgifu rules in his stead and schemes for England's throne. Her archenemy is Emma of Normandy, widow of Saxon king Aethelred, claiming Cnut's realm in exchange for her hand in marriage. Their sons become rivals, pawns in their mothers' wars until they can secure their own destinies. And always in the shadows is Godwin of Wessex, playing all sides to become the power behind the throne until his son Harold emerges as king of all of England.

But Harold's brother Tostig turns traitor, abandons the Anglo-Saxons and joins the army of the last great Viking, Harald Hardrada, where together they meet their fate at the battle of Stamford Bridge. And all this time watching from across the water is William, the Bastard, fighting to secure his own Norman dukedom, but with an eye on the English crown.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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David Alan Parnell, "Belisarius & Antonina: Love and War in the Age of Justinian" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Belisarius and Antonina were titans in the Roman world some 1,500 years ago. Belisarius was the most well-known general of his age, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths, and as if this were not enough, wealthy beyond imagination. His wife, Antonina, was an impressive person in her own right. She made a name for herself by traveling with Belisarius on his military campaigns, deposing a pope, and scheming to disgrace important Roman officials. Together, the pair were extremely influential, and arguably wielded more power in the late Roman world than anyone except the emperor Justinian and empress Theodora themselves. This unadulterated power and wealth did not mean that Belisarius and Antonina were universally successful in all that they undertook. They occasionally stumbled militarily, politically, and personally - in their marriage and with their children. These failures knock them from their lofty perch, humanize them, and make them even more relatable and intriguing to us today.

Belisarius & Antonina: Love and War in the Age of Justinian (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first modern portrait of this unique partnership. They were not merely husband and wife but also partners in power. This is a paradigm which might seem strange to us, as we reflexively imagine that marriages in the ancient world were staunchly traditional, relegating wives to the domestic sphere only. But Antonina was not a reserved housewife, and Belisarius showed no desire for Antonina to remain in the home. Their private and public lives blended as they traveled together, sometimes bringing their children, and worked side-by-side. Theirs was without a doubt the most important nonroyal marriage of the late Roman world, and one of the very few from all of antiquity that speaks directly to contemporary readers.

Dr. David Alan Parnell is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest. He is the author of Justinian’s Men (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has worked on numerous articles about the military and social life of the sixth-century Roman Empire. He is also a consultant, recently working on Epic History TV’s documentary series on Belisarius.

Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

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Toby Matthiesen, "The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools.

But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followed—would be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen.

Toby, in his most recent book The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford University Press, 2023), tries to chart the history of the Sunni-Shia split: its origins at the very start of Islam’s founding, and how different Muslim polities—including those outside of the Arabian core—flitted between tolerance and conflict.

In this interview, Toby and I talk about the origins of the division between the Sunni and the Shia, how different regimes throughout history molded and were molded by the split, and what that means for the present day.

Toby Matthiesen is Senior Lecturer in Global Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of several award-winning books and has previously held fellowships at the Universities of Oxford, Ca' Foscari of Venice, Stanford, Cambridge, and the LSE.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Caliph and the Imam. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Jennifer Saltzstein, "Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023) investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments. It explores medieval French song through the critical and disciplinary lenses of ecocriticism and environmental history. The repertoire under scrutiny embraces the gamut of forms and genres of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French music, considering the songs of the trouvères, the ars antiqua motet, the formes fixes, the plays of Adam de la Halle, and the lyric-infused narrative poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Although these works have never before been conceptualized as a corpus of nature poetry, they routinely evoke nature and the outdoors. They feature the gardens, meadows, and trees found in the countryside that many of their authors inhabited, and they conceptualize nature as crucial to poetic inspiration, to the fulfillment of desire, and as a space symbolic of the sacred. Through a deep contextualization of these songs and the people who wrote them, Song, Landscape, and Identity offers a novel account that demonstrates how song could present modalities of engagement with nature that were determined by geography, gender, and status. Key questions include: How realistic is the nature imagery in these songs? What ways of interaction with a landscape do they encourage? Where, and for whom, were such experiences available? The answers to these questions reposition medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class.

Jennifer Saltzstein is a Presidential Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses on the music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. She is author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Áine Palmer is a PhD candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her work considers trouvère song and the anthologies that collect them in the long thirteenth century.

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Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Chris Bishop, "Medievalist Comics and the American Century" (UP of Mississippi, 2016)

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Medievalist Comics and the American Century (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Chris Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context.

Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century.

In this interview Dr. Bishop talks about the uses and abuses of classical and medieval texts in popular media, the value of studying flops, and how we all might misunderstand history for our own reassurance.

Dr. Chris Bishop is a honorary lecturer at the Australian National University. He has published widely on the history of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as well as on comic book studies. In 2012 Bishop was awarded a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his research, which led to the publication of the book.

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Youcef L. Soufi, "The Rise of Critical Islam: 10th-13th Century Legal Debate" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Youcef Sufi's book The Rise of Critical Islam: 10th-13th Century Legal Debate (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a fascinating and engaging exploration of the history of critique in Islamic legal and intellectual history. It does this specifically through a case study of dispensations and disputations, known as munāẓarāt in Arabic. Dispensations were a practice of debates that were an important feature of a jurist's practice and an opportunity for him to showcase his juristic skills – for instance, they were sometimes tasked with having to defend a position that they disagreed with or that contradicted the opinion of the school they followed and represented. Ultimately, these dispensations serve as an excellent case study of the tremendous diversity of thought and the celebration of difference of opinion in Islamic history and Islamic law; they also show that for Muslim jurists, engaging in these debate was an act of piety, as a part of their personal and intellectual quest to discover God's law.

In our conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, some of its main points and arguments, a detailed description of these dispensations (such as who participated in them, who was excluded from them, how the debate topic was chosen), the shifts and developments they undergo with time, and the role of ijtihad (or independent reasoning or re-interpretations of Islamic law) and taqlid (or sticking to the past scholarly positions) in these debates. We also discuss specific themes such as child or forced marriage, women’s right to divorce, which are perceived to have been settled matters but it turns out, not quite! And finally, Sufi explains why and how these disputations came to an end and what jurists participating in them may have imagined the role of later generations to be in the process of Islamic law-making.

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Philip Jenkins, "A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World" (Baylor UP, 2023)

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors' zealous movement involved other acts that closely foreshadowed the Reformation movement that would sweep Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Like that later Reformation, iconoclasm marked an authentic revolution in religious sensibility, with all that implied for theology, culture, and visual perceptions of holiness. This was a pivotal moment in the definition of Christianity and its relationship to the material creation. It was also a time of critical encounters with the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam.

With A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (Baylor UP, 2023), Philip Jenkins offers a compelling retelling of the saga of how the iconoclastic movement detonated ferocious controversy within the church and secular society as icon supporters challenged the image breakers. Decades of internal struggle followed, marked by rebellions and civil wars, purges and persecutions, plotting and coups d'état. After their cause triumphed, image supporters made the cult of icons ever more central to the faith of Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm marked a watershed in the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and it contributed to Western attempts to establish new empires.

The questions raised during these struggles are all the more relevant at a time when such controversy rages over public depictions of history and the removal of statues, monuments, and names associated with hated figures. As in those earlier times, debates over images serve as vehicles for authentic cultural revolutions.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Christopher P. Atwood, "The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources" (Hackett, 2021)

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this interview we deep dive into the historiographical issues of the texts in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (Hackett, 2021), edited and translated by Christopher P. Atwood, with Lynn Struve. For a complementary, more general interview of the book dealing with the period under discussion listeners can also check out the July 2023 interview with Professor Atwood over at the Chinese Literature Podcast.

Rise of the Mongols offers readers a selection of five important works that detail the rise of the Mongol Empire from a Chinese perspective. Three of these works were written by officials of South China's Southern Song dynasty and two are from officials from North China writing in the service of the Mongol rulers. Together, these accounts offer a view of the early Mongol Empire very different not just from those of Muslim and Christian travelers and chroniclers, but also from the Mongol tradition embodied in The Secret History of Mongols.

The five Chinese source texts (in English translation, each with their own preface):

Selections from Random Notes from Court and Country since the Jianyan Years, vol.2, by Li Xinchuan
"A Memorandum on the Mong-Tatars," by Zhao Gong
"A Sketch of the Black Tatars," by Peng Daya and Xu Ting
"Spirit-Path Stele for His Honor Yelü, Director of the Secretariat," by Song Zizhen
"Notes on a Journey," by Zhang Dehui

Also included are an introduction, index, bibliography, and appendices covering notes on the texts, tables and charts, and a glossary of Chinese and transcribed terms.

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Benjamin Savill, "England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, C. 680-1073" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Benjamin Savill provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts.

How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries?

By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest—locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting—this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely.

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Claudine Chavannes-Mazel and Linda Ijpelaar, "The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How 'green' were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer's madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature?

Claudine Chavannes-Mazel and Linda Ijpelaar's The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600 (Amsterdam UP, 2023) addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.

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Michelle Karnes, "Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers’ stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period’s philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation.

Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World (U Chicago Press, 2022) is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West—including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish —with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.

Michelle Karnes is professor of English and the history of philosophy and science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages and the coeditor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

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Series Spotlight: Central European Medieval Texts (CEMT)

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In episode 5 of the CEU Press Podcast Series we sat down with Professor Gábor Klaniczay from the CEU’s Department of Medieval Studies to discuss one of CEU Press’s longest running series, Central European Medieval Texts (CEMT) and his new edited volume within this series, entitled The Sanctity of the Leaders.

The CEMT series presents the best available critical editions of the original versions of medieval Central and Easter European texts in English-Latin bilingual editions with extensive annotations for readers less familiar with the history and geography of the region. To learn more about the series, click here: Central European Medieval Texts.

The new edition in the series, The Sanctity of the Leaders, presents the vita of the Hungarian holy kings Stephen and St Ladislaus, the Bohemian holy duke Emeric and the holy Abbott Prokop of Sázava alongside three bishops: the Venetian-Hungarian Gellért of Csanád, the Polish Stanislas of Cracow, and the Dalmatian holy bishop St John of Trogir. To learn more about the book, click here: The Sanctity of the Leaders.

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in the CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify and all other major podcast apps.

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Brian Ulrich, "The Medieval Persian Gulf" (ARC Humanities Press, 2023)

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Persian Gulf today is home to multiple cosmopolitan urban hubs of globalization. This did not start with the discovery of oil. The Medieval Persian Gulf (ARC Humanities Press, 2023) tells of the Gulf from the rise of Islam until the coming of the Portuguese, when port cities such as Siraf, Sohar, and Hormuz were entrepots for trading pearls, horses, spices, and other products across much of Asia and eastern Africa. Indeed, products traded there became a key part of the material culture of medieval Islamic civilization, and the Gulf region itself was a crucial membrane between the Middle East and the world of the broader Indian Ocean. The book also highlights the long-term presence of communities of South Asian and African ancestry, as well as patterns of religious change among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims that belie the image of a region long polarized between Arabs and Persians and Sunnis and Shi'ites.

Brian J. Ulrich is a Professor of History at Shippensburg University. His interests include early Islamic history and the history of the Gulf. He has published on early Islamic history and worked with the archaeological excavations at Kazima in Kuwait. He is the author of Arabs in the Early Islamic Empire: Exploring al Azd Tribal Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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The Secret History of the Mongols

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identity remains unknown - combines insider history and verse to chronicle the life of Chingghis Khan and the empire he founded. In an evocative new translation, Chris Atwood brings to life for contemporary readers the world of the Mongol steppe, the Mongol conquests, and life within the tent cities of the Mongol empire. In this episode, Prof. Atwood joins me to discuss what we know about the identity of the Secret Historian; the circumstances of the epic’s creation, reception, and transmission; how Mongol identity is constructed and portrayed in The Secret History; and his work as a historian and translator.

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Martyn C. Rady, "The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe" (Basic Books, 2023)

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (Basic Books, 2023), Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and East. Even as Central European powers warred with their neighbors, the region developed its own cohesive identity and produced tremendous accomplishments in politics, society, and culture. Central Europeans launched the Reformation and Romanticism, developed the philosophy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and advanced some of the twentieth century's most important artistic movements.

Drawing on a lifetime of research and scholarship, The Middle Kingdoms tells as never before the captivating story of two thousand years of Central Europe's history and its enduring significance in world affairs.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Deanne Williams, "Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy" (Arden Shakespeare, 2023)

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Deanne Williams's newest book, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy (Bloombury, 2023), is a groundbreaking study of the girl actor in the medieval and early modern world, demonstrating the existence of the girl performer in England long before the Restoration. Challenging existing academic assumptions about the supposed male dominance of the early modern stage, this book reveals girls' participation in a host of areas, from medieval religious drama to pageants and royal entries under the Tudors, country house entertainments, and Jacobean masques. Williams situates her historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including singing, translating, and writing. By examining the impact of the girl actor in Shakespeare's various constructions of girlhood– those girl characters which play upon the precedent of the performing girl in the medieval world– Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' actively shaped culture in the middle ages and Renaissance through their various performances. Interweaving her study of literary texts with the lives of girls who wrote, collected, and performed them—people like Hroswitha of Gandersheim, Anne Boleyn, Jane Lumely, the Russell sisters, and Elizabeth Carey—Williams centers the lived reality of girl children as they interacted with dramatic culture.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Peter Adamson, "Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Peter Adamson's book Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) provides an introduction to the most important philosopher of the Islamic world, Ibn Sīnā, often known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. After introducing the man and his works, with an overview of the historical context in which he lived, the book devotes chapters to the different areas of Ibn Sīnā's thought. Among the topics covered are his innovations in logic, his theory of the human soul and its powers, the relation between his medical writings and his philosophy, and his metaphysics of existence. Particular attention is given to two famous arguments: his flying man thought experiment and the so-called “demonstration of the truthful,” a proof for the existence of God as the Necessary Existent. A distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the relationship between Ibn Sīnā and Islamic rational theology (kalām): in which we see how Ibn Sīnā responded to this tradition in many areas of his thought. A final chapter looks at Ibn Sīnā's legacy in both the Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. Here Adamson focuses on the critical responses to Ibn Sīnā in subsequent generations by such figures as al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

Peter Adamson is professor of Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He received his BA from Williams College and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. From 2000 to 2012 he was a member of the Philosophy Department at King's College London, and he maintains a connection to King's. But his primary position is now as Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich. The author of numerous monographs and articles on ancient and medieval philosophy, especially Neoplatonism and philosophy in the Islamic world, he also hosts the History of Philosophy podcast, which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.

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Neil Tarrant, "Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history of science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.

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A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Religion and Politics in the Lord of the Rings

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings delighted so many of us as children, yet it and its vast body of accompanying work, such as the Silmarillion, contain a rich depth not well understood by most adults. Tolkien's work reflects his academic interests in the history of language and the Medieval world, as well as his Catholic faith. What purpose and religious message does his writing contain? Does his work carry a political meaning?

Here to discuss is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. In addition to her work on the history of Christianity, medieval liturgy, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, she teaches a popular course "Tolkien: Medieval and Modern," and has a series of lectures and writings mining the depths of Tolkien's thought and writing.

More on Rachel Fulton Brown here.
The syllabus to her course is here.
Her lecture series, "The Forge of Tolkien" is here.
Her blog, "Fencing Bear at Prayer" is here.
Dragon Common Room, which contains more lectures and information about creative writing, is here.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Jacob Abell, "Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose.

By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis.

Jacob Abell is Assistant Professor of French at Baylor University. His work focuses on ecocriticism, religious studies, and the digital humanities.

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Aleksandra Nicole Pfau, "Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Pfau, Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king’s mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.

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Alistair Moffat, "War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans" (Birlinn, 2023)

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans (Birlinn, 2023), acclaimed historian Alistair Moffat sets off in the footsteps of the Highland clans. In twelve journeys he explores places of conflict, recreating as he walks the tumult of battle. As he recounts the military prowess of the clans – surely the most feared fighting men in western Europe – he also speaks of their lives, their language and culture before it was all swept away. The disaster at Culloden in 1746 represented not just the defeat of the Jacobite dream but also the unleashing of merciless retribution from the British government which dealt the Highland clans a blow from which they would never recover.

From the colonisers who attempted to ‘civilise’ the islanders of Lewis in the sixteenth century through the great battles of the eighteenth century – Killiekrankie, Dunkeld, Sheriffmuir, Falkirk and Culloden – this is a unique exploration of many of the places and events which define a country’s history.

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Taylor Cowdery, "Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Is the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes, techniques, and plots that authors draw from? And what kind of labor is the process of transforming that matter into literature? Earlier this year, Taylor Cowdery published an academic study on just this subject. The title of Taylor’s book is Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through case studies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, and Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, Taylor captures a wide discourse around creativity and originality.

Taylor is Associate Professor of English and Robert M. Lumiansky Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Taylor also serves as the Director of the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Taylor’s writing has been published in ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Marion Holmes Katz, "Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this interview, I speak with Marion Holmes Katz about her latest book Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (Columbia UP, 2022). This fascinating book explores the question of wives’ domestic responsibilities from a Sunni Islamic legal perspective, covering scholarship from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. The book addresses questions such as, does the wife have the obligation to provide housework? What counts as housework? And if it is true that the wife is not obligated to perform any household labor, as many western Muslims believe, how did the Muslim tradition reconcile this ruling with the anecdote involving Fatima’s request to the Prophet Muhammad for help with household work because she is overworked? And how did Muslim scholars reconcile this idea with what they understood to be morally, culturally, or religiously correct behavior from a woman? If the wife does choose to perform housework, is she entitled to compensation from her husband?

For most Muslim scholars historically, answers to these questions involved distinguishing between ethical ideals and legal claims. Katz shows, for instance, that the discourse on women’s household labor evolves with time, context, geographical location, such that, for example, in the formative period, it was widely accepted that wives are not obligated to perform any household chores, but by the time we get to the 14th century, this doctrine is challenged. Overall, then, not only do scholarly views expectedly disagree with each other, but also, scholars are less interested in providing a set of generic rules about wifely duties and more in encouraging the fulfillment of duties as they’re understood in one’s own social location.

In our conversation today, we discuss the book’s main contributions and its origins; a hadith report describing an incident about Fatima’s request to Muhammad for domestic help; what exactly domestic service means and who is required or obligated to provide it—and what that obligation means; what exactly is so ethical about household work, since this discourse is rooted in ethics for Muslim scholars; and how male scholars have historically treated domestic service. We end with some thoughts on discussions about Islamic law and domestic service from a class perspective; for example, where do poor men and poor wives fit into this discussion? What are their rights?

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Joshua Daniel Schachterle, "John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity" (Equinox Publishing, 2022)

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity (Equinox Books, 2023), a revision of his 2019 dissertation, Joshua Schachterle evaluates the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian with a keen eye toward the possibility that he envisioned monasticism as a version of Christian piety distinct from that of the institutional church. Schachterle elaborates on comments from a variety of monastic writings indicating that monks should “flee” from bishops, who characteristically sought to ordain these famous ascetic figures for broader church service and to enlist them for support in theological disagreements against the mounting ideological challenges of so-called heretics. Furthermore, Schachterle observes that materials internal to monastic discourses, ranging from the various collections of sayings (“apophthegmata”) of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the writings of Cassian himself, formed a closed discursive system that made no meaningful appeals to the more mainstream institutional church fathers, and he argues that Cassian pursues a separate monastic authority based not on apostolic succession but on apostolic praxis, the notion that monastic practices such as prayer and asceticism can be traced back to the primitive church without recourse to genealogical rhetoric privileging the identities of bishops as guarantors of the true faith. Finally, Schachterle leans on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the creation of subjects to examine Cassian’s formation of a specifically Egyptian form of monastic subjectivity for his new Western audience, the monks of Gaul. Schachterle joined the New Books Network recently to discuss these topics, the origins of Egyptian monasticism, and more from his engaging study of John Cassian’s primary works.

Joshua Schachterle (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) undertook his doctoral studies after a long career as a punk rock musician and an equally long and overlapping career as a high school English teacher. His research focuses on the origins of Christian monasticism and how early monastic texts contributed to the formation and development of both eastern and western Christianity in the Late Antique period. He currently writes articles on the New Testament and Early Christianity, with subjects ranging from The Didache to the Gospel of Matthew and John the Baptist, for Bart Ehrman’s website and Early Christian Texts, and he has a forthcoming article in Cistercian Studies Quarterly on monastic uses of Scripture.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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H. Norman Strickman, "The Secret of the Torah: A Translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra's Sefer Yesod Mora" (Kodesh Press, 2021)

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra is one of the most important Jewish personalities of all time. Aside from being a Bible commentator of great consequence, his works in Jewish philosophy - though less famous - impacted many of his successors, including Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, Nahmanides, and Rabbi Joseph Albo, as well as the Jewish mystics and Kabbalists. The Yesod Mora is one of the first books of Jewish philosophy written in Hebrew, which blazed the trail for philosophy to enter those parts of the Jewish world that were unfamiliar with Arabic.

Highlights of Ibn Ezra's The Secret of the Torah: A Translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra's Sefer Yesod Mora (Kodesh Press, 2021) include

the claim that we cannot properly understand the Bible and Talmud without studying logic, philosophy, and science;
when we are obligated to accept standard rabbinic interpretations of verses, and when we are permitted to draw our own conclusions;
the reasons for - and classification of - the commandments in the Torah;
the composition of the soul according to Jewish philosophy;
how we connect to God by achieving deveikut (communion) with God

This edition of Yesod Mora is based on a version originally published in 1995, with additional notes and critical analysis. The original Hebrew text has been supplied as well.

Editor, interpreter, and translator H. Norman Strickman is Rabbi emeritus of the Marine Park Jewish Center in Brooklyn and is a Professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Touro College in New York City. He earned his ordination from Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Dr. Samuel Belkin of Yeshiva University. Dr. Strickman received his B.A. and M.H.L. degrees from Yeshiva University, and his Ph.D. from Dropsie University.

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Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022).

In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.

Don J. Wyatt (Ph.D. Harvard University) is the John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont, USA, where he has taught history and philosophy since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research interests most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, incoming visiting fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Yehuda Halper, "Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa" (Brill, 2021)

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa (Brill, 2021), Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewish authors of this period formed two distinct views of Socrates: one as a wise, ascetic, monotheist, and the other as a vocal skeptic. The latter view has its roots in Plato's Apology where Socrates describes his divine mandate to question all knowledge, including knowledge of the divine. After exploring how this and similar questions arise in the works of Judah Halevi and the Hebrew Averroes, Halper traces how such open-questioning of the divine arises in the works of Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, and Abraham Bibago.

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Toward a More Expansive View of Medieval Europe: Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Yiwen Li, "Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations.

In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations.

Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu.

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Aleksandra Nicole Pfau, "Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Nicole Pfau's book Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam UP, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice.

The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.

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Richard C. Hoffmann, "The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive examination of European engagement with aquatic systems between c. 500 and 1500 CE. Using textual, zooarchaeological, and natural records, Richard C. Hoffmann's unique study spans marine and freshwater fisheries across western Christendom, discusses effects of human-nature relations and presents a deeper understanding of evolving European aquatic ecosystems.

Changing climates, landscapes, and fishing pressures affected local stocks enough to shift values of fish, fishing rights, and dietary expectations. Readers learn what the abbess Waldetrudis in seventh-century Hainault, King Ramiro II (d.1157) of Aragon, and thirteenth-century physician Aldebrandin of Siena shared with English antiquarian William Worcester (d. 1482), and the young Martin Luther growing up in Germany soon thereafter. Sturgeon and herring, carp, cod, and tuna played distinctive roles. Hoffmann highlights how encounters between medieval Europeans and fish had consequences for society and the environment - then and now.

Richard Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus in History at York University, Toronto, and author of the acclaimed An Environmental History of Medieval Europe.

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Christine Schott, "Canon Fanfiction: Reading, Writing, and Teaching with Adaptations of Premodern and Early Modern Literature" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon.

Canon Fanfiction: Reading, Writing, and Teaching with Adaptations of Premodern and Early Modern Literature (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom.

Christine Schott, MFA, PhD, is associate professor of English at Erskine College where she teaches medieval and world literatures and creative writing.

Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple.

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Ruth Yun-Ju Chen, "Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ruth Yun-Ju Chen is a historian of mid-imperial China (600–1400). Her research interests lie in the histories of medicine, publishing, and material cultures during this period. Her first book, Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts, will come out from the University of Washington Press in 2023. This book charts how early print culture reshaped strategies for presenting medical knowledge in Song China (960–1279). Her current project explores the transregional circulation of medical knowledge and aromatic drugs across East Asia and Southeast Asia in Song-Jin-Yuan China (960–1368). She has published articles in Chinese and English language journals and, most recently, “A New Study of Scholar-officials’ Roles in the Printing of Medical Texts in Song China” in the Bulletin of IHP 92.3 (2021) and “The Quest for Efficiency: Knowledge Management in Medical Formularies” in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 80.2 (2021).

A bit about the book:

Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of empirical evidence in Chinese medicine between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The rise of this new approach to substantiating knowledge, which had appeared only sporadically in earlier medical literature, provides a window into transformations in the construction of textual authority in mid-imperial China.

Focusing on medical genres and working extensively with notebooks (biji), Ruth Yun-Ju Chen shows that employing empirical evidence became prominent in conjunction with a publishing boom that enabled wider availability of medical texts and treatises. To convince a more socioculturally diverse readership to believe their claims and to win intertextual debates with contemporaneous authors, many Song medical authors turned to empirical methodology. Revealing a correlation between publishing cultures and changes in persuasion strategies in medical genres, Good Formulas offers new insights into the histories of medicine, knowledge production, and publishing in China. It also provides rich examples for scholars interested in the development of empirical evidence in the premodern world.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.

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Joel D. Anderson, "Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends.

Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order―visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church’s text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

Dr. Joel Anderson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine. He is a historian of medieval Europe, and his research revolves around issues of communication, imagination, and authority, particularly in the high and late medieval church.

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Kyle A. Thomas and Carol Symes, "The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A New Verse Translation, Edition, and Commentary" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose dedicated research provides the foundation for an analysis of the play’s broader contexts, also brings perspectives from the first fully staged modern production that tested the theatricality of the translation and provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities.

In this discussion, Symes and Thomas discuss the significance of the play, surprising and fascinating things they learned while working on the book, and what the Play about the Antichrist tells us about what it means to be human.

Carol Symes is associate professor of history and theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of an award-winning monograph on theater and public life in medieval Arras. Kyle A. Thomas is assistant professor of theatre at Missouri State University, specializing in medieval performance texts and strategies for their modern enactment.

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Brigitte Buettner, "The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture" (Penn State UP, 2022)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Opulent jewelled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in mediaeval thought?

In The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture (Penn State University Press, 2022), art historian Dr. Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular mediaeval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Dr. Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jewelled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account.

The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India.

Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in mediaeval art history, material culture, and mediaeval history.

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Yamin Levy, "The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition" (MHC Press, 2023)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Yamin Levy's The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition (MHC Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking book that delves into the mystical tradition of Andalusia and specifically of Maimonides. Unlike Kabalah and the European mystical traditions, Andalusian mysticism is rooted in clear Halakhic and philosophical principles devoid of superstition and magic. This book examines Maimonides works which serve as a guide for those interested in pursuing mystical union with G-d. Topics such as prophecy, love and awe of G-d, silent meditation, the role of prophets, and the spiritual aspects of Jewish rituals are all explored in this book. The Mysticism of Andalusia offers a refreshing perspective and path forward for all who desire deep spiritual fulfillment without the rejection of the mind and self.

Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a psychology research and clinical assistant. He is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, and is involved in a wide array of initiatives and studies from legal philosophy, Jewish programming, and psychology.

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Amir Sedaghat, "Translating Rumi Into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Amir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative questions from translation to audience reception using translation studies and theories of semiotics.

The book addresses linguistic and pragmatic questions of translations, such as how text, gender, language, and lexicon can or cannot be translated into languages like English and what's lost in the process. To highlight the latter example, Sedaghat masterfully maps various translators' works over the years, such as Orientalist scholars (Arberry and Nicholson) to contemporary Rumi enthusiasts (Coleman Barks), to show how these various translations have resulted in negotiations informed by translators own particularities (i.e., beliefs, linguistic abilities, and social locations etc). The book further considers how Rumi’s poetry is also defined by kinetic and musical dimensions, which cannot be translated. What then are the ethical challenges to these paradoxes of untranslatability and reception politics of Rumi into the global west? This book will be of interest to any Rumi enthusiast, scholars of translation, linguistics, and semiotics, and mysticism, Sufism, Persian/Iranian Studies and much more.

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Robert Hillenbrand, "The Great Mongol Shahnameh" (Hali Publications et al., 2022)

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all.

500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer.

Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The Great Mongol Shahnama” back at the center of a sprawling 14th-century Mongol empire.

Robert Hillenbrand is an honorary professorial fellow in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

In this interview, Robert and I talk about the Shahnama—and what makes the “Great Mongol Shahnama” unique—and how the Mongol empire gave this masterpiece’s illustrations recognizable Western and Chinese influences.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Mongol Shahnama. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Liana Saif et al., "Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice" (Brill, 2020)

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Brill, 2020) brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies, and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides a rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue.

Dr. Liana Saif pays special attention to intercultural exchanges of esoteric and occult ideas between the Islamicate and Latinate worlds all the way to the European Renaissance, as reflected in her first monograph “The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She explores there the Islamic scientific and natural-philosophical foundations of the theories of astral influences that “naturalised” astrology and astral magic, becoming sciences that explore the dynamics that link the terrestrial and celestial worlds, thus co-producing knowledge about nature and the cosmos, and resulting in a universe more intelligible to both Muslim scientists and philosophers, and their European counterparts.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of the occult sciences and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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The Future of the Sacred Nation: A Discussion with Anna M. Grzymała-Busse

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of sodomitical themes in medieval literary and visual art, built around an impressive range of texts and artworks from high and late medieval England, France, and Italy.

As Mills shows, sodomy does enter the field of vision in certain contexts, despite being associated with a rhetoric of unmentionability. He shows why sodomy appears when it does and in which media and genres (e.g., commentaries on the Bible and Ovid s Metamorphoses, in manuscript illuminations and sculpture); how it shifts categories as a means of becoming visible (e.g., appearing in narratives involving age difference or gender transformation); and how, as readers/viewers, the process of translating the medieval category of sodomy into the languages of the present is at once a necessity and an impossibility. In a single stroke, Mills revises the way we think about well known medieval literary and visual materials in the light of twenty-first century thinking and the interaction between the visual and the textual, bringing both literary and art historical discourse on the subject to a new level of maturity."

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text.

But in The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.

Dr. Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life.

The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book.

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Chris Wickham, "The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other.

Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought.

The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180 (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.

Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of medieval history emeritus at University of Oxford.

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Queer Mysticism

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We close Pride Month of 2023 with Jamie Staples talking about queer mysticism. This includes instances in medieval Christianity where an embodied and erotic experience of life, within and between persons, became the basis for an apprehension of divinity. The conversation particularly focuses on the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross and the work of 14th-15th century English mystic Margery Kempe. Jamie shares his own story to show how queer mysticism can offer resources from within Christianity to build a personal and communitarian politics against fundamentalist discrimination and hatred.

Starting this fall, Jamie Staples will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval English literature at Trinity College in Hartford. His research takes seriously the productive intersection of mystical theology and poetry in the development of alternative modes of critical thinking in the late Middle Ages. He's recently written two articles focused more specifically on the queer mysticism that he will be discussing today, one on the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, published in Romanic Review, and the other on the fourteenth-century poem Cleanness, published in Exemplaria.

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Joëlle Rollo-Koster, "The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge UP, 2022), by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to understand the event as it was experienced by contemporaries.

Joëlle Rollo-Koster is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rhode Island. A scholar of the Avignon papacy, she is the author of Avignon and its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society and Raiding Saint Peter. In 2016, she was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

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Miri Rubin, "The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2014)

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Middle Ages is a term coined around 1450 to describe a thousand years of European History. In The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2014), Miri Rubin provides an exploration of the variety, change, dynamism, and sheer complexity that the period covers. From the provinces of the Roman Empire, which became Barbarian kingdoms after c.450-650, to the northern and eastern regions that became increasingly integrated into Europe, Rubin explores the emergence of a truly global system of communication, conquest, and trade by the end of the era. Presenting an insight into the challenges of life in Europe between 500-1500 -- at all levels of society -- Rubin looks at kingship and family, agriculture and trade, groups and individuals. Conveying the variety of European experiences, while providing a sense of the communication, cooperation, and shared values of the pervasive Christian culture, Rubin looks at the legacies they left behind.

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London and Head of the School of History. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge. She has taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and has held visiting positions in Paris, Princeton, and New York. Her research has explored areas of the religious cultures of medieval Europe, and has been influenced by an interdisciplinary approach which had benefited from the use of textual, visual and musical sources. She enjoys writing for diverse audiences and discussing history wherever engaged interest arises.

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Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, joins me to share more about his research into Mongol imperial expansion and the Mongol conquests of the Near East. In this episode, we talk about practices of Mongol nomadism and mobility; how Mongol identity can be defined and understood; and where and when the Mongol empire finally collapsed.

Part one is here.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated.

Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.

Keep your eyes out for Lisabeth's next book, She Did It In Her Sleep, which focuses on the horrifying phenomenon that is comatose rape.

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Rumi, "Gold" (New York Review of Books, 2022)

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of language, lends these translations both authoritativeness and beauty. The poems in Gold (New York Review of Books, 2022) are about ecstatic love, both of God and of our fellow human beings. Newcomers to Rumi will discover a new favorite poet, while longtime fans will encounter this major voice of world literature anew.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Loriliai Biernacki, "The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent--as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants--from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice--with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm -- when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century terms, how does mind connect to body?

These questions drive Loriliai Biernacki's The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Biernacki draws on Abhinavagupta's thought--and particularly his yet-untranslated, philosophical magnum opus, the Isvara Pratyabhijña Vivrti Vimarsini--to think through contemporary issues such as the looming prospect of machine AI, ideas about information, and our ecological crises. She argues that Abhinavagupta's panentheism can help us understand our current world and can contribute to a New Materialist re-envisioning of the relationship that humans have with matter.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Reyhan Durmaz, "Stories Between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond" (U California Press, 2022)

Sat, 27 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Durmaz uses stories of saints to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages.

Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Rosamond McKitterick, "Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 23 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The remarkable, and permanently influential, papal history known as the Liber pontificalis shaped perceptions and the memory of Rome, the popes, and the many-layered past of both city and papacy within western Europe. In Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Rosamond McKitterick offers a new analysis of this extraordinary combination of historical reconstruction, deliberate selection and political use of fiction, to illuminate the history of the early popes and their relationship with Rome. She examines the content, context, and transmission of the text, and the complex relationships between the reality, representation, and reception of authority that it reflects.

The Liber pontificalis presented Rome as a holy city of Christian saints and martyrs, as the bishops of Rome established their visible power in buildings, and it articulated the popes' spiritual and ministerial role, accommodated within their Roman imperial inheritance. Drawing on wide-ranging and interdisciplinary international research, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy offers pioneering insights into the evolution of this extraordinary source, and its significance for the history of early medieval Europe.

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Sagang Sechen, "The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Mon, 22 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Buddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, written in 1662 by Sagang Sechen, is many things. As a whole, it is the most important work of Mongolian history on the period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty.

The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press 2023), translated by Johan Elverskog, is not only a fluid and lucid translation, but by adding extensive annotations and helpful introductions, Elverskog has made this epic history approachable to readers today. Whether you are well-versed in the Mongol-Oirat wars or if the name Altan Khan doesn’t (yet) mean anything to you, this is a fabulous introduction to Mongolian historiography that should be of interest to anyone looking to learn more about Mongolian sources, Inner Asian history, and the history of Buddhism in Asia.

Johan Elverskog is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. This is his second time on New Books, and you can hear a conversation about one of his other books, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020) here.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu

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Michelle R. Warren, "Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Tue, 16 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford UP, 2022), Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies—from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.

Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of "tech medievalism" that weaves through the history of computing since the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers, collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a "book."

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Oded Zinger, "Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo, and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view "from below" of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived.

Examining the interactions between gender and law in medieval Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Oded Zinger considers how women experienced Jewish courts and the pressure they faced to relinquish their monetary rights. The tactics with which women countered this pressure--ranging from exploiting family ties to appealing to Muslim courts--expose the complex relationship between individual agency, gendered expectations, and communal authority. Zinger concludes that, more than money, education, or lineage, it was the maintenance of a supportive network of social relations with men that protected women at different stages of their lives.

Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience.

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Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Fri, 05 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.

The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.

Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Tim Clarkson, "A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power: The Isle of Man, AD 400 To 1265" (John Donald, 2023)

Tue, 02 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Situated in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is like a stepping-stone between the lands that surround it. In medieval times, it played an important role in the histories of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.

A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power: The Isle of Man, AD 400 to 1265 (John Donald, 2023) by Dr. Tim Clarkson explores the first part of that turbulent era, tracing the story of the Isle of Man from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. It looks at the ways in which various peoples – Britons, Scots, Irish, English and Scandinavians – influenced events in Man over a period of more than 800 years. A large portion of the book is concerned with the Vikings, a group whose legacy – in place names, old burial mounds and finely carved stones – is such a vivid element in the Manx landscape today.

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Timothy R. Pauketat, "Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America" (Oxford UP,

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change.

Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE)—which resulted in the warmest temperatures in the northern hemisphere since the "Roman Warm Period," a half millennium earlier. Reconstructing these climatic events and the cultural transformations they wrought, Pauketat guides readers down ancient American paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book follows the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands.

Along the way, readers discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change—or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs.

Spanning from North to Central America, Gods of Thunder focuses on remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, leading us down an evidentiary trail toward the book's conclusion that a great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago. The author also includes a guide to visiting the archaeological sites discussed in each chapter of the book.

Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals.

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Ninon Dubourg, "Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service?" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Ninon Dubourg about her new book Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service? (Amsterdam UP, 2023).

The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability.

In these cases, the Papal Chancery bore the responsibility for determining if disabled people were suitable to serve as clerics, with all the rights and duties of divine services. Whilst some petitioners were allowed to enter the clergy, or - in the case of currently serving churchmen - to stay more or less active in their work, others were compelled to resign their position and leave the clergy entirely. Petitions and papal letters lie at intersection of authorized, institutional policy and practical sources chronicling the lived experiences of disabled people in the Middle Ages. As such, they constitute an excellent analytical laboratory in which to study medieval disability in its relation to the papacy as an institution, alongside the impact of official ecclesiastical judgments on disabled lives.

A transcript of this interview is available here.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio.

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Jacques Dalarun et al., "A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) centers on a fascinating woman, Clare of Rimini (c. 1260 to c. 1324–29), whose story is preserved in a fascinating text. Composed by an anonymous Franciscan, the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini is the earliest known saint’s life originally written in Italian, and one of the few such lives to be written while its subject was still living. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the background of her roiling city, her star-crossed family, and the tumultuous political and religious landscape of her age.

Twice married, twice widowed, and twice exiled, Clare established herself as a penitent living in a roofless cell in the ruins of the Roman walls of Rimini. She sought a life of solitary self-denial, but was denounced as a demonic danger by local churchmen. Yet she also gained important and influential supporters, allowing her to establish a fledgling community of like-minded sisters. She traveled to Assisi, Urbino, and Venice, spoke out as a teacher and preacher, but also suffered a revolt by her spiritual daughters.

A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life in English translation for the first time, bringing modern readers into Clare’s world in all its excitement and complexity. Each chapter opens a different window into medieval society, exploring topics from political power to marriage and sexuality, gender roles to religious change, pilgrimage to urban structures, sanctity to heresy. Through the expert guidance of scholars and translators Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo, Clare’s life and context become a springboard for readers to discover what life was like in a medieval Italian city.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Hope Williard, "Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries" (ARC Humanities Press, 2022)

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Hope Williard's book Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries (Arc Humanities Press, 2022) explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flattery for undeserving kings and aristocrats, his work remains unduly neglected. This book reframes Fortunatus as a writer uniquely suited to his times, a professional poet who addressed his contemporaries’ needs and wishes for the prestige and sophistication of Classical culture. His poems and letters enabled his aristocratic patrons to situate themselves in networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of friendship in the Middle Ages and offers a fresh look at the Frankish kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Greta LaFleur et al., "Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska's edited volume Transhistorical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives--literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts--that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.

Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Elizabeth Marshall, "Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Two perceptions about wolves are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. In Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), Elizabeth Marshall traces the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England. Marshall provides new, animal-centric readings of Old English texts, including Beowulf, and positions these texts within a lupine literary network that transcends time and place. By exploring the intricate, contradictory, and even sympathetic depictions of the wolves and wolf-like entities found within these texts, Marshall banishes all notions of the medieval wolf as the one-dimensional, man-eating creature that it is so often understood to be.

Elizabeth Marshall earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews and has received awards for both her thesis and research on the cultural and sociological issues related to the extraordinary predator’s reintroduction to Britain.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

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Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, "Dindshenchas Érenn" (U College Cork, 2022)

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dindshenchas as a branch of aetiological literature; and an analysis of the literary connections between the Dindshenchas and medieval Irish literature generally. Dindshenchas Érenn was published as a part of the series, Cork Studies in Celtic Literatures, in 2023.

Dr. Marie-Luise Theuerkauf is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral fellow on the 'Mapping the Medieval Mind' project, with Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr David McCay, in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. Her academic interests include Celtic languages and literatures, with a specialisation in medieval Irish; dindshenchas (placename history), Irish metrics; Medieval Welsh literature; and Arthurian literature and folklore. She is also the editor of the forthcoming volume, Dublaídi Dindshenchais: Proceedings of a Conference on the Medieval Irish Place-name Tradition, which is being published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who is currently the Coordinator for Digital Engagement for the International Center of Medieval Art and an assistant editor for the journal, Church Archaeology.

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Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene, "The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds" (Getty, 2022)

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture.

From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has captured the imaginations of so many creators.

The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey Through Imaginary Medieval Worlds (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2022) aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so applicable to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars.

This title is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21 to September 11, 2022.

Larisa Grollemond is the assistant curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and was a contributing editor for Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World (Getty Publications, 2019).

Bryan C. Keene (he/él/they/elle) is assistant professor of art history at Riverside City College and a former associate curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He specializes in codex cultures of the global Middle Ages and fantasy medievalisms. He holds a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, at the University of London.

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Ching Keng, "Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, and introducing Tathagatagarbha notions into his translations of Yogacara texts. Engaging with the digitalized Chinese Buddhist canon, Ching Keng draws on clues from a long-lost Dunhuang fragment and considers its striking similarities with Paramartha's corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrines. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the concept of jiexing, Keng demystifies the image of Paramartha and makes the case that the fragment holds the key to recovering his original teachings.

Further readings mentioned in our interview:

Funayama, Toru 船山徹. The Work of Paramārtha an Example of Sino-Indian Cross-cultural Exchange. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies; 2009; 31, pp. 141-83.

Radich, Michael. The Doctrine of *Amalavijñāna in Paramārtha (499–569), and Later Authors to Approximately 800C.E. Zinbun; 2008; 41, pp. 45-174.

Listeners and readers interested in further discussions, please feel free to contact Prof. Ching Keng, ckeng@ntu.edu.tw

Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

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John Soderberg, "Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Clonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise (Lexington Books, 2021), John Soderberg argues that animals are the key to understanding Clonmacnoise’s development as a thriving settlement and a sacred space. At this sanctuary city on the River Shannon, animal bodies were an essential source of food and raw materials. They were also depicted extensively on religious objects. Drawing from new theories about the intersections between religion and economics, John Soderberg explores how transformations emerging from animal encounters made Clonmacnoise a sacred settlement and created the sacred bodies of early medieval Ireland.

Dr. John Soderberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Denison University and holds his degrees from Middlebury College, Boston College (MA), and the University of Minnesota (PhD). He has excavated sites in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. His main research interest is the archaeology of religion, with a focus on the development of large religious centers in Ireland from the Iron Age into the Middle Ages. Other interests include the development of cities, medieval Northern Europe, zooarchaeology, and three-dimensional scanning of artifacts.

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Peter Heather, "Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300" (Knopf, 2023)

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the fourth century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows in this illuminating new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise and eventual dominance.

From Constantine the Great's pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire--which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction--to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.

Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (Knopf, 2023) is an unparalleled history of early Christianity.

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John P. Bequette, "Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality" (Catholic U of America Press, 2022)

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Revered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality (Catholic U of America Press, 2022) takes a fresh look at this classic Christian thinker, exploring the gamut of Bede's literary corpus. The book investigates key themes, including Bede's understanding of the theological significance of time, his conception of the relationship between the temporal and eternal orders within history, his theological use of rhetoric, his foray into narrative theology, and his spirituality.

The purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to principal theological themes in Bede's thought. Bequette's thesis is that Bede was a theologian writing in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet making creative, original contributions to that tradition for the sake of his contemporaries, both in the monastery and in the culture at large. The method involves a close reading and analysis of key texts within Bede's corpus of writings. These texts include the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Life of St Cuthbert, and several of Bede's biblical commentaries (On the Tabernacle, On the Temple) his homilies, and didactic treatises (On the Reckoning of Time, Concerning Figures and Tropes in Sacred Scripture). Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality constitutes a scholarly study of Bede's thought as an integral whole, identifying key themes and ideas that pervade his writings. Thus, it can serve as an introduction to Bede's thought for non-specialists in the areas of theology, religious studies, and other areas of the humanities.

John Bequette is professor of philosophy and theology at the University of St. Francis (Ind.)

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Jessica Brantley, "Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Rosenberg is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Professor Brantley’s new book is Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. After giving a comprehensive survey of writing surfaces, writing instruments, and other aspects of material culture, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms takes a fresh look at some of the most widely studied texts of the medieval period—the Beowulf manuscript, the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, and the Book of Margery Kempe—alongside less canonical manuscripts. In addition to rich analyses of these books as textual artifacts, the book contains 200 high-quality illustrations that will pique the interest of readers looking to deepen their familiarity with medieval manuscript culture.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

During the Middle Ages, the Netherlands played a significant role in the emergence of capitalism, which led to the impressive Dutch Golden Age and paved the way for long-term economic growth across Europe.

Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000-1800 (Princeton University Press, 2022)' by Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden sheds light on the informal institutions that made this economic revolution possible. Using the latest quantitative theories in economic research, the authors illustrate how Dutch cities, corporations, guilds, commons, and other private and semipublic organizations created safeguards for market transactions even in the absence of state regulations. In fact, informal institutions developed in the Netherlands long before public safeguards for economic activity were established. According to the authors, capitalism emerged within a robust civil society in the Netherlands that contained and balanced its centrifugal forces. However, an unbridled capitalism flourished in overseas territories, resulting in slavery and other severe consequences for people outside Europe. Despite this, the Dutch economy thrived, and the country transformed into a powerhouse of sustained economic growth. Pioneers of Capitalism offers a panoramic account of the early history of capitalism, revealing the remarkable transformation of a small region in medieval Europe into a world-changing economic force.

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Emily Steiner, "John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades.

John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.

Emily Steiner is the Rose Family Endowed Chair Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work on medieval literature and middle English literature and culture.

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Audrey Truschke, "The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0000

In her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Historically and geographically expansive, Truschke takes her readers through a delightful tour of Sanskrit texts from a variety of genres to show their incongruity with modern conceptions of religious difference and antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Through her close readings of Sanskrit historical texts often saturated with poetry and a keen poetic sensibility, Truschke achieves no less than a fundamental reorientation of how we imagine and approach the discipline of history. This meticulously researched and lyrically written book will be of tremendous interest to scholars of South Asia, Religion, and the wider Humanities.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

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Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains.

But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to revive the idea that there really was a “Silk Road,” at least for the people of Dunhuang, in what is now China’s Gansu Province. His book explains that there really were convoys traveling back-and-forth along an established route–though they likely saw themselves as diplomats more than merchants.

“People in Dunhuang, of course, did not not exactly call the road that connected them with their neighbors the “Silk Road.” Nevertheless, had they been asked about it, they likely would have found the phrase entirely intelligible, even meaningful,” he writes.

Xin Wen is assistant professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton University. His research interests in medieval China also include manuscript culture, urban history, and digital humanities.

Today, Xin Wen and I talk about the Silk Road, the Dunhuang Archive, and the risks of orienting too much of the history of Central and East Asia around China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King’s Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein, "The Middle Ages in 50 Objects" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The extraordinary array of images included in The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (Cambridge UP, 2018) reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each section is organized chronologically, and every object is accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and cultural significance within the wider context in which the object was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and consider the significance of the objects and the history that they reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.

Elina Gertsman is a professor of Art History at Case Reserve Western University. She specializes in medieval art.

Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert in medieval history, on which she has written a number of influential works.

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Ben Dodds, "Myths and Memories of the Black Death" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Ben Dodds, of Florida State University, talks with Jana Byars about his new book, Myths and Memories of the Black Death (Palgrave, 2022). This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.

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Shivan Mahendrarajah, "A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Shivan Mahendrarajah's A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) follows the history of the city, from its desolation under Chingiz Khan in 1222, to its capitulation to Tamerlane in 1381. Unlike the other o quarters of Khurasan (Balkh, Marw, Nishapur), which were ravaged by the Mongols, Herat became an important political, cultural and economic centre of the eastern Islamic world. The post-Mongol age in which an autochthonous Tajik dynasty, the Kartids, ruled the region set the foundations for Herat’s Timurid-era splendors.

Divided into two parts (a political-military history and a social-economic history), the book explains why the Mongol Empire rebuilt Herat: its rationales and approaches; and Chinggisid internecine conflicts that impacted on Herat’s people. It analyses the roles of Iranians, Turks and Mongols in regional politics; in devising fortifications; in restoring commercial and cultural edifices; and in resuscitating economic and cultural activities in the Herat Quarter.

Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.

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Charlie Samuelson, "Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues that the genres’ juxtaposition opens up radical new perspectives on the deviant poetics and gender and sexual politics of both. Contrary to a critical tradition that locates the queer Middle Ages at the margins of these courtly genres, Courtly and Queer emphasizes an unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and that inhabits the core of a literary tradition usually assumed to be conservative and patriarchal. Ultimately, Courtly and Queer contends that one facet of texts commonly referred to as their “courtliness”—namely, their literary sophistication—powerfully overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness.

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Anthony Bale, "Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography.

Anthony Bale is professor of medieval studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published many articles and books on medieval literature and culture, including The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 and a translation of The Book of Margery Kempe.

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Azzan Yadin-Israel, "Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries.

Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.

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Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Sacred Foundations. The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments. The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike.

Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation. Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity.

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David Arnovitz, "The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Exodus" (Koren, 2020)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Exodus (Koren, 2020) offers an innovative and refreshing approach to the Hebrew Bible. By fusing extraordinary findings by modern scholars on the ancient Near East with the original Hebrew text and a brand new English translation by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel clarifies and explains the Biblical narrative, laws, events and prophecies in context with the milieu in which it took place.

The inaugural work in this multi-volume series is dedicated to the book of Shemot (Exodus). It features stunning visuals of ancient civilizations including artifacts, archeological excavations, inscriptions and maps, along with brief articles on Egyptology, geography, biblical botany, language, geography, and more. By showcasing material that was unknown to previous generations of Torah scholars, The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel opens a new view into the revolutionary impact of the Tanakh, published for the first time in English.

Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org.

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Mary C. Flannery, "Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England" (Manchester UP, 2019)

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures.

Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2019) uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.

Mary C. Flannery is a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern

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Daniel Lasker, "Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism" (Littman Library, 2022)

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Karaite Judaism emerged in the ninth century in the Islamic Middle East as an alternative to the rabbinic Judaism of the Jewish majority. Karaites reject the underlying assumption of rabbinic Judaism, namely, that Jewish practice is to be based on two divinely revealed Torahs, a written one, embodied in the Five Books of Moses, and an oral one, eventually written down in rabbinic literature. In Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022), Daniel Lasker presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of the entire story of Karaite Judaism.

Daniel J. Lasker is Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values (Emeritus) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

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Golda Akhiezer, "Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism Among the Karaites of Eastern Europe" (Brill, 2017)

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Golda Akhiezer's Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism Among the Karaites of Eastern Europe (Brill, 2017; translated by David Greenberg) is the first of its kind to deal with Eastern European Karaite historical thought. It focuses on the social functions of Karaite historical narratives concerning the rise of Karaism from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The book also deals with the image of Karaism created by Protestants, and with the perception of Karaism by some leaders of the Haskalah movement, especially the scholars of Hokhmat Israel. In both cases, Karaism was seen as an orientalistic phenomenon whereby the “enlightened” European scholars romanticized the “indigenous” people, while the Karaites (themselves), adopted this romantic images, incorporating it into their own national discourse. Finally, the book sheds new light on several conventional notions that shaped the study of Karaism from the nineteenth century.

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Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock, "The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia" (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022)

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Mary E. Sommar, "The Slaves of the Churches: A History" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem.

Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

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Rowan Dorin, "No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils of usury as they expelled Jews from their lands. Yet Jews were not alone in supplying coin and credit to needy borrowers. Across much of Western Europe, foreign Christians likewise engaged in professional moneylending, and they too faced repeated threats of expulsion from the communities in which they settled. No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2023) examines how mass expulsion became a pervasive feature of European law and politics—with tragic consequences that have reverberated down to the present.

Drawing on unpublished archival evidence ranging from fiscal ledgers and legal opinions to sermons and student notebooks, Dr. Rowan Dorin traces how an association between usury and expulsion entrenched itself in Latin Christendom from the twelfth century onward. Showing how ideas and practices of expulsion were imitated and repurposed in different contexts, he offers a provocative reconsideration of the dynamics of persecution in late medieval society.

Uncovering the protean and contagious nature of expulsion, No Return is a panoramic work of history that offers new perspectives on Jewish-Christian relations, the circulation of norms and ideas in the age before print, and the intersection of law, religion, and economic life in premodern Europe.

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Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry.

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Meir M. Bar-Asher, "Jews and the Qur'an" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. He traces the Qur'anic origins of the protection of Jews and other minorities living under the rule of Islam, and shows how attitudes toward Jews in Shi'i Islam are substantially different from those in Sunni Islam. Bar-Asher sheds light on the extraordinary contribution of Jewish tradition to the Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an, and draws important parallels between Jewish religious law, or halakha, and shari'a law.

An illuminating work on a topic of vital relevance today, Jews and the Qur'an (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a nuanced understanding of Islam's engagement with Judaism in the time of Muhammad and his followers, and serves as a needed corrective to common misperceptions about Islam.

Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience.

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War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Nicole Archambeau, associate professor of history at Colorado State University, talks about her book, Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence (Cornell University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession. Many people, Archambeau finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau and Vinsel also discuss the important lessons historians can teach about working to understand people who are quite different from ourselves.

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Igor H. De Souza, "Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed" (de Gruyter, 2018)

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 04:00:00 -0000

Maimonideanism, the intellectual culture inspired by Maimonides’ writings, has received much recent attention. Yet a central aspect of Maimonideanism has been overlooked: the formal reception of the Guide of the Perplexed through commentary.

In Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed (de Gruyter, 2018), Igor H. De Souza offers a comprehensive analysis of six early philosophical commentaries, written in Italy, Spain, and France, by some of Maimonides’ most loyal followers. The early commentaries represent the most creative period of exegesis of the Guide. De Souza’s analysis dispels the notion that the tradition of commentary on the Guide is monolithic. Rather, De Souza’s study illuminates how each commentator offers distinctive readings. Challenging the hierarchy of text and commentary, Rewriting Maimonides studies commentaries on the Guide as texts in their own right.

De Souza approaches the form of commentary as a multifaceted cultural practice. Employing historical, philosophical, and literary methods, this publication fills a lacuna in the history of the Guide through a global perspective on commentary.

This book is available open access here.

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Padma Kaimal, "Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space" (U Washington Press, 2020)

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide light, shadow, sound, and footsteps—Kaimal offers insights that complement what surviving texts tell us about Shaiva Siddhanta ideas and practices, providing a rare opportunity to walk in the distant past.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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James Morton, "Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 04:00:00 -0000

Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the majority date to the centuries after the Norman conquest.

James Morton's Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy (Oxford UP, 2021) is a historical study of these manuscripts, exploring how and why the Greek Christians of medieval southern Italy persisted in using them so long after the end of Byzantine rule. The first part of the book provides an overview of the source material and the history of Italo-Greek Christianity. The second part examines the development of Italo-Greek canon law manuscripts from the last century of Byzantine rule to the late twelfth century, arguing that the Normans' opposition to papal authority created a laissez faire atmosphere in which Greek Christians could continue to follow Byzantine religious law unchallenged. Finally, the third part analyses the papacy's successful efforts to assert its jurisdiction over southern Italy in the later Middle Ages. While this brought about the end of Byzantine canon law as an effective legal system in the region, the Italo-Greeks still drew on their legal heritage to explain and justify their distinctive religious rites to their Latin neighbors.

Diki Sherpa is a PhD candidate at the Chinese university of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

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Wolfgang P. Müller, "Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Wolfgang Muller, Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215- 1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the establishment of a coherent doctrine on sacramental marriage to the eve of the Reformation, late medieval church courts were used for marriage cases in a variety of ways. Ranging widely across Western Europe, including the Upper and Lower Rhine regions, England, Italy, Catalonia, and Castile, this study explores the stark discrepancies in practice between the North of Europe and the South. Wolfgang P. Müller draws attention to the existence of public penitential proceedings in the North and their absence in the South, and explains the difference in demand, as well as highlighting variations in how individuals obtained written documentation of their marital status. Integrating legal and theological perspectives on marriage with late medieval social history, Müller addresses critical questions around the relationship between the church and medieval marriage, and what this reveals about both institutions.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

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Bridget Whearty, "Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford UP, 2022) demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet.

Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Bridget Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Wout J. van Bekkum, "The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.)" (Brill, 2022)

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Wout J. van Bekkum's The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.) (Brill, 2022) is a comprehensive edition of Hebrew hymns composed by Eleazar the Babylonian, a prolific composer and scholar who lived in 13th-century Baghdad. His poetic language and style show much affinity with contemporary Sufism.

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Medieval Arabic sources are full of references to the Banu Sasan (Sons of Sasan) and the Ghuraba' (Strangers), an enigmatic but captivating group who begged, told fortunes, trained animals, and practiced medicine throughout the Islamic world from the mid-7th century onwards. These groups constitute peoples who would later come to be known as the Roma. Although they both produced their own texts and were written about by outsiders, relatively little scholarship has been conducted into the Roma in the Middle East. In this episode, Dr. Kristina Richardson joins me to talk about her new book Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Drawing on a wide variety of literary and archaeological evidence to illuminate the practices, languages, and lived experiences of the Roma in the Middle Ages, Dr. Richardson's book argues for a central role of the Roma in medieval culture and society. We discuss nomadism and mobility among the medieval Roma, their literary and artistic outputs, languages, trades, relationships with outsiders, and contemporary issues affecting the study of the Roma in the Middle East today.

Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.

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Melila Hellner-Eshed, "Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar" (Stanford UP. 2021)

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar (Stanford UP. 2021) opens the profound treasure house at the heart of Judaism's most important mystical work: the Idra Rabba (Great Gathering) of the Zohar. This is the story of the Great Assembly of mystics called to order by the master teacher and hero of the Zohar, Rabbi Shim'on bar Yochai, to align the divine faces and to heal Jewish religion. The Idra Rabba demands a radical expansion of the religious worldview, as it reveals God's faces and bodies in daring, anthropomorphic language.

For the first time, Melila Hellner-Eshed makes this challenging, esoteric masterpiece meaningful for everyday readers. Hellner-Eshed expertly unpacks the Idra Rabba's rich grounding in tradition, its probing of hidden layers of consciousness and the psyche, and its striking, sacred images of the divine face. Leading readers of the Zohar on a transformative adventure in mystical experience, Seekers of the Face allows us to hear anew the Idra Rabba's bold call to heal and align the living faces of God.

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Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage (Academic Studies Press, 2022), Hélène Jawhara Piñer presents readers with the dishes, ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic principles that make up a sophisticated and attractive cuisine, one that has had a mostly unremarked influence on modern Spanish and Portuguese recipes.

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Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Tzafrir Barzilay explores the origins of the charges of well poisoning leveled at European minorities in the later Middle Ages. Barzilay asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins.

Tzafrir Barzilay is a Senior lecturer in the Department of History at Bar Ilan University.

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Wendi L. Adamek, "Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan" (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

How should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive relations is as palpable as ever.

Thoroughly researched and artfully written, Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021) advances scholarship without leaving the lay reader behind. The comparative insights, theory-work, and appended transcriptions of this definitive study constitute a gift to past, present, and future travelers.

This book is available open-access.

Jessica Zu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at USC Dornsife. She specializes in modern Chinese Yogācāra and Buddhist social philosophy. You can find her on Twitter @ JessicaZu7 or email her at xzu@usc.edu.

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Fintan Walsh, "The Road to Kells: Prehistoric Archaeology of the M3, Navan to Kells and N52, Kells Bypass Road Project" (Wordwell Books, 2022)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this latest publication in the TII Heritage series, the long prehistory of Kells and its hinterland is shown to be written on the landscape in foundation trenches and boundary ditches, pits, post-holes, hearths, and myriad other marks of human life, which were discovered along the route of the M3 Clonee to Kells motorway project and recorded by an archaeological team from Irish Archaeological Consultancy Ltd. The story begins with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and continues, chapter by chapter, over a span of c. 5,000 years, recording the homes, burial grounds, work and worship of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age communities and bringing us at last to the threshold of history, in the Iron Age/early medieval transition period. Kells was not yet the seat of a famous monastery at that time but had already become a central place in the region, with a tribal capital at Commons of Lloyd, on the hill that overlooks the town today. The Road to Kells: Prehistoric Archaeology of the M3 Navan to Kells and N52 Kells Bypass Road Project, is available now through Wordwell Books and Transport Infrastructure Ireland.

Fintan Walsh has been a professional field archaeologist for over 20 years. He studied Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s University Belfast, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1997. He has published numerous papers and reports on his fieldwork in Ireland and is especially interested in Early Neolithic and early medieval archaeology. Fintan currently works as a full-time archaeological project manager and lives in Limerick City.

Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher of the early medieval period, who is the Coordinator for Digital Engagement of the International Society of Medieval Art and an Adjunct Professor at Roger Williams University.

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Yannis Stouraitis, "Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World (Edinburgh UP, 2022) examines ideas, beliefs and practices of identification in the medieval East Roman world

Approaches ideology and identity in the Byzantine world from different perspectives, top-down, bottom-up, and outside-in, and from various disciplinary perspectives including historical, literary, art-historical and archaeological.
Explores what makes discourses ideological by giving them a central function in the promotion of power relations and interests on the macro-level of society as well as on the micro-level of certain social groups.
Explores the interrelation between dominant imperial ideology and collective identification.
Scrutinizes various kinds of identification, local-regional, religious, gender, class, ethno-cultural and regnal-political.
Contributors include Leslie Brubaker, Kostis Smyrlis, Alicia Simpson and Dionysios Sthathakopoulos.

This collection offers new insights into ideology and identity in the Byzantine world. The range of international contributors explore the content and role of various ideological discourses in shaping the relationship between the imperial centre and the provinces. Crucially, they examine various kinds of collective identifications and visions of community in the broader Byzantine world within and beyond the political boundaries of the empire.

This interdisciplinary collection includes historical, literary, art-historical and archaeological as well as cross-cultural perspectives along with the exploration of ideas and identifications in cultures on the empire’s periphery.

Dr. Yannis Stouraitis is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine History, University of Edinburgh. He specializes in Byzantine social and cultural history, focusing on the socio-ideological aspects of war, collective identifications and ideological attachments and the construction of historical memory. He is the author of Krieg und Frieden in der politischen und ideologischen Wahrnehmung in Byzanz (Byzantinische Geschichtsschreiber, Erganzungsband, 2009). He is editor of A Companion to the Byzantine Culture of War, c. 300-1204 (Brill, forthcoming 2018) and he is co-editor of Byzantine War Ideology between Roman Imperial Concept and Christian Religion (Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (2012).

This episode is part of the NBN's Byzantine Studies series.

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Mary Channen Caldwell, "Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Mary Channen Caldwell in her new book Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press 2022) opens up new avenues for investigation by centering the refrain as an area of focus in which to analyze Latin songs through the Middle Ages.

Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for the Latin refrain's significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies it as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

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On "1001 Nights"

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Humans love stories. And no collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The original collection only contained about 40 stories. It was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine Galland who got a hold of this original manuscript in the 1690s. Galland began translating and publishing these stories in French. They were an instant hit. But some of the most popular stories, such as Aladdin and Ali Baba didn’t appear in that original manuscript. Paulo Lemos Horta is an associate professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Nicholas Morton, "The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East" (Basic Books, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0000

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As Nicholas Morton reveals in The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. The Mongol Storm is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.

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Robert Houghton, "Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact" (de Gruyter, 2022)

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress.

The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deployed to introduce new and alien themes to students typically unfamiliar with the subject matter swiftly and effectively. They can foster an interest in and understanding of the medieval world through various innovative means and hence act as a key educational tool.

Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact (de Gruyter, 2022), edited by Robert Houghton, presents a series of essays addressing the practical use of games of all varieties as teaching tools within Medieval Studies and related fields. In doing so it provides examples of the use of games at pre-university, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels of study, and considers the application of commercial games, development of bespoke historical games, use of game design as a learning process, and use of games outside the classroom. As such, Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games is a flexible and diverse pedagogical resource and its methods may be readily adapted to the teaching of different medieval themes or other periods of history.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Edmund Hayes, "Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 874 CE, the eleventh Imam died, and the Imami community splintered. The institutions of the Imamate were maintained by the dead Imam's agents, who asserted they were in contact with a hidden twelfth Imam. This was the beginning of 'Twelver' Shiʿism.

In Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge UP, 2022), Edmund Hayes provides an innovative approach to exploring early Shiʿism, moving beyond doctrinal history to provide an analysis of the socio-political processes leading to the canonisation of the Occultation of the twelfth Imam. Hayes shows how these agents cemented their authority by reproducing the physical signs of the Imamate, including protocols of succession, letters and the alm taxes. Four of these agents were ultimately canonised as “envoys” but traces of earlier conceptions of authority remain embedded in the earliest reports. Hayes dissects the complex and contradictory Occultation narratives to show how, amidst the claims of numerous actors, the institutional positioning of the envoys allowed them to assert a quasi-Imamic authority in the absence of an Imam.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, "The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021)

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A gulf of centuries separates the Byzantine Empire from the academic field of Byzantine studies. The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship, focusing on the attraction that Byzantium held for Early Modern Europeans and challenging the stereotype that they dismissed the Byzantine Empire as an object of contempt.

The authors in this book focus on how and why the Byzantine past was used in Early Modern Europe: to diagnose cultural decline, to excavate the beliefs and practices of early Christians, to defend absolutism or denounce tyranny, and to write strategic ethnography against the Ottomans. By tracing Byzantium’s profound impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals as they grappled with the most pressing issues of their day.

Refuting reductive narratives of absence or progress, this book shows how “Byzantium” underwent multiple overlapping and often discordant reinventions before the institutionalization of “Byzantine studies” as an academic discipline. As this book suggests, it was precisely Byzantium’s ambiguity—as both Greek and Roman, ancient and medieval, familiar and foreign—that made it such a vibrant and vital part of the Early Modern European imagination.

Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego in the department of history. His research and publications explore empire and ideology in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, as well as Byzantium’s imperial legacy after 1453.

Jake Ransohoff is a Hellenisms Past & Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago, and defended his PhD dissertation in History at Harvard University in June, 2022. His current research focuses on the intersection between power, political legitimacy, and attitudes toward the body in the Byzantine world—especially the disfigured and disabled body.

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On Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy"

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s greatest literary works, the Divine Comedy. In the story, Dante, the main character, must pass through the nine circles of Hell, climb Mount Purgatory, and ascend to Heaven to reach salvation. Along the way he meets all sorts of characters including the Roman poet Virgil, various politicians of his time, teachers from his school, and his one true love. Nassime Chida is a Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Local Power in Dante’s Inferno. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Darra Goldstein, "The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food" (U California Press, 2022)

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food (U California Press, 2022) unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers readers a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians' ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia's social structures from within. This is a domestic history of Russian food that serves up a deeper history, demonstrating that the wooden spoon is mightier than the scepter.

Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita, at Williams College and founding editor of Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, named Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She is author of six award-winning cookbooks, including Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, and Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, which was nominated for a James Beard, IACP, and The Art of Eating awards. Darra also serves as a series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture and has written for Gourmet, Saveur, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times. Follow Darra on Instagram.

Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a historian of Russia and Eurasia and holds a PhD from Georgetown University. She is a faculty member at New York University. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

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Carolyne Larrington, "All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

“All men must die”: or “Valar Morghulis,” as the traditional Essos greeting is rendered in High Valyrian. And die they do – in prodigious numbers; in imaginatively varied and gruesome ways; and often in terror within the viciously unpredictable world that is HBO's sensational evocation of Game of Thrones. As acclaimed medievalist Professor Carolyne Larrington writes in All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones (Bloomsbury, 2021), the stories George R.R. Martin brings to life are epic in scope and in imaginative breadth, telling of the dramatic rise and fall of nations, the brutal sweeping away of old orders, and the advent of new autarchs in the eternal quest for dominion.

Yet, as her book reveals, many potent and intimate narratives of love and passion can be found within these grand landscapes of heroism, honour, and death. They focus on strong relationships between women and family, as well as among the anti-heroes, the “cripples, bastards and broken things.” In this vital follow-up to her book, Winter Is Coming (also published by Bloomsbury), Larrington explores themes of power, blood-kin, lust, and sex in order to draw entirely fresh meanings out of the show of the century.

Carolyne Larringon is Professor of Medieval Literature at University of Oxford, UK. She completed her DPhil in Old English and Old Norse at Oxford and now teaches Old and Middle English literature as well as English and Old Norse-Icelandic languages. Previous publications include books on Norse mythology and literature and another book on the series called Winter Is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones. Also, Professor Larrington has been awarded the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland for her services to Icelandic literature.

Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec.

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Travis Zadeh, "Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. With fine paintings and leading science, Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. Yet after circulating for centuries, first in Arabic and Persian, then in Turkish and Urdu, Qazwīnī's compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance.

In Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard UP, 2023), Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. From the Mongol conquests to the rise of European imperialism and Islamic reform, Zadeh shows, wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of the world--at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through the course of colonial modernity, Qazwīnī's universe of marvels helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or the earth's rotation around the sun. Recovering Qazwīnī's ideas and his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation.

Travis Zadeh revives the work of the thirteenth-century Persian scholar Qazwīnī, whose Wonders and Rarities was for centuries one of the most influential natural histories in the world. Inviting us to embrace anew Qazwīnī’s rationalized study of nature and magic, Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic thought.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Frans Camphuijsen, "Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York, and Paris (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people's conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These "scripts of justice" took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Charles Goodman, "The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has selected sections of this Sanskrit text which cover debates over the existence of prime matter, God, and an immaterial soul, as well as controversies around the cause and effect, karma, and Jain perspectivalism. Within these chapters, through a translation of the verses of the Tattvasaṃgraha as well as the canonical commentary the Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā by Kamalaśila, the book showcases Buddhists debates with a wide range of interlocutors. Śānatarakṣita and Kamalaśila, from their vantage point late in the history of Indian Buddhism, collect a range of arguments against their historical opponents: Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Advaita Vedānta, Jainism, and even a group of Buddhists known as the Vātsīputrīyas. The book also includes an introductory chapter by the translator which explains the sophisticated underlying epistemological framework of this massive and massively influential text.

Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff.

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Beatrice Forbes Manz, "Nomads in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A history of pastoral nomads in the Islamic Middle East, Nomads in the Middle East by Beatrice Forbes Manz (Cambridge University Press, 2021) charts the rise of nomadic power from the formation of Islam through the Middle Ages, when Mongols and Turks ruled most of the region, to the decline of nomadic power in the twentieth century. Offering a vivid insight into the impact of nomads on the politics, culture, and ideology of the region, Beatrice Forbes Manz examines and challenges existing perceptions of these nomads, including the popular cyclical model of nomad-settled interaction developed by Ibn Khaldun. Looking at both the Arab Bedouin and the nomads from the Eurasian steppe, Manz demonstrates the significance of Bedouin and Turco-Mongolian contributions to cultural production and political ideology in the Middle East, and shows the central role played by pastoral nomads in war, trade, and state-building throughout history. Nomads provided horses and soldiers for war, the livestock and guidance which made long-distance trade possible, and animal products to provision the region's growing cities.

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Ahmad Al-Jallad, "The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions" (Brill, 2022)

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. Al-Jallad reconstructs this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context. In this episode we discuss the lifestyles, worldviews, belief systems, languages, and gender and social norms of the nomadic peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia based on the epigraphic evidence.

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Guido Ruggiero, "Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of love in the early Renaissance. As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio's collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero's words, a "symphony of life." Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo, the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Morgan Pitelka, "Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge UP, 2022) illuminates the city's layout, the possessions and houses of its residents, its politics and experience of war, and religious and cultural networks. Morgan Pitelka demonstrates how provincial centers could be dynamic and vibrant nodes of industrial, cultural, economic, and political entrepreneurship and sophistication. In this study a new and vital understanding of late medieval society is revealed, one in which Ichijôdani played a central role in the vibrant age of Japan's sixteenth century.

Morgan Pitelka is Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor of Japanese History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945.

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Sarah Ifft Decker, "The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities" (Pennsylvania State, 2022)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities (Penn State Press, 2022) examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked.

Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of women's work that includes the management of household resources as well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent roles in urban economies.

Through its attention to the distinct experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths. It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Peter Adamson, "Don't Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy" (U Notre Dame Press, 2022)

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Don't Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy (U Notre Dame Press, 2022), Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom.

Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlid, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtihad, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlid,” according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought.

Peter Adamson is professor of philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat.

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Yuhua Wang, "The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline?

The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development.

Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University.

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Yohanan Friedmann, "Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2022)

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0000

In his fascinating and painstakingly research new book Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2022), the noted scholar of Islam Yohanan Friedmann details the religious thought and political movements of multiple actors who made messianic claims in premodern and modern Islam, spanning sites including South Asia, North Africa, and the Sudan. Over the course of this book, we learn extensively about a range of less known intellectual traditions-in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu-on questions of messianism and apocalypse in Muslim thought and history. Centered on the lives, messianic claims and aspirations, as well as the tensions and contradictions hovering over some of the most prominent Muslim actors across time and space, Friedmann highlights with glistening brilliance the importance of messianism to Sunni Islam. Throughout the book, Friedmann unleashes his signature prowess of presenting unexpected, finely grained, and yet eminently accessible readings of an encyclopedic reservoir of difficult texts and sources.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Thomas E. Burman et al., "The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650" (U California Press, 2022)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration.

Key features:

Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use
Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes
Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps

The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students and scholars through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.

Thomas E. Burman is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the Director of the Medieval Institute. He is a scholar of Christian-Muslim-Jewish intellectual and cultural history in the medieval Mediterranean. His book Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.

Brian A. Catlos is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the co-director of the Mediterranean Seminar. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean. His most recent book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, is available in eight languages and as an audiobook.

Mark D. Meyerson is Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean and on the history of violence. His book A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain was runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, USA.

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E. Amanda McVitty, "Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture" (Boydell Press, 2020)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020) by Dr. E. Amanda McVitty presents a groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.

Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s.

This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties.

Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, Dr. McVitty illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.

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On Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji"

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We don’t even know the real name of the 11th century author Murasaki Shikibu. But we do know that her book, The Tale of Genji, is arguably one of the most influential Japanese texts to date. Genji quickly captured its readers’ imaginations with political intrigue and court drama, but it can also be read as an astute critique of Japanese elite society. Reginald Jackson is an associate professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature and Performance at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Textures of Mourning.

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Timothy McCall, "Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati―gorgeously dressed and adorned men―to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power.

Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials.

This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.

Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Emily Jane O'Dell, "The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2022)

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), written by Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2022. In this rich and insightful book, Dr. O’Dell takes us through her own spiritual and physical travels, as well as gives us historical and Islamic mystic context to help us understand and cherish the words of Rumi on a deeper level.

As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualizing his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily Jane O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes in Istanbul. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi’s classic work.

At the heart of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love” which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gift of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.

Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino.

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On Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī's "Indications of Inimitability"

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Great poetry or beautiful prose if often capable of challenging and delighting readers far more than dry, bland language. But why is that? Dalā’il al-Iʿjaz, or Indications of Inimitability, is a hugely influential Arabic text about exactly what it is that makes beautiful language beautiful. Its author, Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, used a theoretical, almost scientific method to demystify poetry and its lasting effects. Professor Alexander Key discusses why he’s working on the first English translation of this text and the huge impact that Jurjānī’s work has had on Arabic literary criticism. Alexander Key is an associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His studies focus on the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds. He is the author of Language Between God and the Poets. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Natalie J. Goodison, "Introducing the Medieval Swan" (U Wales Press, 2022)

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possibly even the phrase ‘swan song’.

Dr. Natalie Goodison’s Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022) explores the emergence of each of these ideas, starting with an examination of the medieval swan in natural history, exploring classical writings and their medieval interpretations and demonstrating how the idea of a swan’s song developed.

Dr. Goodison then proceeds to consider literary motifs of swan-to-human transformation, particularly the legend of the Knight of the Swan. Although this legend is known today only through Wagner’s opera, it was a best-seller in the Middle Ages, and courts throughout Europe strove to be associated as ancestors of this Swan Knight. Consequently, the swan was projected as an icon of courtly and eventual royal status.

The book’s third chapter looks at the swan as icon of the Lancasters, particularly important during the reign of Richard II and the War of the Roses, and the final chapter examines the swan as an important item of feasting, focusing on cookery and husbandry to argue that over time the right to keep swans became an increasingly restricted right controlled by the English crown. Each of the swan’s medieval associations are explored as they developed over time to the modern day.

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Emily Joan Ward, "Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation.

The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Dr. Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. Dr. Ward stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth.

Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Dr. Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.

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Anthony Sattin, "Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World" (Norton, 2022)

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) by Anthony Sattin tells the remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout history. Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative, sometimes bloody, sometimes peaceful and symbiotic relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two ways of living generates a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities. Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, this sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible to its seeming decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads explains why we leave home, and why we like to return again.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. Her work focuses on histories of nomad-state relationships and uses of architecture in nomadic contexts, with a focus on the Middle East.

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James Belich, "The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.

In The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022) Dr. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and the plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.

Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

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On Giovanni Boccaccio’s "The Decameron"

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From roughly 1346 to 1353, Europe was paralyzed by the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history; the bubonic plague. The plague killed more than 60% of the total population in Eurasia. This is the backdrop of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of short novellas completed in 1353. Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of French and Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is author of the books The Dominion of the Dead and Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Levi Roach, "Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia (Pegasus, 2022) by Dr. Levi Roach is a tale of ambitious adventures and fierce freebooters, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. The Normans made their influence felt across all of western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land. In Empires of the Normans we discover how they combined military might and political savvy with deeply held religious beliefs and a profound sense of their own destiny. For a century and a half, they remade Europe in their own image, and yet their heritage was quickly forgotten - until now.

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Caleb Swift Carter, "A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Often represented as a tradition of ancient origins, Shugendō has retained a quality of mystery and nostalgia in the public imagination and scholars as the “original” champions of mountain asceticism.

In his monograph, A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi. By focusing on themes of narratives, institution, and ritual, Carter explores how the transmission of this complex religious system at Togakushi was not a natural phenomenon, but a conscious act by a practitioner from Mount Hiko. Using a variety of textual sources including origin stories (engi) and temple records, Carter demonstrates how the practitioners of Mount Togakushi utilize storytelling, institutional support, and ritual processes to not only provide legitimacy but also establish a foundation for Shugendō at Togakushi. With discussions on Shinto and women’s exclusion (nyonin kekkai), staple topics in Japanese religions, A Path Into the Mountains offers something for those interested in not just Shugendō but also Buddhism, mountain religions, and religious history.

Raditya Nuradi is a Phd candidate at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality.

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Silvia Schwarz Linder, "Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya" (Routledge, 2022)

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Silvia Schwarz Linder's Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya (Routledge, 2022) is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages.

Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Charo B. D'Etcheverry, "Celebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Celebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. Charo B. D'Etcheverry translates a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and varied influence of a beloved court tale.

Medieval Japanese readers, fascinated by Sagoromo's sorrows and success, were inspired to retell his tale in stories, songs, poetry, and drama. By recontextualizing the tale's poems and writing new libretti, stories, and commentaries about the tale, these medieval aristocrats, warriors, and commoners expressed their competing concerns and ambitions during a chaotic period in Japanese history, as well as their shifting understandings of the tale itself. By translating these creative responses from an era of uncertainty and turmoil, Celebrating Sorrow shows the richness and enduring relevance of Japanese classical and medieval literature.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Thomas Donald Conlan, "Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook" (Hackett, 2022)

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In addition to providing excerpts from classic tales of Japan’s warrior past, Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook (Hackett, 2022) draws on a wide range of lesser-known but revealing sources—including sword inscriptions, edicts, orders, petitions, and letters—to expand and deepen our understanding of the samurai, from the order’s origins in the fifth century to its abolition in the nineteenth. Taken together with Thomas Donald Conlan's contextualizing introductions and notes, these sources provide a rare window into the experiences, ideals, and daily lives of these now-sentimentalized warriors. Numerous illustrations, a glossary of terms, and a substantial bibliography further enhance the value of this book to students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning more about the samurai.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Ann Blair et al., "Information: A Historical Companion" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Information is everywhere. We live in an “Information” Society. We can get more of it faster, quicker, and in more different shapes and sizes than at probably any other time in history. Meanwhile, misinformation (a very old word) and disinformation (a neologism of the 20th century) have worked their way into our collective cultural lexicon.

Like everything, information has a history and Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton UP, 2021)—just shy of 900 pages, comprising 13 narrative essays, followed by 100 shorter pieces on particular technologies, practices, etc. relevant to information history—is an invaluable and highly readable reference work to help us orient in that history. This collaboration of 107 contributing experts has been brought to fruition by a team of four editors: Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. In the interview, we talk with Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, experts who know, among a great many other things, as much anybody about the history of one of the earliest and stable means of storing and transmitting information, the book. They have also been paying close attention to how the information ecosystem of our own day is evolving. Listen in for this wide-ranging conversation.

Erika Monahan is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

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Stephen Hewer. "Beyond Exclusion: Intersections of Ethnicity, Sex, and Society Under English Law in Medieval Ireland" (Brepols, 2022)

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Beyond Exclusion: Intersections of Ethnicity, Sex, and Society Under English Law in Medieval Ireland (Brepols, 2022) offers a fresh look at the legal status of minorities in English Ireland. Through a detailed analysis of case studies gleaned from medieval court rolls, Stephen Hewer challenges the prevailing narrative of wholesale ethnic discrimination and presents a nuanced picture of intersectional identities, strategies of negotiation, and evolving tensions between legal principle and practice.

The notion that all Gaelic peoples were immediately and ipso facto denied access to the English royal courts in Ireland, upon the advent of the English in 1167, has become so accepted in academic and popular histories of Ireland that it is no longer questioned. This book tackles this narrative of absolute ethnic discrimination in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English Ireland on the basis of a thorough re-examination of the Irish plea rolls. A forensic study of these records reveals a great deal of variation in how members of various ethnic groups and women who came before the royal courts in Ireland were treated. Specifically, it demonstrates the existence of a large, and hitherto scarcely noticed, population of Gaels with regular and unimpeded access to English law, identifiable as Gaelic either through explicit ethnic labelling in the records or implicitly through their naming practices.

Dr. Margaret Smith is a historian of medieval Ireland and Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

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Paolo Squatriti, "Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti asks: Why did weeds matter in the Carolingian empire? What was their special significance for writers in eighth- and ninth-century Europe and how was this connected with the growth of real weeds?

In early medieval Europe, unwanted plants that persistently appeared among crops created extra work, reduced productivity, and challenged theologians who believed God had made all vegetation good. For the first time, in this book weeds emerge as protagonists in early medieval European history, driving human farming strategies and coloring people's imagination. Early medieval Europeans' effort to create agroecosystems that satisfied their needs and cosmologies that confirmed Christian accounts of vegetable creation both had to come to terms with unruly plants. Using diverse kinds of texts, fresh archaeobotanical data, and even mosaics, this interdisciplinary study reveals how early medieval Europeans interacted with their environments.

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Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understanding of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.

Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Dr. Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.

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Matthew Mark Silver, "The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0000

Galilee, the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its greatest triumphs. Matthew Silver's two volumes--The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades (Lexington Books, 2021), and The History of Galilee, 1538-1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War (Lexington Books, 2022)--chronicle the fascinating history of the Galilee region in a tour de force that includes interest in geography, politics, history, philosophy, and religion.

Tune in as we speak with Matthew Silver about his recent books on The History of Galilee.

M.M. Silver is professor of Jewish history and world history at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College and at the University of Haifa.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Alexander Green, "Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The philosopher and biblical commentator Joseph Ibn Kaspi (1280–1345) was a provocative Jewish thinker of the medieval era whose works have generally been overlooked by modern scholars.

Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History (SUNY Press, 2019) by Alexander Green is the first book in English to focus on a central aspect of his work: Ibn Kaspi's philosophy of history. Green argues that Ibn Kaspi understood history as guided by two distinct but interdependent forces: power and progress, both of which he saw manifest in the biblical narrative. Ibn Kaspi discerned that the use of power to shape history is predominantly seen in the political competition between kingdoms. Yet he also believed that there is historical progress in the continuous development and dissemination of knowledge over time. This he derived from the biblical vision of the divine chariot and its varied descriptions across different biblical texts, each revealing more details of a complex, multifaceted picture. Although these two concepts of what drives history are separate, they are also reliant upon one another. National survival is dependent on the progress of knowledge of the order of nature, and the progress of knowledge is reliant on national success. In this way, Green reveals Ibn Kaspi to be more than a mere commentator on texts, but a highly innovative thinker whose insights into the subtleties of the Bible produced a view of history that is both groundbreaking and original.

Alexander Green is Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and the author of The Virtue Ethics of Levi Gersonides.

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On Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich"

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his community, he accused his Jewish neighbors of the heinous crime. Over the course of two decades, he wrote a seven-volume conspiracy theory, building out the accusation and cementing it in history. Stanford professor Rowan Dorin discusses the book’s creation and its challenging legacy. Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Stuart Ellis-Gorman, "The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King" (Pen & Sword Military, 2022)

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The crossbow is an iconic weapon of the Middle Ages and, alongside the longbow, one of the most effective ranged weapons of the pre-gunpowder era. Unfortunately, despite its general fame it has been decades since an in-depth history of the medieval crossbow has been published, which is why Dr. Stuart Ellis-Gorman’s detailed, accessible, and highly illustrated book The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (Pen & Sword, 2022) is so valuable.

The book approaches the history of the crossbow from two directions. The first is a technical study of the design and construction of the medieval crossbow, the many different kinds of crossbows used during the Middle Ages, and finally a consideration of the relationship between crossbows and art.

The second half of the book explores the history of the crossbow, from its origins in ancient China to its decline in sixteenth-century Europe. Along the way it explores the challenges in deciphering the crossbow’s early medieval history as well as its prominence in warfare and sport shooting in the High and Later Middle Ages.

This fascinating book brings together the work of a wide range of accomplished crossbow scholars and incorporates the author’s own original research to create an account of the medieval crossbow that will appeal to anyone looking to gain an insight into one of the most important weapons of the Middle Ages.

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On the Wanderer's Havamal and the Poetic Edda

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Jackson W. Crawford is Instructor of Nordic Studies and Coordinator of the Nordic Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Crawford is the author and translator of The Wanderer’s Havamal and The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Both books are available from Hackett Publishing.

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Chrysovalantis Kyriacou, "Orthodox Cyprus Under the Latins, 1191-1571: Society, Spirituality, and Identities" (Lexington Books, 2018)

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern historiographical readings of Cypriot identity in medieval and early modern times have been colored by British colonialism, Greek nationalism, and Cyprocentric revisionism. Although these perspectives have offered valuable insights into the historical experience of Latin-ruled Cypriots, they have partially failed to capture the dynamics of non-coercive resistance to domination, and of identity preservation and adaptation.

Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571 (Lexington Books, 2018) readdresses the question of Cypriot identity by focusing on the Greek Cypriots, the island’s largest community during the medieval and early modern period. By bringing together theories from the fields of psychology, social anthropology, and sociology, this study explores continuities and discontinuities in the Byzantine culture and religious tradition of Cyprus, proposing a new methodological framework for a more comprehensive understanding of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Crusader and Venetian rule. A discussion of fresh evidence from hitherto unpublished primary sources enriches this examination, stressing the role of medieval and Renaissance Cyprus as cultural and religious province of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox world.

Chrysovalantis Kyriacou (Ph.D.) is a lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the Theological School at the church of Cyprus. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has also taught at the University of Cyprus. His area of specialty is late antique, Byzantine, medieval, and early modern history and culture, focusing on the role of Cyprus as a place of ethnoreligious encounter, interaction, and contention.

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The Kushnameh: The Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Kushnameh is unique, literally. Only one copy of the “Epic of Kush”exists, sitting in the British Library. Hardly anything is known about its author, Iranshah. It features a quite villainous protagonist, the tusked warrior Kush, who carves a swathe of destruction across the region. And it spans nearly half the world, with episodes in Spain, the Maghreb, India, China and even Korea.

It was that last reference that encouraged academics in Korea to study the Kushnameh, and bring Kaveh Hemmat to do its first-ever English translation, published by the University of California Press this year.

Kaveh L. Hemmat is assistant professor, professional faculty in History at Benedictine University, scholar of world history and Islamicate culture, director of the NEH-funded Khataynameh Translation Project, an unusually determined cyclist, and a dabbler in sundry pursuits ranging from sourdough bread baking to drawing. He completed his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2014. His research focuses on interaction between the Islamic world and East Asia and the importance of this interaction to Islamic political thought and premodern global political history.

In this interview, Kaveh and I discuss this unique document and the cultural and political context behind its writing.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of the Kushnameh. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Christopher S. Celenza, "Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer" (Reaktion Books, 2017)

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private.

In Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (Reaktion Books, 2017), Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.

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Peter Hughes, "A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues" (Aurum Press, 2021)

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The ongoing debate surrounding who gets to determine the subjects of public commemoration, particularly in the form of statues, has become more heated over the past few years. In his timely book, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press, 2021), Peter Hughes examines the long history of statues being used to articulate the values of rulers, governments, organizations, and average citizens. Of course, that also means statues are often targets of people who want to challenge those values.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss whether the motivation for public commemorations, as well as the opposition to them, can be found first and foremost in a society’s emotional relationship to the person (or god, for that matter) being commemorated, as is suggested in the book’s title; or, if the timeless debate over who does and doesn’t get commemorated is really about power.

Lia Paradis is a professor of History at Slippery Rock University and co-host of the NBN partner podcast, Lies Agreed Upon.

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Mary Wellesley, "Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers" (Riverrun, 2021)

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded.

Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers (Riverrun, 2021) tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part.

Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed.

From the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects. With an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history.

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John Gillis, "The Fadden More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure" (Wordwell Books, 2022)

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure Dr. John Gillis explores the conservation, construction, and context of an early medieval psalter discovered by chance in a bog at Faddan More, Co. Tipperary in July 2006. The different facets of this find are discussed in-depth, along with the pre-existing and newly created methods, tools, and ideas from different disciplines used to reveal its secrets. Gillis shines a light on this incredibly significant manuscript – named one of the National Museum of Ireland’s top ten treasures - that represents the first insular manuscript to be discovered in the past 200 years and the first from a wetland environment. The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure was published by Wordwell and National Museum of Ireland in 2022.

John Gillis is Chief Manuscript Conservator in the Library Preservation and Conservation Department in Trinity College Dublin. In 1988 he established and worked as Head of Conservation in the Delmas Conservation Bindery at Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin. John has been teaching book conservation techniques and theory in Italy for over 20 years. His major achievement to date has been the conservation of the Fadden More Psalter at the National Museum of Ireland Conservation Department over a four-and-a-half year period, for which he won the Heritage Council of Ireland Conservation Award in 2010.

Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is an editorial assistant for the Church Archaeology journal.

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Thomas Dixon and Adam Shapiro, "Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction" Second Edition. (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Debates about science and religion are rarely out of the news. Whether it concerns what's being taught in schools, clashes between religious values and medical recommendations, or questions about how to address our changing global environment, emotions often run high and answers seem intractable. Yet there is much more to science and religion than the clash of extremes.

As Thomas Dixon and Adam Shapiro show in Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), a whole range of views, subtle arguments, and fascinating perspectives can be found on this complex and centuries-old subject. They explore the key philosophical questions that underlie the debate, but also highlight the social, political, and ethical contexts that have made the tensions between science and religion such a fraught and interesting topic in the modern world. In this new edition, Dixon and Shapiro connect historical concepts such as evolution, the heliocentric solar system, and the problem of evil to present-day issues including the politicization of science; debates over mind, body, and identity; and the moral necessity of addressing environmental change. Ranging from medical missionaries to congregations adopting new technologies during a pandemic, from Galileo's astronomy to building the Thirty Meter Telescope, they explore how some of the most complex social issues of our day are rooted in discussions of science and religion.

Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He taught at universities in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for over a decade before accepting a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and shifting to work in public policy and science communication. He is the author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013) as well as several articles on science and religion from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

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Matt King, "Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming the Norman kingdom of Africa, which persisted until the Almohad conquest of Mahdia in 1160.

Previous scholarship on medieval North Africa during the reign of the Zirids has depicted the region as one of instability and political anarchy that rendered local lords powerless in the face of foreign conquest. Matt King shows that, to the contrary, the Zirids and other local lords in Ifriqiya were integral parts of the far-reaching political and economic networks across the Mediterranean. Despite the eventual collapse of the Zirid dynasty at the hands of the Normans, Dynasties Intertwined makes clear that its emirs were active and consequential Mediterranean players for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with political agency independent of their Christian neighbors across the Strait of Sicily.

Matt King is Assistant Professor of Medieval History and Digital Humanities at the University of South Florida. He is also actively involved in National History Day, an outreach program that allows middle school and high school students to conduct original historical research about topics of their choice.

Luka Haeberle is an enthusiastic student of Latin American and medieval history. His main areas of interest are political economy, labor history and political theory. You can find him on Twitter: @ChepoteLuka

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Jason Sion Mokhtarian, "Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies Between Magic and Science" (U California Press, 2022)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Despite the Talmud being the richest repository of medical remedies in ancient Judaism, this important strain of Jewish thought has been largely ignored – even as the study of ancient medicine has exploded in recent years. In a comprehensive study of this topic, Jason Sion Mokhtarian recuperates this obscure genre of Talmudic text, which has been marginalized in the Jewish tradition since the Middle Ages, to reveal the unexpected depth of the rabbis' medical knowledge. Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies Between Magic and Science (U California Press, 2022) argues that these therapies represent a form of rabbinic scientific rationality that relied on human observation and the use of nature while downplaying the role of God and the Torah in health and illness. Drawing from a wide range of both Jewish and Sasanian sources – from the Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides to texts written in Akkadian, Syriac, and Mandaic, as well as the incantation bowls – Mokhatarian offers rare insight into how the rabbis of late antique Babylonia adapted the medical knowledge of their time to address the needs of their community. In the process, he narrates an untold chapter in the history of ancient medicine.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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Richard G. Marks, "Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries)" (Routledge, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Richard G. Marks's book Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries) (Routledge, 2021) explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and religion in India.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Shelley Puhak, "The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule.

Shelley Puhak introduces readers to Brunhild, who was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport-these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe.

The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war-against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths-one gentle, the other horrific-their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend.

In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture's stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.

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Katherine Pangonis, "Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders. At the political, social, and cultural heart of their subsequent history were a series of remarkable women who exercised power and influence in a way nearly unknown in western Europe at that time.

Katherine Pangonis is the author of the Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule, a remarkable chronicle of lives lived in times of extreme danger and immense complexity.

For Further Investigation

Another medieval woman who tried to rule, briefly mentioned in the podcast, was Mathilda (who married Fulk of Anjou’s son, Geoffrey). Mathilda was the subject of Episode 122, a conversation with her biographer Catherine Hanley.
The Melisende Psalter
Sarah J. Biggs, “Twelfth-Century Girl Power”
Katherine Pangonis, “Crusader Queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem”

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the excellent podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng, "China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter" (World Scientific, 2022)

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Europeans have been writing about China for centuries–ever since The Travels of Marco Polo described it as a faraway and mystical kingdom. European thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu used China to support their own theories of political philosophy, then writers in early modernity tried to explain why China was falling behind–and then, with the rise of Maoist China, how it represented true revolutionary potential.

China Through European Eyes: 800 Years Of Cultural And Intellectual Encounter (World Scientific, 2022), edited by Professor Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng collects an assortment of these observations written over several centuries, from illustrious writers like Matteo Ricci, Voltaire, Leibniz, Weber, Marx, and Beauvoir.

In this interview, Kerry and I talk about how the way Europeans understood China changed and shifted over eight centuries–and the ways in which they parallel the way we talk about cHina today.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run by the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He is the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China Through European Eyes. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li, "Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li's book Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age (Cornell UP, 2022) draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868.

The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history.

Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Emma Natalya Stein, "Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

Thu, 19 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Emma Natalya Stein's book Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples (Amsterdam UP, 2021) traces the emergence of the South Indian city of Kanchi as a major royal capital and multireligious pilgrimage destination during the era of the Pallava and Chola dynasties (circa seventh through thirteenth centuries). It presents the first-ever comprehensive picture of historical Kanchi, locating the city and its more than 100 spectacular Hindu temples at the heart of commercial and artistic exchange that spanned India, Southeast Asia, and China.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Ferenc Hörcher, "The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, Through City-State, to Megalopolis?" (Lexington Book, 2021)

Mon, 16 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

To many the city might seem simply a large urban area to live within, but it actually forms an important political concept and community that has been influential throughout European history. From the polis of Ancient Greece, to the Roman Republic, to the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, and down to the present day. Modern concepts of democracy and citizenship that have shaped European thought have historically originated from the political community of the “city”.

Addressing this multifaceted topic is Ferenc Hörcher's The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, Through City-State, to Megalopolis? (Lexington Books, 2021)

Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher, historian of political thought and a philosopher of art. He is director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Public Service in Budapest and senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science.

Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Mahmood Kooria, "Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 12 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Analyzing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, Africa and Europe. By examining the processes of the spread of legal texts and their roles in society, as well as thinking about how Afrasian Muslims responded to these new arrivals of thoughts and texts, Mahmood Kooria weaves together a narrative with the textual descendants from places such as Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Malabar, Java, Aceh and Zanzibar to tell a compelling story of how Islam contributed to the global history of law from the thirteenth to the twentieth century.

Mahmood Kooria is a researcher at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and a visiting faculty of history at Ashoka University (India). Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR); International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); and African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASCL). He received his PhD in Global History from Leiden University in 2016. Before this, he studied at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India) for his M.A. and M.Phil. in Ancient Indian History, and at Darul Huda Islamic University and the University of Calicut (both in Kerala, India) for Bachelors. In addition to numerous academic journal articles and book chapters, he has co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices (2022). Currently he is writing a book on the matriarchal Muslim communities in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

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William Wayne Farris, "A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (U Hawaii Press, 2019) is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant’s introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the herb was processed into a palatable beverage, ultimately resulting in the wide variety of teas we enjoy today. Along the way, he traces in fascinating detail the shift in tea’s status from exotic gift item from China, tied to Heian (794–1185) court ritual and medicinal uses, to tax and commodity for exchange in the 1350s, to its complete nativization in Edo (1603–1868) art and literature and its eventual place on the table of every Japanese household. Farris maintains that the increasing sophistication of Japanese agriculture after 1350 is exemplified by tea farming, which became so advanced that Meiji (1868–1912) entrepreneurs were able to export significant amounts of Japanese tea to Euro-American markets. This in turn provided the much-needed foreign capital necessary to help secure Japan a place among the world’s industrialized nations.

Tea also had a hand in initiating Japan’s “industrious revolution”: From 1400, tea was being drunk in larger quantities by commoners as well as elites, and the stimulating, habit-forming beverage made it possible for laborers to apply handicraft skills in a meticulous, efficient, and prolonged manner. In addition to aiding in the protoindustrialization of Japan by 1800, tea had by that time become a central commodity in the formation of a burgeoning consumer society. The demand-pull of tea consumption necessitated even greater production into the postwar period—and this despite challenges posed to the industry by consumers’ growing taste for coffee. A Bowl for a Coin makes a convincing case for how tea—an age-old drink that continues to adapt itself to changing tastes in Japan and the world—can serve as a broad lens through which to view the development of Japanese society over many centuries.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Hana Videen, "The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 02 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith.

The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (Princeton UP, 2022) takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own “wordhord”—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations.

Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you’re reading right now: you’ll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again.

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Lisa Reilly, "The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Cappella Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. To the modern eye, these works are perceived as culturally diverse. As Reilly demonstrates, the multiple sources for Norman visual culture served to expand their meaning. Norman artworks represented the cultural mix of each locale, and the triumph of Norman rule, not just as a military victory but as a legitimate succession, and often as the return of true Christian rule.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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George Warner, "The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ibn Babawayh – also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq – was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vanishing of the twelfth imam, al-Saduq represents a pivotal moment in Twelver hadith literature, as this Shi'i community adjusted to a world without a visible imam and guide, a world wherein the imams could only be accessed through the text of their remembered words and deeds. George Warner's book The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2021) examines the formation of Shi'i hadith literature in light of these unique dynamics, as well as giving a portrait of an important but little-studied early Twelver thinker. Though almost all of al-Saduq's writings are collections of hadith, Warner's approach pays careful attention to how these texts are selected and presented to explore what they can reveal about their compiler, offering insight into al-Saduq's ideas and suggesting new possibilities for the wider study of hadith.

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Greater Angkor and Global Urbanism

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Cambodia is home to Angkor, one of the most important archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. Greater Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was a low-density city covered about a 1000 sq km and was the home of between 750,000 to 900,000 people in the 12th century CE. The urban complex was largely abandoned in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its central 300 sq km is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the world-famous temple of Angkor Wat, one of humankind’s largest religious monuments which has continued in use to the present day.

In this episode, world-renowned archaeologist Professor Roland Fletcher joins Dr Natali Pearson to examine the structure of Angkor’s social and spatial organisation; the way the urban complex operated in its environment. Reflecting on the metropolis’ demise, Roland argues that archaeological study of Angkor can teach us lessons about the vulnerability of modern-day urbanism in a time of increasing climate risk.

About Roland Fletcher:

Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Roland is also Director of the Greater Angkor Project – a collaboration between the University of Sydney, the Authority for the Protection of the Site and Management of the Region of Angkor (APSARA) in Cambodia, and the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), that has been ongoing since 1998. He is the author of The Limits of Settlement Growth, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and has published extensively on urbanism.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Michael Carasik, "The Commentators' Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqra'ot Gedolot" (Jewish Publication Society, 2018)

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The biblical commentaries known as Miqra’ot Gedolot have inspired and educated generations of Hebrew readers. Now, with the five volumes of the acclaimed English edition of Miqra’ot Gedolot, The Commentators' Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—the voices of Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides, Rashbam, Abarbanel, Kimhi, and other medieval Bible commentators come alive, speaking in a contemporary English translation annotated and explicated for lay readers.

Join us as we speak with Michael Carasik, editor of The Commentators' Bible!

Dr. Michael Carasik teaches biblical Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the weekday Torah reader at Historic Congregation Kesher Israel in Center City Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. in Bible and the Ancient Near East from Brandeis University, and has taught at various universities. He is the compiler and translator of the JPS Miqra'ot Gedolot Commentators' Bible series and, in addition to numerous articles, is also author of Theologies of the Mind in Biblical Israel and The Bible's Many Voices.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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On St. Francis of Assisi, Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and the Crusades

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Paul Moses, former Newsday city editor and senior religion writer, is a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He was the lead writer on a Newsday team that won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of The Saint the Sultan (2009, Doubleday) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York's Irish and Italians (2015, NYU Press).

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Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, "Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland" (Reaktion, 2010)

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today we talk to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon about Wasteland with Words (Reaktion, 2010) and about microhistory as a method. Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wasteland with Words Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon presents a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the island’s history that examines the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture while investigating the literary and historical factors that created the rich cultural heritage enjoyed by Icelanders today. Magnússon explains how a nineteenth-century economy based on the industries of fishing and agriculture—one of the poorest in Europe—grew to become a disproportionately large economic power in the late twentieth century, while retaining its strong sense of cultural identity. Bringing the story up to the present, he assesses the recent economic and political collapse of the country and how Iceland has coped. Throughout Magnússon seeks to chart the vast changes in this country’s history through the impact and effect on the Icelandic people themselves. Up-to-date and fascinating, Wasteland with Words is a comprehensive study of the island’s cultural and historical development, from tiny fishing settlements to a global economic power.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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James C. Ungureanu, "Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.

In Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019), James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

James C. Ungureanu is a Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland and in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Jason M. Baxter, "The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind" (InterVarsity, 2022)

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Many readers know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature.

What shaped the mind of this great thinker? In The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (InterVarsity, 2022), Jason Baxter argues that Lewis was deeply formed not only by the words of Scripture and his love of ancient mythology, but also by medieval literature. For this undeniably modern Christian, authors like Dante and Boethius provided a worldview that was relevant to the challenges of the contemporary world.

Here, readers will encounter an unknown figure to guide them in their own journey: C. S. Lewis the medievalist.

Jason M. Baxter (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is associate professor of fine arts and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. He is the author of An Introduction to Christian Mysticism, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante's Encyclopedia and the Names of God, and A Beginner’s Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Adrian J. Pearce et al., "Rethinking the Andes-Amazonia Divide. A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration" (UCL Press, 2020)

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. Because of that, the different disciplines that research the human past in South America have tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be studied independently of each other. Objections to that approach have repeatedly been raised, however, warning against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia when there are clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them.

Rethinking the Andes-Amazonia Divide. A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration (UCL Press, 2020) brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. This collaboration has emerged from an innovative program of conferences and symposia conceived to generate discussion and cooperation across the divides between disciplines.

Adrian J. PEARCE, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American History at the University College London

David BERESFORD-JONES, fellow of the Heinz Heinen Centre for Advanced Study, University of Bonn, and affiliated researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge

Paul HEGGARTY, senior scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.

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Lucy Donkin, "Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 04:00:00 -0000

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Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec, "Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook" (Northern Illinois UP, 2020)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.

Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

Valerie A. Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History. Christine D. Worobec is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Ayşe Zarakol, "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ayse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline. How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending - the Rise of the West and the decline of the East - into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result?

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Eiren L. Shea, "Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange" (Routledge, 2020)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange - culturally, politically, and artistically - across Eurasia. The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. In

In Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020), Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes from the steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century, creating a courtly idiom that permanently changed the aesthetics of China and whose echoes were felt across Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe.

Eiren Shea is Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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On Medieval Christianity and Monastic Worlds

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Rabia Gregory’s primary research interest is the history of Christianity in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She approaches the study of religion through book history, material culture, and theories of gender. Her book, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform, published by Ashgate, uses previously unpublished cultural artifacts to revise long-standing assumptions about religion, gender, and popular culture. In the book, she demonstrates that by the fourteenth century, worldly, sexually active brides of Christ, both male and female, were no longer aberrations and provide a history of the dispersion of theology about the bride of Christ in the period between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and explains how this metaphor, initially devised for a religious elite, became integral to the laity’s pursuit of salvation.

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Christopher Clohessy, "Angels Hastening: The Karbalāʾ Dreams" (Gorgias Press, 2021)

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Christopher Clohessy about his book Angels Hastening: The Karbalāʾ Dreams (Gorgias Press, 2021),

When, on an autumn Medina night in 61/680, the night that saw al-Ḥusayn killed, Umm Salama was torn from her sleep by an apparition of a long-dead Muḥammad, she slipped effortlessly into a progression of her co-religionists who, irrespective of status, gender or standing with God, were the recipients of dark and arresting visions. At the core of those Delphian dreams, peopled by angels or ğinn or esteemed forbears and textured with Iraqi dust and martyrs’ blood, was the Karbalāʾ event. Her dream would be recounted by an array of Muslim scholars, from al-Tirmiḏī, stellar pupil of al-Buḫārī, and Ibn ʿAsākir, untiring chronicler of Syrian history, to bibliophile theologian Ibn Ṭāʾūs and Egyptian polymath al-Suyūṭī. But this was not Umm Salama’s only otherworldly encounter and she was not the only one to have al-Ḥusayn’s fate disturb her nights. This is their story.

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Racheli Haliva, "Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020)

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

To date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar’s thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that covers Polqar’s thought in its entirety. Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020) aims to fill this lacuna by tracing and contextualizing both Polqar’s Islamic sources (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes) and his Jewish sources (Maimonides and Isaac Albalag).

The study brings to light three of Polqar’s main purposes; (1) seeking to defend Judaism as a true religion against Christianity; (2) similarly to his fellow Jewish Averroists, Polqar wishes to defend the discipline of philosophy. By philosophy, Polqar means Averroes' interpretation of Aristotle. As a consequence, he offers an Averroistic interpretation of Judaism and becomes one of the main representatives of Jewish Averroism; (3) defending his philosophical interpretation of Judaism.

From a social and political point of view, Polqar's unreserved embrace of philosophy raised problems within the Jewish community; he had to refute the Jewish traditionalists’ charge that he was a heretic, led astray by philosophy. The main objective guiding this study is that Polqar advances a systematic naturalistic interpretation of Judaism, which in many cases does not agree with traditional Jewish views.

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Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, "The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose.

Recent scholarship has overturned popular assumptions about Israel’s past, suggesting, for instance, that the five books of the Torah were written not by Moses but during the reign of Josiah centuries later. The sources of the Gospels are also under scrutiny. In this book, Dr. Konrad Schmid and Dr. Jens Schröter reveal the long, transformative journeys of these and other texts en route to inclusion in the holy books. The New Testament, the authors show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. Rather the two evolved in parallel, in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, Schmid and Schröter argue that Judaism might not have survived had it not been reshaped in competition with early Christianity.

The book argues that the Bible is the result of diverse developments that unfolded over many centuries. It is not a homogeneous document but reflects a multiplicity of different viewpoints on the God of Israel and his interventions in history. And finally, the Bible generated a rich history of reception and interpretation that Jews and Christians alike should keep constantly in mind when trying to understand the Bible, interpret it, and live with it and according to its precepts.

A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, the book is the most comprehensive history yet told of the world’s best-known literature, revealing its buried lessons and secrets.

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Dennis Duncan, "Index, a History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age" (W.W. Norton, 2022)

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book--it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in Index, a History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and--of course--indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart--and we have been for eight hundred years.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Nebil Husayn, "Opposing the Imam: The Legacy of the Nawasib in Islamic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Islam's fourth caliph, Ali, can be considered one of the most revered figures in Islamic history. His nearly universal portrayal in Muslim literature as a pious authority obscures centuries of contestation and the eventual rehabilitation of his character.

In Opposing the Imam: The Legacy of the Nawasib in Islamic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Nebil Husayn, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, examines the enduring legacy of the nawasib, early Muslims who disliked Ali and his descendants. The nawasib participated in politics and scholarly discussions on religion at least until the ninth century. However, their virtual disappearance in Muslim societies has led many to ignore their existence and the subtle ways in which their views subsequently affected Islamic historiography and theology. By surveying medieval Muslim literature across multiple genres and traditions including the Sunni, Mu'tazili, and Ibadi, Husayn reconstructs the claims and arguments of the nawasib and illuminates the methods that Sunni scholars employed to gradually rehabilitate the image of Ali from a villainous character to a righteous one. In our conversation we discussed approaching early Muslim sources, the spectrum of anti-ʿAlid positions, Ibn Taymiyya’s take, the rehabilitation of 'Ali, and the legacy of anti-ʿAlid sentiment within Sunni theology.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Exploring Autonomy: A History of Jewish Self-Governance in Eastern Europe

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The emergence of self-government in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe has been a slow process, often encouraged by invitations of existing regimes and sometimes to escape state persecution. Nonetheless, the Jewish community has succeeded in establishing its autonomy as well as maintain a certain degree of control over its traditions.

In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, traces the travails and triumphs of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, based on his edited volume, “Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present.”

The book offers insights into different aspects of Jewish sociopolitical life through expert translation of narrative sources in Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and other languages into English.

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Tracy Collins, "Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology" (Cork UP, 2021)

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology (Cork UP, 2021), Dr. Tracy Collins writes the first archaeological investigation into female monasticism in medieval Ireland, primarily from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Weaving in early medieval evidence, textual sources, and examples from Britain and the continent, new considerations are given to the archaeology, architecture, and landscape through the lens of gender. Introducing her results from her recent surveys and excavation, she reveals the fluidity and diversity of female religious communities in Ireland. Debunking stereotypes such as strict enclosure and uniformity, Collins provides a glimpse into the lives of medieval female religious and their connections locally as well as within Ireland and Europe. Dr. Tracy Collins was a co-founder of Aegis Archaeology Limited and currently work as a state archaeologist with the National Monuments Service in Ireland. She is also co-editor of the upcoming Brides of Christ: Women and monasticism in medieval and early modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022).

Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool.

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Katherine Harvey, "The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are with Katherine Harvey, author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2021). An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people. The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much--or too little--sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner or trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life, revealing details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. Ultimately, it provides us with an important and intimate connection to the past.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Nicholas Jubber, "The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales" (John Murray, 2022)

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales (John Murray, 2022), Nick Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, the book travels from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland.

“This is how the history of fairy tales operates: stories splintering along zigzagging pathways, carrying long-sounding echoes that turn down narrative alleyways suggested elsewhere or replicate each other with astonishing exactitude.”

In the process, Jubber discovers fresh perspectives on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, focusing on qualitative analyses of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. However, she is also a life-long lover of fairy tales & fantasy; her father continues to be surprised that her PhD did not once mention dragons, elves, or castles.

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Eleanor Janega and Neil Max Emmanuel, "The Middle Ages: A Graphic History" (Icon Books, 2020)

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A unique, illustrated book that aspires to bring medieval history closer to the general audience will change the way you see medieval history, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Icon Books, 2021) busts the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’, shedding light on the medieval period’s present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style.

This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years War and the Plague; to the curious practices of monks, martyrs and iconoclasts. We’ll see how the foundations of the modern West were established, influencing our art, cultures, religious practices and ways of thinking. And we’ll explore the lives of those seen as ‘Other’ – women, Jews, homosexuals, lepers, sex workers and heretics. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development – not unlike our own.

Eleanor Janega is a medieval historian at the London School of Economics specializing in sexuality, propaganda, apocalypticism, and the urban experience in the medieval period generally and in late medieval Bohemia in particular. Her focus is on communicating medieval history for a general audience, and to that end she blogs at going-medieval.com and has written for The Washington Post, BBC History and History Today among others. At the same time, she can also be found hosting medieval history programs on History Hit TV.

Neil Max Emmanuel is a motion graphics animator, illustrator, storyboard artist, cartoonist, visual facilitator, media trainer, and consultant. For ten years he has worked for Channel 4’s Time Team alongside the country’s leading historical experts and filmmakers. He has worked for many historical documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic and History Channel to name a few.

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Megan Moore, "The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture.

Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels.

In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Judith Herrin, "Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital. Bringing this extraordinary history marvelously to life, Judith Herrin rewrites the history of East and West in the Mediterranean world before the rise of Islam and shows how, thanks to Byzantine influence, Ravenna played a crucial role in the development of medieval Christendom.

Drawing on deep, original research, Herrin tells the personal stories of Ravenna while setting them in a sweeping synthesis of Mediterranean and Christian history. She narrates the lives of the Empress Galla Placidia and the Gothic king Theoderic and describes the achievements of an amazing cosmographer and a doctor who revived Greek medical knowledge in Italy, demolishing the idea that the West just descended into the medieval “Dark Ages.”

Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological findings, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020) provides a bold new interpretation of Ravenna’s lasting influence on the culture of Europe and the West.

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Dyan Elliott, "The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today.

In The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020), she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church. Elliott examines more than a millennium's worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court.

The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jonathan B. Edelmann, "Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Professor Jonathan B. Edelmann develops a constructive and comparative theological dialogue between Hinduism and Western natural sciences. Describing the Bhagavata tradition and Darwinism as worldviews, the author asks the question in the book, whether a dialogue is even possible between the two traditions with entirely different goals of knowledge. The book elaborates upon the various topics in order to construct the dialogue, such as physicalism of Darwin, Ontology of The Bhagavata, theories of knowledge, and objectivity and testimony in natural sciences. Professor Edelmann ends up providing some overlapping aims of science and religion which makes it possible to undertake a science-religion dialogue.

Shruti Dixit is a PhD Divinity Candidate at CSRP, University of St Andrews, researching the Hindu-Christian Dialogue in Apocalyptic Prophecies.

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D. Fairchild Ruggles, "Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar Al-Durr" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Shajar al-Durr--known as "Tree of Pearls"--began her remarkable career as a child slave, given as property to Sultan Salih of Egypt. She became his concubine, was manumitted, became his wife, served as governing regent, and ultimately rose to become the legitimately appointed sultan of Egypt in 1250 after her husband's death. Shajar al-Durr used her wealth and power to add a tomb to his urban madrasa; with this innovation, madrasas and many other charitably endowed architectural complexes became commemorative monuments, a practice that remains widespread today. A highly unusual case of a Muslim woman authorized to rule in her own name, her reign ended after only three months when she was forced to share her governance with an army general and for political expediency to marry him.

Despite the fact that Shajar al-Durr's story ends tragically with her assassination and hasty burial, her deeds in her lifetime offer a stark alternative to the continued belief that women in the medieval period were unseen, anonymous, and inconsequential in a world that belonged to men. D. Fairchild Ruggles' Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar Al-Durr (Oxford UP, 2020)--the first ever in English--places the rise and fall of the sultan-queen in the wider context of the cultural and architectural development of Cairo, the city that still holds one of the largest and most important collections of Islamic monuments in the world.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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Anna McSweeney, "From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola" (Kettler Verlag, 2020)

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Part of the series CAHIM Connecting Art Histories in the Museum, Anna McSweeney's book From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola (Kettler Verlag, 2020) is the story of an extraordinary survivor from the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain: the Alhambra cupola, now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The cupola, a ceiling crafted from carved and painted wood, was made to crown an exquisite mirador in one of the earliest palace buildings of the Alhambra. The book is the cupola's biography from its medieval construction to its imminent redisplay in Berlin. It traces the long history of the Alhambra through the prism of the cupola, from the Muslim craftsmen who built it, to its adaptation by the Christian conquerors after the fall of Granada in 1492, to its creation as a heritage site. The cupola was sketched by artists from across Europe before it was dismantled by a German financier and taken to Berlin in the 19th century. It witnessed the dramatic events of the 20th century in Germany and was eventually bought by the Museum in 1978. In recent decades, the new visibility of the cupola to the wider public has prompted questions about the object and its movement from Granada to Berlin. Its removal from the Alhambra and the complex reasons behind this loss is central to this biography. Setting the cupola within the wider context of Islamic heritage, it considers the role of collecting practices in the transformation of living monuments into heritage sites in the 20th century. This book presents a focused study of this unique object that cuts across academic disciplines and geographic boundaries to reveal a new perspective on the legacy of Islamic art in Europe and its continuing relevance today.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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Jocelyn Hendrickson, "Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In her landmark new book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard UP, 2020), Jocelyn Hendrickson launches a searingly brilliant legal history centered on the question of how medieval and early modern Muslim jurists in Iberia and North Africa wrestled with various thorny questions of living under or migrating away from non-Muslim political sovereignty. This book combines meticulous social and political history with nimble and accessible readings of a vast range of sources from the Maliki School of law. What emerges from this exercise is a picture of the Maliki legal tradition in particular and Islamic law more broadly that is unavailable for predictable readings, enormously interesting, and deliciously complex. This lucid book should also be a delight to teach in various graduate and upper level under graduate courses.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Hassan Abbas, "The Prophet's Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Ali ibn Abi Talib is arguably the single most important spiritual and intellectual authority in Islam after prophet Mohammad. Through his teachings and leadership as fourth caliph, Ali nourished Islam. But Muslims are divided on whether he was supposed to be Mohammad’s political successor and he continues to be a polarizing figure in Islamic history.

In The Prophet's Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib (Yale UP, 2021), Hassan Abbas provides a nuanced, compelling portrait of this towering yet divisive figure and the origins of sectarian division within Islam. Abbas reveals how, after Mohammad, Ali assumed the spiritual mantle of Islam to spearhead the movement that the prophet had led. While Ali’s teachings about wisdom, justice, and selflessness continue to be cherished by both Shia and Sunni Muslims, his pluralist ideas have been buried under sectarian agendas and power politics. Today, Abbas argues, Ali’s legacy and message stands against that of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Taliban.

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Janna Coomans, "Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. In Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021), Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

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A Conversation with Anne F. Harris, Medieval Art Historian and President of Grinnell College

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Anne F. Harris. Anne wears two hats: she's a medieval art historian and president of Grinnell College. We talked about her new book Medieval Art 250-1450: Matter, Making, and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2021), which she co-authored with Nancy M. Thompson. We also discussed the significance and relevance of Medieval art today, the transition from teaching to administration, what it's like to head a premiere liberal arts college in the age of Covid (and all else), and her vision for Grinnell.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He's also a graduate of Grinnell College. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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A Conversation with Anne F. Harris, Medieval Art Historian and President of Grinnell College

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He's also a graduate of Grinnell College. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Shao-yun Yang, "The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China" (U Washington Press, 2019)

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Shao-yun Yang's The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (University of Washington Press, 2019) challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

This is a really important work in understanding how ethnicity was articulated in premodern China. The implications of Yang's detailed and meticulous study make it must-read for anyone interested in the intellectual and political history of China, that includes not only for those concerned with the Middle Period, but also both the classical, late imperial, and modern periods.

Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He can be reached at lance.pursey@abdn.ac.uk.

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Annegret Oehme, "The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations" (Brill, 2021)

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations (Brill, 2021) examines five key moments in the Wigalois / Viduvilt tradition that highlight transitions between narratological and meta-narratological patterns and audiences of different religious-cultural or lingual background.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

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Crawford Gribben, "The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today Crawford Gribben joins us to talk about his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021). Ireland has long been regarded as a 'land of saints and scholars'. Yet the Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples.

Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the 11th and 12th centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the 16th century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion's most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas.

But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel.

In 2021, fifteen hundred years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But its critics need not relax any more than believers ought to despair. After the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance. In the ruins of the church, new Columbas and Patricks shape the rise of another Christian Ireland.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Beatrice Gruendler, "The Rise of the Arabic Book" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

How did it happen that, in the 13th century, Europe's largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes while Baghdad alone boasted of several libraries holding from 200,000 to 1,000,000 books each? In The Rise of the Arabic Book (Harvard UP, 2020), Beatrice Gruendler traces the story of the beginning of the revolution in book culture that happened in the first centuries of the Abbasid period in the Islamic lands of the Middle East. She does so by looking at the lives of people specializing and fulfilling different roles in a society that underwent a drastic technological revolution to accomodate them. Focusing on a range of social classes such as scholars and poets, craftsmen and traders, up to the large aristocratic book collectors, we read of the protagonists of this momentous revolution in knowledge, science, and book culture.

Miguel Monteiro is a PhD student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Twitter @anphph

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Ruth Gamble, "The Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje: Master of Mahamudra" (Shambala, 2020)

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

A scholarly yet accessible biography of the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, one of the great historical figures of Tibetan Buddhism.

Known for his mastery of teachings across sectarian lines, his treatises on medicine and astrology, and his work as spiritual advisor to the last Yuan emperor of China, Rangjung Dorje (1284-1339) is considered one of the most important and influential figures in Tibetan Buddhist history. First recognized as a tulku, or reincarnated Buddhist master, at the age of five, Rangjung Dorje became the Karma Kagyu lineage holder and instituted the reincarnation-based inheritance structure within Tibetan Buddhism that led to the formation of important lineages of tulkus such as the Dalai Lamas.

In The Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje: Master of Mahamudra (Shambala, 2020), Ruth Gamble synthesizes her extensive research on Rangjung Dorje into a sweeping biography covering his life, legacy, and important selected writings. Included in her discussions are Rangjung Dorje's synthesis of Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā in his writings, his devotion to spreading the teachings of Buddha nature, and several works never before translated into English. As the most comprehensive work available on Rangjung Dorje, this book is an indispensable resource for scholars and Buddhist practitioners alike.

Cuilan Liu is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work on Buddhism, Law, China, Tibet, and documentary filmmaking can be found here.

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Daniel C. Matt, "The Zohar" (Stanford UP, 2018)

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Emerging some seven hundred years ago in Spain, the Zohar is considered 'the great medieval compendium of mysticism, myth, and esoteric teaching' and perhaps 'the highest expression of Jewish literary imagination in the Middle Ages' (from Arthur Green's Introduction, vol. 1, pg. xxxi). The twelve volume English translation and encyclopedic commentary on the Zohar: Pritzker Edition by Stanford University Press has become the authoritative and standard version for the English-speaking world--and the first 9 volumes were composed by Daniel C. Matt.

Join us as we speak with Daniel Matt about the Zohar, Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance), a classic text of Kabbalah which has mystified and amazed readers for centuries.

Daniel C. Matt is a leading authority on Jewish mysticism. He served as professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications, in addition to the The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (12 vols.), include The Essential Kabbalah (1995), God and the Big Bang (1996), and Zohar: Annotated and Explained (2002). Daniel also teaches an online Zohar course: www.sup.org/zohar/course

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Quentin Skinner, “Quest for Freedom” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Quest for Freedom is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. Quentin Skinner is considered to be one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. This thoughtful, detailed conversation examines how Quentin Skinner came to appreciate the importance of the distinction between the modern view of freedom and the so-called neo-Roman view, together with what it implies for our current and future political understanding.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Teofilo Ruiz, “The Consolations of History” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Consolations of History is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Teofilo Ruiz, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. Teo Ruiz is a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. He received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for his “inspired teaching and writing”. This wide-ranging conversation provides captivating insights into his Cuban origins, how he became a professional historian, the challenges and excitement of teaching, and what the future might hold.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Miri Rubin, “Religion and Culture: A Historian’s Tale” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Religion and Culture: A Historian’s Tale is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. After behind-the-scenes insights into Miri Rubin’s career path which led her from chemistry to working in an orthopaedic hospital to studying medieval history with a ‘cultural anthropologist” persuasion to the subject of medieval Christianity, this wide-ranging conversation covers several books that Miri Rubin has written, including The Life and Passion of William of Norwich; Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary; Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures; The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction; and Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jay Rubenstein, “Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, commoners and even nuns at the end of the 11th century to leave their normal lives behind and trek thousands of miles across hostile territory in an unprecedented vicious and bloody quest to wrest Jerusalem from its occupying powers? Jay Rubenstein, historian of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds of Europe in the Middle Ages, carefully explores those questions based on his extensive research while discussing the Apocalypse: the crusaders’ sincere belief that the end of the world was approaching and their opportunity to participate in the last stage of the divine plan.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!

If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.

The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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David J. Mozina, "Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Mozina’s Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice (U Hawaii Press, 2021) weaves together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, inviting readers into the religious world of Daoist practice in today’s south China by exploring one particular ritual called the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin, as practiced in central Hunan province.

Performed as the first public ritual by a Daoist apprentice at his own ordination, the Banner Rite seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious martial deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. A lot is at stake. If the apprentice cannot successfully summon the deity in front of his village community and the pantheon of gods in attendance, he would not be able to be ordained that day and would risk losing the confidence of villagers who might hire him in the future.

Through a close reading of the ritual in its social and historical contexts, Mozina shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era.

Knotting the Banner will be of interest to students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion and will also appeal to historians of religion and anthropologists, especially those working on ritual.

Noelle Giuffrida is a professor and curator of Asian art at the School of Art and the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University. Her research focuses on Chinese art, particularly the history of collecting and exhibiting premodern works in American museums after World War II and the visual culture of Daoism in late imperial China. Her teaching and curatorial experience extend broadly both temporally—from Neolithic to contemporary—and cross-culturally to China, Korea, and Japan, as well as to South and Southeast Asia. Her book Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee’s Collecting of Chinese Art in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018) uses American curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008) as a lens through which to investigate the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art. Email her at ngiuffrida@bsu.edu.

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Elizabeth Boyle, "History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, Dr. Elizabeth Boyle closely examines medieval Irish ideas regarding salvation history from 700 to 1200 CE through both Latin and vernacular texts for both ecclesiastical and secular audiences. Incorporating analysis from previously untranslated texts, her book delves into the use of narratives and figures from Hebrew Scriptures and the weaving of elements from the Hebrew and Irish texts into each other. The medieval Irish concept of salvation history was instrumental in writers’ and readers’ perception of where Ireland was situated within history and the world. Boyle illustrates how understanding this concept is important for scholars of this period, as it had a profound effect on Ireland politically, socially, culturally, and religiously. History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland was published by Routledge in 2021 as a part of their Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland.

Dr. Elizabeth Boyle is a lecturer in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University and is the author of numerous works, including the forthcoming Fierce Appetites: My Year of Untamed Thinking (Penguin, 2022).

Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently finished her PhD in History at the University of Liverpool.

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Richard J. A. McGregor, "Islam and the Devotional Object" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Richard J. A. McGregor, Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, offers a history of Islamic practice through the aesthetic reception of medieval religious objects. Elaborate parades in Cairo and Damascus included decorated objects of great value, destined for Mecca and Medina. Among these were the precious dress sewn yearly for the Ka'ba, and large colorful sedans mounted on camels, which mysteriously completed the Hajj without carrying a single passenger. Along with the brisk trade in Islamic relics, these objects and the variety of contested meanings attached to them, constituted material practices of religion that persisted into the colonial era, but were suppressed in the twentieth century. McGregor here recovers the biographies of religious objects, including relics, banners, public texts, and coverings for the Ka'ba. Reconstructing the premodern visual culture of Islamic Egypt and Syria, he follows the shifting meanings attached to objects of devotion, as well as the contingent nature of religious practice and experience. In our conversation we discuss aesthetic theory, material culture, processional objects, museum exhibition, relic typologies, devotional objects and religious landscapes, public celebrations, visual text and its illegibility, and the function of banners.

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Edward J. Watts, "The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

As this book intriguingly explores, for those who would make Rome great again and their victims, ideas of Roman decline and renewal have had a long and violent history. The decline of Rome has been a constant source of discussion for more than 2200 years. Everyone from American journalists in the twenty-first century AD to Roman politicians at the turn of the third century BC have used it as a tool to illustrate the negative consequences of changes in their world. Because Roman history is so long, it provides a buffet of ready-made stories of decline that can help develop the context around any snapshot. And Rome did, in fact, decline and, eventually, fall. An empire that once controlled all or part of more than 40 modern European, Asian, and African countries no longer exists. Roman prophets of decline were, ultimately, proven correct-a fact that makes their modern invocations all the more powerful. If it happened then, it could happen now.

Edward J. Watts' The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford UP, 2021) tells the stories of the people who built their political and literary careers around promises of Roman renewal as well as those of the victims they blamed for causing Rome's decline. Each chapter offers the historical context necessary to understand a moment or a series of moments in which Romans, aspiring Romans, and non--Romans used ideas of Roman decline and restoration to seize power and remake the world around them. The story begins during the Roman Republic just after 200 BC. It proceeds through the empire of Augustus and his successors, traces the Roman loss of much of western Europe in the fifth century AD, and then follows Roman history as it runs through the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) until its fall in 1453. The final two chapters look at ideas of Roman decline and renewal from the fifteenth century until today. If Rome illustrates the profound danger of the rhetoric of decline, it also demonstrates the rehabilitative potential of a rhetoric that focuses on collaborative restoration, a lesson of great relevance to our world today.

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Joshua S. Mostow and Tokurō Yamamoto, "An Ise monogatari Reader: Contexts and Receptions" (Brill, 2021)

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

An An Ise monogatari Reader: Contexts and Receptions (Brill, 2021) is the first collection of essays in English on The Ise Stories, a canonical literary text ranked beside The Tale of Genji. Eleven scholars from Japan, North America, and Europe explore the historical and political context in which this literary court romance was created, or relate it to earlier works such as the Man’yōshū and later works such as the Genji and noh theater. Its medieval commentary tradition is also examined, as well as early modern illustrated editions and parodies. The collection brings cutting-edge scholarship of the very highest level to English readers, scholars, and students.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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John Nemec, "The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda's Sivadrsti and His Philosophical Interlocutors" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda's Sivadrsti and His Philosophical Interlocutors (Oxford UP, 2021) is a sequel to a volume published in 2011 by OUP under the title The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda's Sivadrsti and his Tantric Interlocutors. The first volume offered an introduction, critical edition, and annotated translation of the first three chapters of the Sivadrsti of Somananda, along with its principal commentary, the Sivadrstivrtti, written by Utpaladeva. It dealt primarily with Saiva theology and the religious views of competing esoteric traditions. The present volume presents the fourth chapter of the Sivadrsti and Sivadrstivrtti and addresses a fresh set of issues that engage a distinct family of opposing schools and authors of mainstream Indian philosophical traditions. In this fourth and final chapter, Somananda and Utpaladeva engage logical and philosophical works that exerted tremendous influence in the Indian subcontinent in its premodernity. Throughout this chapter, Somananda endeavors to explain his brand of Saivism philosophically. Somananda challenges his philosophical interlocutors with a single over-arching argument: he suggests that their views cannot cohere--they cannot be explained logically--unless their authors accept the Saiva non-duality for which he advocates. The argument he offers, despite its historical influence, remains virtually unstudied. The Ubiquitous Siva Volume II offers the first English translation of Chapter Four of the Sivadrsti and Sivadrstivrtti along with an introduction and critical edition.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Yan Liu, "Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China" (U Washington Press, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China (U Washington Press, 2021) explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used powerful substances to both treat intractable illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of “potency”—led practitioners to devise a variety of techniques to transform dangerous poisons into efficacious medicines.

Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the early Tang period, Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to the ways people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. Liu also examines a wide range of du-possessing minerals, plants, and animal products in classical Chinese pharmacy, including the highly poisonous herb aconite and the popular arsenic drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with potent medicines, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful.

Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries. Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013.

Yan Liu is assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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Angeliki Lymberopoulou, "Cross-cultural Interaction Between Byzantium and the West, 1204-1669" (Routledge, 2020)

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The early modern Mediterranean was an area where many different rich cultural traditions came in contact with each other, and were often forced to co-exist, frequently learning to reap the benefits of co-operation. Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and their interactions all contributed significantly to the cultural development of modern Europe.

Cross-Cultural Interaction Between Byzantium and the West, 1204-1669: Whose Mediterranean Is It Anyway? (Routledge, 2020) addresses, explores, re-examines, and re-interprets one specific aspect of this cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean - that between the Byzantine East and the (mainly Italian) West. The investigation of this interaction has become increasingly popular in the past few decades, not least due to the relevance it has for cultural exchanges in our present-day society. The starting point is provided by the fall of Constantinople to the troops of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In the aftermath of the fall, a number of Byzantine territories came under prolonged Latin occupation, an occupation that forced Greeks and Latins to adapt their life socially and religiously to the new status quo. Venetian Crete developed one of the most fertile 'bi-cultural' societies, which evolved over 458 years. Its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1669 marked the end of an era and was hence chosen as the end point for the conference. By sampling case studies from the most representative areas where this interaction took place, the volume highlights the process as well as the significance of its cultural development.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Art History (late and post-Byzantine art) at The Open University, UK. Her research interests focus on Venetian Crete (1211-1669) and the cross-cultural interactions and exchanges between Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians in the wider Mediterranean.

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Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Rewriting Buddhism is available for free open-access download at uclpress.com/buddhism.

Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, kingship and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley.

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Charles Tieszen, "The Christian Encounter with Muhammad: How Theologians Have Interpreted the Prophet" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Muhammad has not only been at the center of Muslims discussions of prophethood but he has also been the focus for many Christians as well. In The Christian Encounter with Muhammad: How Theologians have Interpreted the Prophet (Bloomsbury, 2020), Charles Tieszen, Ph.d., University of Birmingham, introduces a wide variety of depictions throughout history and assesses how Muhammad is used in the context of differing Christian doctrinal and social issues. His examples range from medieval Christian communities writing Syriac, to those living in Al-Andalus, to west Africa, and more. Across these case studies Tieszen seeks to understand how the Prophet was used to support, justify, or contest various positions both within Christian debates and broader inter-religious exchanges. In our conversation we discuss Christian writings about Muhammad from late antiquity to the modern times, narratives about the Christian Monk Bahira, John of Damascus, early Syriac Texts, the martyr movement of Cordoba, Latin depictions of the Prophet, Christian letters addressed to Muslims, Mary Fisher the English Quaker who traveled to Ottoman Turkey, Samuel Ajayi Crowther the Yoruba convert and west African Christian missionary, Professor of World Christianity Lamin Sanneh, and what these discussions tell us about Christian-Muslim relations.

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James D. Reich, "To Savor the Meaning: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Medieval Kashmir in its golden age saw the development of some of the most sophisticated theories of language, literature, and emotion articulated in the pre-modern world. James D. Reich's book To Savor the Meaning: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in this period by looking at debates about how poetry communicates emotions to its readers, what it is readers do when they savor these emotions, and why this might be valuable.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Jagjeet Lally, "India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology.

Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders traveled through today’s India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, sharing commodities and goods, culture and information, under both Indian and British rulers.

In this interview, Jagjeet and I talk about the Indian caravan trade, and the routes traders took as they transported goods, cultures and ideas across Central Asia. We’ll also talk about what we miss in the way we talk about globalization in the present.

Jagjeet is Associate Professor in the History of Early Modern and Modern India at University College London, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India and the Silk Roads. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, "ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

There's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even so, it's been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world - Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Geniza, and Tabriz - this fascinating and much-needed book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent.

ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place over the course of global history.

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim is Reader in History at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-editor of Rashid al-Din: Agent and Mediator of Cultural Exchanges in Ilkhanid Iran, Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, and Astro-Medicine: Astrology and Medicine, East and West.

Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

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David Potter, "Disruption: Why Things Change" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to David Potter about his new book Disruption: Why Things Change (Oxford UP, 2021).

Disruption is about radical change-why it happens and how. Drawing on case studies ranging from the fourth century AD through the twentieth century, we look at how long-established systems of government and thought are challenged, how new institutions are created and new ideas become powerful. While paying attention to the underlying political, intellectual, economic and environmental sources of social disruption, we will see that no matter what similarities there might be between forces that shake different societies, these underlying factors do not dictate specific outcomes. The human actors are ultimately the most important, their decisions drive the conclusions that we see over time. Through our case studies we can explore successful and unsuccessful decision making, and the emergence of the ideas that conditioned human actions. We'll explore the development of Islam and of Christian doctrine, of constitutional thought, of socialism and social Darwinism. We'll look at how these ideas, all of them emerging on the fringes of society became central.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern Eureaopn history at the University of Florida. He can be reached at crsbb32@ufl.edu or on twitter @craig_sorvillo

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Heather N. Keaney, "'Uthman ibn 'Affan" (Oneworld Academic, 2020)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Who is ‘Uthman ibn Affan, and why does he matter? Why was his election as the third successor to the Prophet Muhammad so controversial? In fact, why is he a controversial figure in Islamic history? Who killed him, and was his murder the fault of his own leadership and character flaws or was he a victim of the time and context he lived in, of the legacy he inherited from his predecessors? In her excellent new book, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan: Legend or Liability, published with OneWorld 2021. Heather Keaney sets out to explore answers to these questions by providing a historical overview of ‘Uthman’s life, leadership, and legacy. She investigates Muslim sources between the 8th and 14th centuries, Shi'i and Sunni. Keaney argues that Uthman as a historical figure is constructed by the biographies written about him, by a memory of him, and that these memories often result from polemical debates among Muslims.

In today’s discussion, we talk at length about Uthman in all of his complexity. We talk about who he is, why he matters, his caliphate and the controversies around how he became the caliph, some of the challenges he faced as a caliph, and complaints about his character and leadership, his accomplishments, his murder, his legacy.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?! (WTP?!), where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Jill P. Ingram, "Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England" (U Notre Dame Press, 2021)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), Dr. Jill Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. By analyzing a wide range of genres and a diverse range of venues, Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Dr. Jill Ingram is associate professor of English at Ohio University.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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James E. Lindsay and Suleiman Mourad, "Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology" (Hackett, 2021)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In the West, the study of the phenomenon known as the Crusades has long been dominated by European concerns: European periodization, European selection of important moments and personages, and, most of all, European sources. In recent years, scholars such as Carole Hillenbrand, Paul Cobb, and Michael Lower have mined Arabic-language material with the purpose of creating a more balanced view of the Crusades--one that gives the Muslim experiences a voice in the English language. Now, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion at Smith College, and Dr. James Lindsay, Professor of History at Colorado State University, have produced an anthology known as Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology (Hackett, 2021). Covering a wide range of topics and a diverse set of sources, Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period makes new translations of primary source material available to English-speaking students and scholars of the Crusades.

In our conversation, Jim, Suleiman and I touch upon how the Crusades are perceived differently in Muslim sources than they are in European sources; how to categorize an anthology, and what sort of sources to include; and the importance of establishing the diversity of opinion even within the Muslim sources.

Aaron M. Hagler is an associate professor of history at Troy University.

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Kathryn Smithies, "Introducing the Medieval Ass" (U of Wales Press, 2020)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Kathryn Smithies a medieval historian at the University of Melbourne, Australia, to talk about her new book, Introducing the Medieval Ass, out 2020 with the University of Wales Press.

Introducing the Medieval Ass presents a lucid, accessible, and comprehensive picture of the enormous socioeconomic and cultural significance of the ass, or donkey, in the Middle Ages and beyond. In medieval times, the ass was a vital, utilitarian beast of burden, rather like ubiquitous white delivery vans today. At the same time, however, the ass had a rich, paradoxical reputation. Its hard work was praised but its obstinacy condemned. It exemplified the good Christian, humbly bearing Christ to Jerusalem, but also represented sloth, a mortal sin. It had a potent sexual reputation—in one literary work, an ass had sex with a woman—even as it was simultaneously linked to sterility. Over time, the ass also became synonymous with human idiocy, a comic figure representing foolish peasants, students too dull to learn, and their asinine teachers. This trope of foolishness was so prevalent that by the eighteenth century the word “ass” began to be replaced by “donkey.” Introducing the Medieval Ass offers a wide-ranging account of the importance, and often surprising cultural prevalence, of this common domesticated animal.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Ryan J. Lynch, "Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh Al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Of the available sources for Islamic history published before the 9th century of the Christian Era, few are of greater importance than Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands), by al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century administrator at the Abbasid court. The text has been heavily relied upon by scholars for centuries as they have compiled the history of the early Islamic empires.

In Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri (I. B. Tauris, 2021), Ryan J. Lynch, Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University in Georgia, takes a deeper look at the text, its author, sources, genre, and reception. Al-Baladhuri wasn't a historian, and he wrote Futuh al-Buldan for a specific purpose -- what was he trying to achieve, and why?

This fascinating volume not only brings new depths to al-Baladhuri's text, but offers insight into how historians of the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean can engage with sources in a more critical manner while still recognizing their historical value. Published in 2020, Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography is out in paperback from I. B. Tauris, which makes it easily accessible to students, specialists, and generalists alike.

Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas.

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Gayle Rogers, "Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, "Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex.

Amy S. Kaufman is a scholar of medieval studies and popular culture.

Paul B. Sturtevant is Editor in Chief of The Public Medievalist and a Visitor Research Specialist at The Smithsonian Institution.

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Young Richard Kim, "The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Every Sunday, Christians all over the world recite the Nicene Creed as a confession of faith. While most do not know the details of the controversy that led to its composition, they are aware that the Council of Nicaea was a critical moment in the history of Christianity. For scholars, the Council has long been a subject of multi-disciplinary interest and continues to fascinate and inspire research. As we approach the 1700th anniversary of the Council, The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea (Cambridge UP, 2021) provides an opportunity to revisit and reflect on old discussions, propose new approaches and interpretative frameworks, and ultimately revitalize a conversation that remains as important now as it was in the fourth century. The volume offers fifteen original studies by scholars who each examine an aspect of the Council. Informed by interdisciplinary approaches, the essays demonstrate its profound legacy with fresh, sometimes provocative, but always intellectually rich ideas.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Ruth Mazo Karras, "Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today on the podcast, Ruth Mazo Karras, the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin talks about her new book, Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, out this year, 2021 with University of Pennsylvania Press.

"How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages.

In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king, not just a remnant of the past, but part of a living heritage. In both traditions he was warrior, lover, and friend, founder of a dynasty and a sacred poet. But how could an exemplar of virtue also be a murderer and adulterer? How could a physical weakling be a great warrior? How could someone whose claim to the throne was not dynastic be a key symbol of the importance of dynasty? And how could someone who dances with slaves be noble?

Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Thou Art the Man offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.

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Katherine Pangonis, "Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule" (Hachette, 2021)

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Any study of the Crusades — the religious wars waged by Latin Catholics to recapture the Holy Land — is primarily an exploration of men and their military deeds, with scant consideration of women, save perhaps the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine who accompanied her husband, King Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade. But the history of the Christian Crusader states established after the success of the First Crusade is a different matter. From 1099 to 1187, the four polities, known collectively as “Outremer” or “the lands beyond the sea” — the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Tripoli and Edessa — were more often ruled by queens, princesses, and countesses in their own right.

The captivating story of these women is the subject of Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (Hachette, 2021) by Katherine Pangonis. In taking up the story of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, her rebel sister, Princess Alice of Antioch, and their descendants, Pangonis set herself the challenging task of peeling back the layers of recorded history — primarily chronicles written by men — to create a realistic portrait of these vital, ambitious, and dynamic women, a task that requires the historian to wear many hats: archivist, detective, archeologist, and psychologist.

Pangonis is well up to the task; she is an outstanding narrative historian, and in addition to scrutinizing all extant sources on Outremer, Pangonis also took the time to walk in the footsteps of her protagonists, and this allows readers of “Queens of Jerusalem” to experience medieval Outremer in vibrant detail. The queens, princesses, and countesses of Outremer were keen builders of edifices, which still form parts of the skylines of of the region: the Crusader castles, the Convent of Bethany, and the all-important Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In “Queens of Jerusalem” this topography leaps off the page in very satisfying detail.

Pangonis’s writing is elegant and evocative, always informative but never pedantic. Her ability to marshall her sprawling cast of characters, many of whom confusingly share the same names, is impressive, with each person emerging as a separate and vivid personality with distinct character traits. Pangonis argues that like their European cousins, none of the women of Outremer was ever destined to rule, but that the inherent violence of Outremer rendered the mortality rate for men such that women were often the only potential heirs. Some women, such as Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, were well prepared for their task from childhood, while others, like her sister Alice, struggled to establish and maintain power. Pangonis also considers the fates of several Byzantine princesses who married into the Crusader states, such as the colorful Theodora Komnene, foreigners forced to weather their own challenges in navigating power in Outremer.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life.

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Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief.

Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth century. In the past few decades, scholarship has started emphasizing other aspects of the three hundred year Mongol project--after all, waves of destruction don't tend to also be referred to by names like "Pax Mongolica," or "the Mongolian Peace."

In this majestic new study, Marie Favereau (Paris Nanterre University) takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. For three centuries, the Mongol Empire was no less a force for global development than the Roman Empire. The Horde--ulus Jochi, one of the four divisions of Chingghis Khan's Empire--was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its unique political regime--a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility--reswarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard UP, 2021) is an ambitious, accessible, beautifully written portrait of an empire little understood tand too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Marie Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.

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April D. Hughes, "Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What is the relationship between Buddhism and politics? How might Buddhism be realized in this world? And how might Buddhist texts help legitimate new rulers? These questions are ably addressed in April Hughes’s Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2021). Students of Buddhism are familiar with Wu Zhao, or Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese history take the title of “emperor,” and her use of Buddhist ideas and imagery to support her claims to rule. Hughes sets Wu Zhao within a longer history of “worldly saviors,” figures who fuse political and religions authority. Through close readings of apocryphal scriptures, Hughes shows how the “worldly savior” incorporates elements from the traditions of Wheel-Turning King and buddhas and bodhisattvas to address the needs of a world in chaos. Along with Wu Zhao, Hughes discusses rebel-monks and the founder of the Sui dynasty, Yang Jian. Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism helps us to better understand the religio-political landscape of medieval China.

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Jamie Kreiner, "Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West" (Yale UP, 2020)

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode of New Books in History, Jamie Kreiner, Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia, talks about her new book, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, out in 2020 with Yale University Press.

In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture. In this fascinating book, Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far-reaching consequences.

Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed: at the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Stephen Murray, "Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time.

Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space.

A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary.

Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Jonathon D. Beeke, "Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ's Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology" (Brill, 2020)

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ's Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology (Brill, 2020), Jonathon D. Beeke surveys the development of thinking among early modern Reformed theologians about the relationship between religion and civil government. Taking cues from Calvin, but showing how the Reformed tradition variegates around his contribution, Beeke shows how the medieval ideas of two cities and two swords were brought into the "two kingdoms" ideas of the earlier magisterial reformers, and how later generations of protestants, especially among the Reformed, preferred to refer in the singular to the "two-fold kingdom" of Christ. Beeke's new work promises to add significant historical light to recent discussions among protestant theologians as to the relationship between church and state. What kinds of government did early modern Reformed theology prefer? Why was Calvin consistent in arguing that heretics who disturbed public peace should face the ultimate sanction? And why were these views so normative among Reformed thinkers - and for so long?

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Susan Blakeley Klein, "Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Susan Blakeley Klein demonstrates how medieval esoteric commentaries on the tenth-century poem-tale Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise) and the first imperial waka poetry anthology Kokin wakashū influenced the plots, characters, imagery, and rhetorical structure of seven plays (Maiguruma, Kuzu no hakama, Unrin’in, Oshio, Kakitsubata, Ominameshi, and Haku Rakuten) and two treatises (Zeami’s Rikugi and Zenchiku’s Meishukushū). In so doing, she shows that it was precisely the allegorical mode—vital to medieval Japanese culture as a whole—that enabled the complex layering of character and poetic landscape we typically associate with noh. Klein argues that understanding noh’s allegorical structure and paying attention to the localized historical context for individual plays are key to recovering their original function as political and religious allegories. Now viewed in the context of contemporaneous beliefs and practices of the medieval period, noh plays take on a greater range and depth of meaning and offer new insights to readers today into medieval Japan.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Hannah Barker, "That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Wed, 12 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Before the Transatlantic slave trade ravaged the western coast of Africa, immense numbers of persons were taken from their homes and carried across the Black and Mediterranean Seas as involuntary passengers. This trade is the subject of Hannah Barker’s remarkable study, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Professor Barker provides a comprehensive overview of this tangled, multiethnic trade in human beings. Professor Barker is uniquely equipped to do so because she brings a knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. Since this trade brought captives both to Mamluk Egypt and late medieval Italy, previous studies, hampered by linguistic limitations, have not examined the trade in its totality. Barker is able to marshal both Arabic and Latin sources to provide a truly comprehensive picture of slaving and slavery. The result is a work that is both detailed and synoptic, and is essential reading for scholars of late medieval Europe and North Africa.

Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England.

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Brenda Beck, "Land of the Golden River: The Medieval Tamil Folk Epic of Poṉṉivaḷa Nāḍu" (Friesen Press, 2021)

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast features Brenda Beck’s lifelong work on the Tamil folk epic Ponnivala. In addition to her forthcoming new English translation of the epic (“Land of the Golden River”), we also discuss her 1982 study of the epic The Three Twins (now open-access), her full color graphic novel of the epic (available in Tamil and English), and her 13-hour animated video of the epic. The interview discusses the significance of folks traditions in understanding Indian religions, along with the power of narrative to encapsulate religious themes.

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Roundtable on Medieval Conspiracy Theories

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Join us today for a roundtable conversation with three leading medieval scholars about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in history.

Michael D. Bailey, professor of history at Iowa State University is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of the idea of the Witches’ Sabbath, the verifiable hysterical historical panic about a gathering of diabolical witches joined together to dance with the devil himself in order to spread evil power, a nocturnal festival capable of destroying flora and fauna.

Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, and translator of the first Blood Libel accusation in England, speaks on her historical forte: the dangerous, long-lived, and utterly spurious assertion that Jews ritually murder a Christian child to celebrate Passover. Emerging in medieval England and flourishing throughout the whole of the premodern era, the Blood Libel was responsible for another form or murderous hysteria.

Sean Field, a specialist on religious life in medieval France, speaks about the creation of mystery around the Templars. This is a different kind of conspiracy theory, that develops later around a specific and very real event. King Philip IV of France accused the Templars of a laundry list of spiritual and corporeal crimes; almost all the accused were entirely innocent. Though there was much furor contemporaneously, there was no belief that the Templars were involved in some sort of international secret financial skullduggery. Instead that modern balderdash developed much later and sticks with us. Our conversation covers the appeal of conspiracy theories, how they gain traction, and how they might be handled. Though our discussion is based in history it has strong repercussions for the current political and cultural situation.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Sara Ritchey, "Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021.

The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical.

The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns.

Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Lokesh Ohri, "Till Kingdom Come: Medieval Hinduism in the Modern Himalaya" (SUNY Press, 2021)

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Hinduism, as is well known, has taken a multitude of shapes and forms. Some Hindu "little traditions" have remained obscure or understudied to this day due to their regional remoteness. One such offshoot is the influential cult of Mahasu, which has existed since medieval times in a part of the western Himalaya. The deity at the core of the cult takes the form of four primary Mahasus with territorial influence, installed in various far-flung temples. Their geographical center is the village of Hanol, and the larger territory is integrated into the Mahasu politico-religious system by a peripatetic deity with loyal followers across a considerable domain. Mahasu remains influential in the region, its ritual practices having remained quite distinct despite social change. An anthropological survey was conducted in its terrain during British times, but Till Kingdom Come: Medieval Hinduism in the Modern Himalaya (SUNY Press, 2021) is the first book to offer a detailed framework, a fine-grained history, and an analytically nuanced understanding of one of the rarest branches of Hindu worship.

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Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present.

Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day.

Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University

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Erin L. Brightwell, "Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre (Harvard UP, 2020) is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval.

Despite the Mirrors’ common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Roy Flechner, "Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The only surviving contemporary texts that provide insight into the life of Saint Patrick were both written by the legendary patron saint of Ireland. By Patrick's own account, his life and ministry were controversial in his day, and the myths and legends that have surrounded this enigmatic Christian leader have continued to generate speculation and curiosity to the present day.

Roy Flechner (University College Dublin) brings the the best available critical tools to the task of seeking to reconstruct Saint Patrick's life and mission in Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint (Princeton UP, 2019). What emerges is a vivid relief that fills in the gaps of what we can know about this characteristically guarded autobiographer from the best available scholarship of late Roman Britain. Flechner's account promises to serve as a standard text in the long tradition of Patrician scholarship for decades to come, and takes seriously Patrick's own accounts of the conflicts that surrounded his early disappearance from his native Britain and his sojourns on the emerald isle. Saint Patrick Retold won the Hagiography Society Book Prize in 2020, and is just releasing in paperback edition March of 2021.

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Brian Cummings et al., "Memory and the English Reformation" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Richard Kalmin, "Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context" (U California Press, 2014)

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context (University of California Press, 2014) situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars.

Richard Kalmin is the Theodore R. Racoosin Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary.

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Ethan Pollock, "Without the Banya We Would Perish" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Blog Post:

In Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Ethan Pollock discusses one of life’s basic questions—How do people get clean?—in a way that embeds those everyday practices into a sophisticated historical context.

From legends about medieval Kievan rulers, to everyday Russians in the Soviet era, the banya has been a consistent part of everyday life. While its existence has been continuous, the meanings assigned to the banya have been at once diffuse, contradictory, and reflective of prevailing cultural and political trends and questions. Dr. Pollock’s book addresses these themes and more, in this fascinating historical survey.

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Charles Hirschkind, "The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo.

The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present.

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Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "A Fourth-Century Daoist Family: The Zhen’gao, or Declarations of the Perfected, Volume 1" (U California Press, 2020)

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The Zhen’gao, or Declarations of the Perfected is one of the most important Daoist texts, and a literary classic in its own right. The Declarations of the Perfected collects fragmentary texts—poems, information on the realm of the dead, instructions for practice—revealed to Yang Xi (330—ca. 386) by celestial beings. These texts were assembled and annotated by Tao Hongjing (456–536), whose notes provide a window into textual and literary practices of medieval China. The fragments themselves are richly informative not only about divine beings and celestial realms but also about the social world in which these revelations were made, and the interactions between Daoism and Buddhism. In A Fourth-Century Daoist Family: The Zhen’gao, or Declarations of the Perfected, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 2020), these texts are translated and introduced by Stephen R. Bokenkamp, one of the world’s foremost scholars on early Daoist texts.

Stephen R. Bokenkamp is Regents Professor of Chinese Religion at Arizona State University.

Natasha Heller is associate professor of Chinese Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

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Michael D. Bailey, "Origins of the Witches' Sabbath" (Penn State UP, 2021)

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Eminent medievalist Michael D. Bailey, Professor of History at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, talks about his upcoming book, Origin of the Witches’ Sabbath. The book contains nimble and enjoyable translations of five medieval treatises as well as the two witchcraft trials, as well as a critical introduction.

While the perception of magic as harmful is age-old, the notion of witches gathering together in large numbers, overtly worshiping demons, and receiving instruction in how to work harmful magic as part of a conspiratorial plot against Christian society was an innovation of the early fifteenth century. The sources collected in this book reveal this concept in its formative stages.

The idea that witches were members of organized heretical sects or part of a vast diabolical conspiracy crystalized most clearly in a handful of texts written in the 1430s and clustered geographically around the arc of the western Alps. Michael D. Bailey presents accessible English translations of the five oldest surviving texts describing the witches’ sabbath and of two witch trials from the period. These sources, some of which were previously unavailable in English or available only in incomplete or out-of-date translations, show how perceptions of witchcraft shifted from a general belief in harmful magic practiced by individuals to a conspiratorial and organized threat that led to the witch hunts that shook northern Europe and went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come.

Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath makes freshly available a profoundly important group of texts that are key to understanding the cultural context of this dark chapter in Europe’s history. It will be especially valuable to those studying the history of witchcraft, medieval and early modern legal history, religion and theology, magic, and esotericism.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo?

This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews.

But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer.

No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it.

Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo!

Notably mentioned in this episode:

Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011)
Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008)
Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000)
S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964)
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab.

Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies.

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Miri Rubin, "Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Today we speak to Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London about her 2020 Cambridge University Press publication, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Professor Rubin is the author of many books, among them Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, and Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary.

Cities of Strangers illuminates life in European towns and cities as it was for the settled, and for the 'strangers' or newcomers who joined them between 1000 and 1500. Some city-states enjoyed considerable autonomy which allowed them to legislate on how newcomers might settle and become citizens in support of a common good. Such communities invited bankers, merchants, physicians, notaries and judges to settle and help produce good urban living. Dynastic rulers also shaped immigration, often inviting groups from afar to settle and help their cities flourish. All cities accommodated a great deal of difference - of language, religion, occupation - in shared spaces, regulated by law. But when, from around 1350, plague began regularly to occur within European cities, this benign cycle began to break down. High mortality rates led eventually to demographic crises and, as a result, less tolerant and more authoritarian attitudes emerged, resulting in violent expulsions of even long-settled groups. Tracing the development of urban institutions and using a wide range of sources from across Europe, Miri Rubin recreates a complex picture of urban life for settled and migrant communities over the course of five centuries and offers an innovative vantage point on Europe's past with insights for its present.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Priya Satia, "Time's Monster: How History Makes History" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

How we see the past helps shape our understanding of the present. In the realm of statecraft and empire, understandings of the meaning of history, the progression of time, and the end to which it moves justified and produced the British imperial project. This story is the subject of Priya Satia’s groundbreaking new study, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Satia tracks the ways in which new Enlightenment ideas of history, time, and civilizational progress helped men who thought of themselves as good confront the moral challenge that imperial violence posed. The book demonstrates how a wide variety of thinkers, stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, thought about and through history to uphold, contest, and remake British imperialism. Its nuance, its breadth of material, its insight, and its relevance to the present all make this book unmissable.

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Noel John Pinnington, "A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Kyōgen from 1300 to 1600" (Springer, 2019)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Noel Pinnington's A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Kyōgen from 1300 to 1600 (Palgrave, 2019) traces the history of noh and kyōgen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. Going beyond P. G. O'Neill's Early Nō Drama of 1958, it covers the full period of noh's medieval development and includes a chapter dedicated to the comic art of kyōgen, which has often been left in noh's shadow. Pinnington writes in a clear and accessible style, making this an ideal work for theatre students and Japanese scholars alike.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages: A Discussion with Roland Betancourt

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, the book offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race.

Weaving together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts, Betancourt investigates depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Diana Darke, "Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe" (Hurst, 2020)

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Visitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”.

Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (Hurst: 2020), Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islamic empires to the tall European cathedrals between the 12th and 17th centuries. The book sold out on its first day of sale, in part due to its review in The Guardian, which called the book "an exhilarating, meticulously researched book that sheds light on centuries of borrowing."

In this interivew, Diana Darke and I talk about the origins of what we consider to be “Gothic architecture”, how those styles came to Europe, how this history of cultural and intellectual exchange may have gotten lost, and what we miss when we code something as fully “European”, fully “Islamic”, or fully any kind of culture.

Diana Darke is an Arabist and cultural expert who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over thirty years. Among her better-known books are The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival and My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of Stealing from the Saracens. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Dale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics.

In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe.

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John Tolan, "Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perceptions of Muhammad as understood by Christian Europeans. Using sources that range from art to literature to history to theater to religion, Tolan shows that portrayals of Muhammad are varied and complex – indeed contradictory – and reveal more about the context in which these images appear than about Muhammad or Islam. In other words, the non-Muslim European discourse on Muhammad reflects the writers’ own preoccupations at home. Views about Muhammad are varied and complex, Tolan argues, and not always negative as is often highlighted. Sure, Muhammad is a false prophet, a heretic, a trickster, an idol, in some cases, but he’s also a role model, a hero, a great leader in others, sometimes in the same time period. For instance, while during the Crusades, Muhammad is a false prophet and the primary opponent of the Christian writers, during the Protestant Reformation, the prophet of Islam is received more positively, although not consistently: he is instrumentalized in the polemics between the various Christian groups such that each group – specifically the Protestants, the Catholics, the Unitarians – hold differing views on Muhammad, and parallels are drawn between him and the writer’s contemporary heroes or opponents.

In today’s discussion, Tolan shares with us the primary contributions and arguments of the book, including specific depictions of Muhammad and the contexts that shape them, legends associated with Muhammad involving bulls and doves and floating coffins, the Christian doctrine of Immaculate Conception and its relevance to Muhammad, Jewish authors’ perception of and relationship with Muhammad, and more.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and interreligious marriage. She has a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy; the vlog is available at https://www.youtube.com/whatthepatriarchy. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Sujung Kim, "Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian 'Mediterranean'" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) is a fascinating study of the transcultural underpinnings of Medieval East Asian Buddhist traditions with an emphasis on Shinra Myōjin, a deity integral to the institutional development of the Medieval Japanese Tendai faction, the Jimon. It demonstrates the linkage between continental Buddhist Culture and Buddhism in Medieval Japan through the intersectionality of various subjective and objective actors such as, traveling monks from Japan bound for China, merchants and other immigrants from the Korean peninsula, archetypal old man and pestilence deities, as medieval Japanese aristocrats and Shungendō practitioners in the theoretical space of the East Asian Mediterranean. For those interested in transcultural Buddhist studies, Tendai Buddhism, and the diffusion of Buddhism in East Asia, more broadly this interview with Sujung Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University, should be an enjoyable and insightful listen.

Trevor McManis is a novice monk in a branch of the Vietnamese, Línjǐ school at Phước Sơn temple in Modesto, California.

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Alexander Lee, "Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Renaissance humanists and the Holy Roman Empire haven’t mixed well in most scholarship. Humanists were supposed to be learned exponents of liberty. Often employed by Italian city-states, their civic pride and positive valuation of the ancient Roman Republic meant, it was claimed, that empire was anathema to them.

But in a lucidly written and penetrating study of the early Renaissance, Dr. Alexander Lee turns these narratives on their heads. Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 2018) looks at the relationship between humanists of northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. It finds, for example, that humanists working for both republican and autocratic cities could fit their politics onto an imperial landscape drafted on a classicizing canvass. They debated the universality of imperial dominion, the spheres of authority between pope and emperor, and much besides. Impressively, this study is grounded in the frenetic politics of the fourteenth century, and Dr. Lee demonstrates the extent to which humanist assessments of empire responded in lockstep with the shifting sands of Italian affairs.

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Martyn Rady, "The Habsburgs: To Rule the World" (Basic Books, 2020)

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins in what is to-day southern Germany and Switzerland, the Habsburgs gained control first of Austria in the 12th century and then the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs continued to dominate Central Europe through the First World War.

Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But in this wide-ranging view of their past, Professor Rady reveals Habsburg’s enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. The Habsburgs is a highly interesting and readable history of a remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world. A perfect book for the lay educated reader who has heard of the dynasty but wants to know more.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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M. R. Jackson Bonner, "The Last Empire of Iran" (Gorgias Press, 2020)

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Despite the competition it posed to the Romans’ eastern empire and the longevity it enjoyed compared to its Iranian predecessors, English-language histories of the Sassanian Empire are few and far between. In The Last Empire of Iran (Gorgias Press, 2020), Michael R. Jackson Bonner fills this gap with a work that surveys the empire’s history from its rise in the 3rd century CE to its conquest by Muslim invaders in the 650s. To Bonner, a key reason for the empire’s longevity was the degree of centralization of its government, which was far greater than that of its Parthian predecessors. Thanks to that centralized control and the access to resources that it afforded them, the Sassanians were able to deal with the various challenges their empire faced on its many frontiers, from Roman legions to assaults from Central Asian nomads. Thanks to their effective administration and their military effectiveness, the Sassanians not only persevered against these threats but they succeeded in driving the Roman frontier back westward in the early 7th century, though the extended struggle and the civil war that followed left the Sassanians too weak to face the challenge that arose from the Arabian peninsula just a few years later.

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Jared Rubin, "Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms.

Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born.

In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book.

Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography.

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Alyssa Gabbay, "Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam" (I.B. Tauris, 2020)

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we speak with Alyssa Gabbay about her recent new book Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (I.B. Tauris, 2020). The book shows that contrary to assumptions about Islam’s patrilineal nature, there is in fact precedent in pre-modern Islamic history of Muslims' recognition of bilateral descent, or descent from both the mother and the father – though, of course, bilateral descent was by no means universally acknowledged.

Although not the only example of this argument, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is essential to the study because of her status in both Sunni and Shi’i societies historically as well as because especially Shi’is have used the example of Fatima, through whom Muhammad’s lineage can be traced, to argue in support of bilateral descent. In our conversation, we discuss the concept of bilateral descent and its three components of women as mothers, heiresses, and successors; Fatima’s relevance and significance to the discussion of descent and as a representative of bilateral descent; parallels between Mary the mother of Jesus and other pious women in Muslim history; Fatima’s claim to fadak as her inheritance and its impact on Sunni and Shi’i history; and female rulers in Muslim history. The book would make for an enjoyable and educational read for anyone interested in gender studies, Islam and gender, female authority, biographical studies, medieval Islam, and Islamic history, and would make for a great resource for both undergraduate and graduate Islam courses.

Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvnmSeZ5t_YSIfGnB-bGNw She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Pernilla Myrne, "Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2020)

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I talk with Pernilla Myrne about her exciting and excellently researched book Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, published with I. B. Tauris in 2020. Pernilla Myrne is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and History at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she also earned her PhD in 2008. Her research interests include the representation of women in pre-modern Arabic literature, attitudes to sexuality in medieval Islam, and women as creative subjects.

In today’s discussion, Myrne shares with us the origins of her book, some of its findings, and the process of collecting the many, many sources she used to make this book an essential resource of many a thing female sexuality, including pleasure, sexual comedy, and women’s bodies. Among Myrne’s impressive range of sources are medical, Islamic legal, literary, and entertainment sources. Contrary to popular and even scholarly expectations, medieval erotic literature emphasized female sexual satisfaction, including via teaching male readers how precisely to ensure that their female partner reaches an orgasm. Other specific themes we discuss in today’s interview include the Greek influences on Islamic writers writing about sex and sexuality, female desire, the two-seed theory, female orgasm, and lesbian love. The book would be welcome by anyone interested in gender and sexuality, medieval literature, and female representation in various genres, such as medical, erotic, and religio-legal literature.

Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at here. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Jeremy Black, "Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published a stunningly attractive volume entitled, Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps (Bloomsbury, 2018). This lavishly illustrated volume compiles maps of the world, of Europe, of England, of English counties, and of English villages, to illustrate its author’s detailed description of the history of cartography and of the ways in which space and locality was represented in the medieval period and early modernity. In this podcast, Professor Black talks about the book’s preparation, and how illustrated works require different kinds of writing processes from conventional monographs, as well as highlighting those parts of the history of cartography that he finds most compelling.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Ahmed El-Shamsy, "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 04:00:00 -0000

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts.

The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial discoveries and frustrations, and collaborations between Arab scholars and European Orientalists, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics combines the literary flair of a sumptuous novel with the textual density of a philological masterpiece. This carefully crafted and argued book represents both a profound tribute to a mesmerizingly layered archive of tradition and its actors, and a tremendous service to the field of Islamic Studies in particular and Religious Studies more broadly. It will also make a great text to teach in courses on intellectual history, manuscript studies, modern Islam, Muslim reform, and Islamic Law.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 21:16:00 -0000

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century scholar ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Arabic Poetics presents and explores a panoply of scholars and texts situated at the intersection of religion, and literature. Written with sparkling clarity, this book will also make an excellent text to teach in various undergraduate and graduate courses on the Muslim Humanities, Arabic, Religion and Literature, and Religious Studies more broadly.

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Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, "Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Fascination with the Viking Age seems to be at an all-time high, though it has never really gone out of fashion. There is something irresistible about the Vikings, a civilization dedicated to exploring the edges of the known world, forging an empire from north America to Kiev, which dominated the political and economic landscape from the Fall of Rome to the First Crusade. Writers, artists and musicians such as Richard Wagner and J. R. R. Tolkien have found inspiration in the stories, legends, and sagas of the Vikings, and modern culture too has successfully mined the canon for the inspiration behind blockbusters as “Vikings,” “Game of Thrones” and the Marvel films.

But few scholars have delved-exclusively into the world of Viking women until now. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s recent book, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a deeply satisfying exploration of the lives of Viking women. Valkyrie is skillfully arranged around the skeleton of the life cycle of a woman—from birth through childhood, adolescence, marriage, and old age. But this skeleton is expertly fleshed out with cogent examples drawn from archaeology, contemporary accounts, and the rich literary vein of the Old Norse sagas. The result is a gripping read, which plunges us into the world of the Viking women as they grapple with the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence, weather transactional marriages, and navigate old age.

The Viking Age (793-1100 CE) was a time of exceptional opportunity for social mobility. Viking raiding and trading had the potential to create substantial wealth for those of comparatively humble origins. “Valkyrie” looks at this phenomenon, too: charting the role women played in running successful enterprises, and sometimes even ruling countries. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttiralso explores the emotional lives of Viking women, and their capacity for protecting their loved ones as fiercely as they exact vengeance for wrongs done to them.

“Valkyrie” is that rare academic book that reads like an action-packed thriller and is sure to appeal to serious scholars of early Scandinavian history as much as it will to those who are eager to learn more about the women behind the great men of the Viking age. This is a book that gives the hitherto unseen Vikingwomen a chance to take centre stage and emerge as powerful agents for change in their own right.

Friðriksdóttir earned attained her PhD from the University of Oxford and has held teaching and research positions at Yale, The Árni MagnússonInstitute for Icelandic Studies, and Harvard. She is currently based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo. She is the author of Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words and Power, The New Middle Ages. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Find out more about Johanna at her website, vikingwomen.org.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn" (U Hawaii Press, 2016)

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (960-1270) to study with the Huayan (華嚴) master, Jinshui Jingyuan (晉水淨源) (1011-1088). During his fourteen-month stay in China, he became well-acquainted with monks of the Huayan, Tiantai, Vinaya, Chan, and Consciousness-only schools. Upon his return to Koryŏ, he compiled the "New Catalog of the Teachings of All the Schools," the first comprehensive catalog of essays and commentaries that reflects a pan-East Asian tradition. Ŭich’ŏn has been historically associated with abandoning his affiliation with the Huayan school, and founding the Ch’ŏnt’ae (Tiantai, 天台) order of Korean Buddhism. Despite this, letters to Master Jinshui Jingyuan, in combination with addresses to novice disciples reveal that Uicheon did not abandon Huayan thought,but advocated that all forms of doctrinal knowledge be thoroughly understood in an age of declining dharma.

Trevor McManis is a student at California State University, Stanislaus, who specializes in cultural geography with an interest in applying geographic thought to the study of East Asian Religions.

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Magda Teter, "Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The myth of Jews killing Christian children emerged in 1144 CE, with the death of a boy named William in Norwich, England. Over the course of several centuries, this myth gained traction and became firmly rooted throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Magda Teter traces the history of this myth and analyzes how accusations of ritual murder have followed Jews from the 12th century to the contemporary period.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University.

Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Elizabeth A. Cecil, "Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape" (Brill, 2020)

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth A. Cecil's Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (Brill, 2020) weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapurāṇa, physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons to provide groundbreaking insight into the earliest known community of Śiva devotees: the Pāśupatas. Through examining how the Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional Indian landscapes, this book explores issues of belonging, identity, community building and place-making in Early Medieval India.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.

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Kevin O'Connor, "The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga" (NIUP, 2019)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century as a trading hub, a military outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a base for Roman Catholic prelates to convert both the pagan natives and the Orthodox Christians of Rus.

Kevin O'Connor's new book, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019) charts the fascinating history of Riga from the earliest days to Peter the Great's conquest of the much-coveted trading port in the early 18th century.

O'Connor's book recounts in fascinating detail the personalities who shaped and dominated Riga's political and economic history. For six centuries, Riga's fortunes rose and fell in step with major political events of Europe, as the uneasy triumvirate of the church, military, and merchants balanced control and power over the city, ever hopeful to keep goods such as furs, timber, resin, and beeswax flowing from the vast Russian forest lands, through Riga and onto the rest of the known world. O'Connor introduces us to the infamous Livonian Brotherhood of the Sword — a military order of knights based in the city, canny and diplomatic prelates, and the notorious Brotherhood of the Blackfaces, one of the city's professional associations.

From the outset, Riga was a multi-national and polyglot city, much as it remains today. Her membership in the Hanseatic League — the European economic fraternity, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade — greatly enhanced the city's prestige and economic influence, as Germans, Poles, and other Hansa members established successful trading relationships with Riga's guilds. Riga's rapid adoption of Protestantism in the 16th century forged other strong links with her neighbors and separated her even further culturally from the growing might of Russia.

Though Rigans cherished their independence, the history of their city is one of almost constant occupation or rule of a foreign power, as the larger players in the Baltic constantly fought to gain the prize that was the city on the Daugava. O’Connor’s accounts of German, Polish, and later Swedish occupations help readers understand why the city developed in the way it did.

O'Connor leaves us at Riga’s nadir. As plague ravishes the war-torn city, Tsar Peter the Great captures Riga as part of his conquest of the Eastern Baltic in the Great Northern War, which established the Russian Empire as the preeminent naval power in the Baltic Sea, but relegates Riga to a second-tier trading hub. Moreover, O'Conner suggests, Russia's conquest of the city forces Riga to adopt "Eastern," which never sits comfortably with the centuries of Riga's primarily "Western" culture and nature. We are left hoping that perhaps now, as Riga sloughs off the Soviet occupation, she will once more take her rightful place in the Baltic’s panoply of prosperous ports.

The House of Hemp and Butter is an impeccably-researched and very engagingly written account of Riga's fascinating social, economic, and political history.

Kevin O'Connor is the Chair of History at Gonzaga University.

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Adrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015)

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this volume Adrian Boas draws together an impressive range of academics, including work from renowned scholars as well as a number of though-provoking pieces from emerging researchers, in order to provide broad coverage of the major aspects of the period. This authoritative work will play an important role in the future direction of crusading studies.

This volume enriches present knowledge of the crusades, addressing such wide-ranging subjects as: intelligence and espionage, gender issues, religious celebrations in crusader Jerusalem, political struggles in crusader Antioch, the archaeological study of battle sites and fortifications, diseases suffered by the crusaders, crusading in northern Europe and Spain and the impact of Crusader art. The relationship between Crusaders and Muslims, two distinct and in many way opposing cultures, is also examined in depth, including a discussion of how the Franks perceived their enemies.

Arranged into eight thematic sections, The Crusader World considers many central issues as well as a large number of less familiar topics of the crusades, crusader society, history and culture. With over 100 photographs, line drawings and maps, this impressive collection of essays is a key resource for students and scholars alike.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Jane D. Hatter, "Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

There are a handful of pieces from the Medieval and Renaissance periods that most music students learn about in their introductory history courses; among them are Guillaume Du Fay’s, Ave regina celorum III and Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. Some of these foundational compositions have been studied by musicologists for over one hundred years, but generally they have been examined in isolation as masterworks by great composers. In her new book Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jane D. Hatter effectively contextualizes these pieces within a larger repertory of motets and masses written between 1450 and 1550 that mention other musicians or explore complex theoretical topics. She sees these works as evidence of an international community of musicians that might have been separated geographically and isolated by their itinerant lifestyles, but who were connected through a shared attitude towards art and their own sense of themselves as composers and musicians. Connecting her insights to a similar phenomenon in the visual arts, Hatter shows that the repertory she studies reflects a musical culture that valued intergenerational connections between artists and compositional virtuosity based upon theoretical and pedagogical concepts that stretched back to antiquity, but that also permeated the musical training these composers received.

Jane D. Hatter is a musicologist on faculty at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Jane has published on musical time in early sixteenth-century Italian paintings (Early Music, 2011) and also on intersections between popular devotions and ecclesiastical liturgy in Renaissance motets that include or quote the Ave Maria prayer (2012). More recently she has examined the persistence and conversion of music for women's churching ceremonies in both Catholic and Protestant contexts in the early Reformation period.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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K. B. Berzock, "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University) tells the story of how trade routes across the Saharan Desert facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects between the 8th and the 16th century. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, Caravans of Gold is a selection of chapters that reach across academic fields and genres of writing, seeking to evoke the exhibition’s central themes, including cultural movement, archaeological fragments, and global connection. We talk to the exhibition’s curator and the publications’s editor, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, about this expansive project. The conversation ranges from the exhibition’s conception, how the catalogue was designed in relation to it, and best practices associated with building a project like this one. Moreover, Kathleen details the major themes and questions associated with the exhibition. What is the “medieval”? How can we understand historical movements across the Sahara? How does religion –specifically, Islam– play a role in this project?

Kathleen Bickford Berzock is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She is the author of For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection and the coeditor of Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display.

Exhibition Schedule:

Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

September 21, 2019–February 23, 2020

Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC

April 8–November 29, 2020

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Fran Altvater, "Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts" (Cambridge Scholars, 2017)

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Fran Altvater talks about the Medieval Pilgrimage, a practice that became central to Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages and evolved into the military pilgrimages of the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Altvater is a professor of art history at the University of Hartford. Her book, Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017.

Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. Baptism marked the entrance of the faithful into the right relation, with the Catholic Church representing the main cultural institution of medieval society. In the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1220, the decoration of the font often had an important function: to underscore the theology of baptism in the context of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. This period witnessed a surge of concern about sacraments. Just as religious thinkers attempted to delineate the sacraments and define their function in sermons and Sentence collections, sculptural programs visualized the teaching of orthodox ideas for the lay audience. This book looks at three areas of primary concern around baptism as a sacrament incarnation, initiation, and the practice of baptism within the institution of the Church and the images that embody that religious discussion. Baptismal fonts have been recognized as part of the stylistic production of the Romanesque period, and their iconography has been generally explored as moral and didactic. Here, the message of these fonts is set within a very specific history of medieval Catholic sacramental theology, connecting erudite thinkers and lay users through their decoration and use.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Winston Black, "The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions" (ABC-CLIO, 2019)

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Winston Black's new book The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions (ABC-CLIO, 2019) guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages.

Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot.

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Eleanor Parker, "Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

For all of their prominence in the popular imagination today, the historical record of the Viking presence in England is limited, with much of what we know about them dependent upon the literary accounts attached to it. In Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Eleanor Parker deconstructs these accounts to ascertain what they reveal both about the Vikings and their legacy for medieval England. Focusing on the narratives of Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons, Siward, Guy of Warwick, and Havelok, she draws out similarities that deepen our understanding of who they were. By analyzing these stories, she shows how the interpretations of the Danes changed over time, as their evolution into a more hostile and alien presence gave them a more adversarial role in shaping England’s national identity than was the case.

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Christine D. Baker, "Medieval Islamic Sectarianism" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

How do contemporary events shape the ways in which we read, understand, and interpret historical processes of identity formation? How can we resist framing conflicts of the past through frameworks of the present? What role does historical memory play in the forming and framing of group identity? In her book Medieval Islamic Sectarianism (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Christine D. Baker, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, engages these questions by exploring the formation of sectarian identities in the tenth century medieval Middle East and North Africa.

The tenth century, which is often deemed the “Shi’i century” because it witnessed the emergence of two major Shi’i empires, gave rise to a new challenge for the existing Sunni Abbasid Caliphate. There were the Fatimids of North Africa who came to dominate from the western end of the caliphate, and the Buyids of Iraq and Iran who come to dominate from the eastern end, and each one claimed their political legitimacy by positioning themselves against the Abbasid rulers. But how exactly did they do that?

Christine cautions against reading the political conflicts between these empires through the lens of modern sectarian identities and urges us to examine them in their own right. In this way, we avoid the risk of reinforcing a false narrative of primordial Sunni-Shi’i conflict, and are able to consider more accurately how those empires legitimated themselves and delegitimated the other.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Sebastian Prange, "Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Sebastian Prange provides a fascinating window into the Muslim world of the medieval (12-16th century) Malabar Coast and the development of Islam that was defined by significant trade networks. Prange conceptualizes this particular development of Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast as Monsoon Islam. Subverting any notions that Islam developed systematically or through organized political efforts, the book uses the history of the pepper trade across the Indian Ocean to map spatial developments, such as of mosques and ports, and the early Muslim trading communities who inhabited these realms. We have before us a global history of Monsoon Islam that utilizes trade networks to capture far more complex cross-cultural exchanges that included kinship, religious, textual, Sufi, and political networks. The latter dynamics led to instances of negotiated establishment of legal and religious codes, as well as familial and economic ties. For instance, the book highlights how legal norms or religious practices became localized and translated to a new context by minority Muslims within a predominately Hindu society, such as in mosque architecture or marriage practices. Prange’s detailed study asks us to think of both global and local processes that led to the formation of a cosmopolitan and transoceanic Monsoon Islam and thus complicates how we study the spread of Islam across diverse regions in South Asia, and the vital role of traders, scholars, and saints. The study’s deep engagement with diverse historical sources, and its beautifully written analysis, makes it an accessible and critical read for scholars interested in the world of Islam in the Indian Ocean and South Asia, as well as Islamic economics, politics, and history broadly.

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Donald Ostrowski, "Europe, Byzantium, and the 'Intellectual Silence' of Rus’ Culture" (Arc Humanities Press, 2018)

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In Europe, Byzantium, and the “Intellectual Silence” of Rus’ Culture (Arc Humanities Press, 2018), Dr. Donald Ostrowski pens a fresh look at an old question: Why did intellectual path of Medieval Russian culture differ so much from its counterparts in Western Europe? In a phrase: Why was there no Russian Abelard? In addition to deep analysis of the primary sources, Ostrowski provides a window into the history of historians debating this question. The book concludes by arguing that Rus’ was not in fact “silent” at all. Rather, Rus’ intellectual culture simply spoke on a different frequency than that of Medieval Western Europe. Dr. Ostrowski’s book has already generated an academic journal symposium in Russian History (volume 46), and is an important addition to how historians understand the early history of Rus’ in relationship to the rest of the world.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0000

While monarchs throughout history used their power to make laws as a tool for governing their realms, rarely did they undertake the long and detailed work of drawing up an entire legal code. One of the few who did so was the Castilian king Alfonso X, and as Joseph F. O'Callaghan explains in his book Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age: Law and Justice in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Cornell University Press, 2019) this legal code provides insights into both his reign and the larger issues facing his kingdom in the Middle Ages. As O’Callaghan details, many of its provisions were drawn up in response to the problems Alfonso dealt with as king, and the laws that formed the code reflected his means for addressing them. Yet this was just one factor shaping a comprehensive civil and criminal code that covered everything for the responsibilities of the crown to the legal processes available to his subjects. While the code reflected the many concerns of Alfonso’s age O’Callaghan demonstrates how its legacy is still felt today, as jurists and legal scholars on three continents continue to draw upon its precedents in shaping their analyses.

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Dan Jones, "Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands" (Viking, 2019)

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisingly little focus on the men and the women who were entangled in these conflicts. In his book Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands (Viking, 2019), Dan Jones addresses this by detailing the role of key individuals played in these events. By drawing from a variety of perspectives, he shows how the Crusades was a different event depending upon one’s perspective, be that of a Norman ruler, a Byzantine princess, or a Muslim chronicler. Moreover, by expensing the scope of coverage beyond such traditional figures to include people such as the Norwegian king Sigurd I, Jones demonstrates the wide impact of the wars and the ways in which they drew in people from throughout Europe. From their stories, Jones shows how the purpose of the Crusades changed over time, as they reflected more the motivations of the individuals involved rather than the goals traditionally associated with them.

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Zahra Ayubi, "Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017).

Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility.

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Michael Lower, "The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Why was a Crusade that was initially meant for Syria end up in Tunis? How did the aspirations of the King of France and the Mamluk Sultan, the King of Sicily and the Hafsid Emir of Tunis, get entangled in the years following the Mongol invasion of the Middle East? More broadly, how should we approach the Crusades, a series of events that have traditionally focused on either the European or the Near Eastern perspectives, and can these perspectives become integrated into a more wholistic, Mediterranean approach? In The Tunis Crusade of 1270: a Mediterranean History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Lower, professor of History at the University of Minnesota, offers a broad and deep dive into the Tunis Crusade, an unlikely but impactful moment of Mediterranean History.

In our conversation, Michael and I touch upon traditional and new methodological approaches to the Crusades, the important roles played by Mediterranean rulers and the political, religious, and economic pressures that shaped their decisions, and the reasons behind the strange detour the so-called eighth Crusade, originally bound for Syria, took 1500 miles to the West, to Tunis.

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Robert Haug, "The Eastern Frontier: Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia" (I. B. Tauris, 2019)

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Haug’s new book, The Eastern Frontier: Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia (I. B. Tauris, 2019) is an in-depth look at the frontier zone of the Sassanian, Umayyad, and Abbasid Empires. Employing an impressive array of literary, archaeological, and numismatic sources, combined with a solid theoretical foundation, Haug demonstrates the distinct challenges the border region of the empire posed to these imperial powers, but also tracks the emergence and maintenance of unique regional identities and political trends on this frontier. This is essential reading for scholars and enthusiasts of Islamic, Iranian, and Central Asian History, as well as those with an interest in the study of frontiers and border regions.

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Peter Jan Margry, "The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion" (U Notre Dame, 2019)

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

harles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry's The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion (University of Notre Dame, 2019) presents a “cultural biography” of a Dutch devotional manifestation. According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later. A chapel was erected over the spot, and the citizens of Amsterdam became devoted to their “Holy Stead." From the original Eucharistic processions evolved the custom of individual devotees walking around the chapel while praying in silence, and the growing international pilgrimage site contributed to the rise and prosperity of Amsterdam.

With the arrival of the Reformation, the Amsterdam Miracle became a point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, and the changing fortunes of this devotion provide us a front-row seat to the challenges facing religion in the world today. Caspers and Margry trace these transformations and their significance through the centuries, from the Catholic medieval period through the Reformation to the present day.

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Marko Geslani, "Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (śanti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces (primarily the Atharva Veda and in the Bṛhatsaṃhitā, an Indian astrological work), Marko Geslani demonstrates the persistent significance and centrality of the work of Brahmanical priesthood from ancient to medieval to modern times. In doing so he aptly problematizes the scholarly tendency to demarcate Vedic ritual from popular Hinduism. Join me today as I speak with Marco about his new book Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism(Oxford University Press, 2018).

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.

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Robert Louis Wilken, "Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.

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Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019)

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor. In it, we meet pirates, princes, and prelates; and while much divides the Slavs, Balts, Saxons, Poles, and Scandinavian peoples, much also unites them: rugged individualism and a desire to expand the boundaries of their known world.

Caroline Boggis-Rolfe’s new book, The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples(Amberley, 2019) is a deep dive into this engrossing history. It which opens with the prosperity of the Hanseatic League, that commercial confederation, which ruled the Baltic between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and closes with the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Unlike other studies of the region which focus on subsets of the Baltic region: Scandinavia, Northern Germany, the Baltic States, Russia, and Poland, Boggis-Rolfe has undertaken the somewhat daunting task of examining 1000 years of the region’s history as one unified history.

Boggis-Rolfe’s approach makes The Baltic Story eminently readable: rather than placing her material in strict silos, she weaves the stories of separate nations into a cogent chronological narrative, examining each nation at the zenith of its power, but through the lens of its relationship to its neighbors. That being said, each chapter is an excellent stand-alone study, and in them we get the privilege of spending time with the bold Swedish monarchs who forged empires, the erudite Kings of Poland, the patrons of Copernicus; Peter the Great who hewed for Russia a “window on the West,” and the visionary Frederick II of Prussia, and a host of other equally fascinating personalities.

The Baltic Story was born of Boggis-Rolfe’s two passions: her academic work on Voltaire and the Enlightenment and her many years of visiting Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. She has a natural gift for story-telling, which makes the history of this region leap off the page. Her tenacity and commitment to creating what did not previously exist — a complete study of the Baltic — is a boon for both amateur and seasoned historians, and anyone embarking on a voyage of discovery around the Baltic Sea.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Ashley Thompson, "Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor" (Routledge, 2016)

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We are especially familiar with those haunting images of the face of King Jayavarman VII, represented in the stone sculptures of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Archaeologists and historians tend to relate the history of the Angkorean era through the dynasties of great kings. These are, of course, all male images. But this apparent maleness of the Angkorean state contrasts with one of the paradigms of Southeast Asia as a cultural zone: the comparatively high status of women. Ashley Thompson addresses this apparent contradiction in her new book titled, Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge, 2016). Among the themes of this rich, challenging, and provocative book is the gendered nature of the Angkorean state.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au

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Patton E. Burchett, "A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

How distinct is Indian devotionalism from other strands of Indian religiosity? Is devotionalism necessarily at odds with asceticism in the Hindu world? What about the common contrasting of Hindu devotionalism as ‘religion’ with tantra as ‘black magic’? Patton E. Burchett's new book A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India (Columbia University Press, 2019) re-examines what we assume about the rise of devotionalism in North India, tracing its flowering since India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” to present day. It illumines the complex historical factors at play in Sultanate and Mughal India implicating the influence of three pervasive strands in the tapestry of North Indian religiosity: tantra, yoga and Sufism. Burchett shows the extent to which Persian culture and popular Sufism contribute to a (now prevalent) Hindu devotionalism that is critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Prior to this, argues Burchett, Hindu devotionalism locally flowered in fruitful cross pollination with yogic and tantric forms of Indian religiosity.

For information about your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/academia

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Mimi Hanaoka, "Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Periphery" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Fri, 31 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

How do peripheral places assert the centrality of their identity? Why are fanciful events, like dreams and myths, useful narrative elements for identity construction and arguments about authority, legitimacy, and rhetoric? In Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mimi Hanaoka, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, offers a broad and deep dive into the importance of events that never happened to Persianate locales seeking to center themselves within the Islamic world and the Islamic story.

In our conversation, Mimi and I touch upon the appearance and nature of local histories, the important role of fiction and fantasy in constructing local identity, and a few of the more interesting stories she encountered in her research.

Aaron Hagler is an assistant professor of history at Troy University.

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Gregory Smits, "Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650" (U Hawaii Press, 2018)

Mon, 20 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Conventional portrayals of early Ryukyu are based on official histories written between 1650 and 1750. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in archaeology and anthropology and leverages unconventional sources such as the Omoro sōshi(a collection of ancient songs) to present a fundamental rethinking of early Ryukyu. Instead of treating Ryukyu as a natural, self-contained cultural or political community, he examines it as part of a maritime network extending from coastal Korea to the islands of Tsushima and Iki, along the western shore of Kyushu, and through the Ryukyu Arc to coastal China.

Smits asserts that Ryukyuan culture did not spring from the soil of Okinawa: He highlights Ryukyu’s northern roots and the role of wakō (pirate-merchant seafarers) in the formation of power centers throughout the islands, uncovering their close historical connections with the coastal areas of western Japan and Korea. Unlike conventional Ryukyuan histories that open with Okinawa, Gregory Smits' Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650 (University of Hawaii Press, 2018) starts with the northern island of Kikai, an international crossroads during the eleventh century. It also focuses on other important but often overlooked territories such as the Tokara islands and Kumejima, in addition to bringing the northern and southern Ryukyu islands into a story that all too often centers almost exclusively on Okinawa.

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Sheilagh Ogilvie, "The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

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Margaret Arnold, "The Magdalene in the Reformation" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Mary Magdalene’s story of conversion from sinner to saint is one of Christianity’s most compelling and controversial stories. The identity of this woman, but more likely women, has been disputed since the early days of the Church, but her role as the first person to witness the resurrection of Christ makes her an astoundingly important figure in ways I was never privy to growing up.

The Magdalene’s interpretation changes throughout history, from medieval times to the Reformation, where the interpretation under Martin Luther takes on different meaning, which is the topic conversation today with Dr. Margaret Arnold. Her new book, The Magdalene in the Reformation is out now from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2018). Margaret Arnold is the Associate Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University.

Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.

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Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Benoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018)

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their own story to tell. Majerus’ narrative arc follows the twists and turns of madness in a city long associated with mental pathogens and their cures and reveals how the history of psychiatry can be told differently through the lens of visual culture.

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Matthew Gabriele, "Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" (Routledge, 2018)

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, intellectual, and ecclesial history. Matthew Gabriele is co-editor of and contributor to this volume; he joins the podcast today to talk about everything from medieval apocalyptic thought—theology and teleology—to zombie movies, to present-day race politics and how history is pressed into the service of polemics. Professor Gabriele also talks about how much—and how little—has changed in a thousand years in the way we think about history and human agency.

Matthew Gabriele is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He has written The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, and An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages (which won the best first book award from the Southeastern Medieval Association) and edited a half-dozen volumes and many articles on medieval history, especially cultural, intellectual, and imperial, including prophecy and apocalypse.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program.

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Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard University Press, 2016-)

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian poet, Tulsīdās. The first four volumes of the translation, entitled The Epic of Ram (Harvard University Press, 2016-), are currently available as part of the Murty Classical Library of India Series published by Harvard University Press and distributed in India by Penguin Books.

Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.

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Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi”

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims and narratives of the post-colonial state about religion and religious identity. Centered on the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, this book brings into view visions of sovereignty, ethics, hospitality, and inter-communal encounters that rescue Islam in modern South Asia from the suffocating pressures, anxieties, and amnesias of nationalist politics and historiographies. Conceptually bold, ethnographically vivacious, and historically grounded, this book masterfully carries a tragic sensibility while also offering provocative avenues of hope and optimism. Written with poetic eloquence and lyrical command, this book will not only be widely read and debated by scholars of South Asia, Islam, and religion, it also cries out for adoption as what will surely become a Bollywood blockbuster.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Luis Cortest, “Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas” (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0000

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of understanding the ourselves and the world around us. Todays interview seeks to uncover when, and how this began.

In his ambitious new book, Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (Academic Studies Press, 2017), Luis Cortest finds in Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic philosopher who lived in first century Alexandria, the origins of a philosophic curriculum and method that would frame many of the concerns of medieval philosophy. Though a long millennium separates them, after opening with Philo, the heart of the book is dedicated to a comparison of Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides in which Cortest uncovers a subtle genealogy that begins with Philo: how to read the Bible allegorically and do so through the lenses of Plato and Aristotle. All three thinkers ask: what is the role of religion in the establishment of politics and law, was the world created, what is God and does he shape world events? Rather than retrace the obvious, Philo’s Heirs encourages us to tease out the subterranean influences that animate the big questions of the western philosophic tradition and to think broadly, across large time periods and geographies, to answer these questions in our own day.

Professor Luis Cortest is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the University of Oklahoma.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He can’t recall whether “the crisis” is in the humanities or with humanity.

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Lev Weitz, “Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), revisits the early years of Islamic civilization by looking at an oft-neglected population in the secondary literature, Syriac Christians. Weitz’s study uses marital practice from the seventh through tenth centuries to illustrate how Islamic law influenced the development of Christian law and the role religious authorities –that is the Christian bishops– had to play in it. We talk through polygamy, confessional boundaries, and what households meant now and then; Weitz also fills us in on what the growing field of Syriac studies looks like, how it is changing, and how a scholar of the medieval Middle East gets their sources.

Lev Weitz is an historian of the Islamic Middle East. He is an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, in the Department of History; he also directs the Islamic World Studies program at Catholic University. For academic year 2018-19, he will be a fellow of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He did his PhD at Princeton University at the Department of Near Easter Studies. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research.

Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow.

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Irina Dumitrescu, “The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways that shocking and moving stories fix knowledge in the mind and demonstrate relationships—even grammatical relations—in unforgettable ways, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers readers interested in the history of pedagogy an exploration of the relationships between Anglo-Saxon students and teachers that tangles with both scholarly and popular expectations of the medieval mind.

Addressing Anglo-Saxon uses of the culture of late antiquity, especially the form of the dialogue, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature reveals scenes heavily invested in the tensions between teacher and student, portrayals of engagement between parties that complicate relations of power and creation of knowledge. In the texts under consideration, the lesson for the reader (or hearer) grows from the conflict, rather than concord, between student and teacher. Focused on spiritual education and literacy, often closely linked in Anglo-Saxon texts, Dr. Dumitrescu’s work considers the Anglo-Saxon interest in negative emotions like fear, curiosity, erotic longing, and mistrust; and the potential cognitive uses of these emotions as they emerge in the faceoffs, desert journeys, revenants, riddles, letter battles, sea voyages, and challenges to memory that provide the narrative substance of Anglo-Saxon writing.

Rereading the standard texts of the Anglo-Saxon corpus, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature demonstrates the ways in which texts like The Life of St. Mary of Egypt speak to broader medieval interests in learning, and drives toward a grasp of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the purposes of teaching. Chapters on Solomon and Saturn I, Aelfric Bata’s Colloquies, and Andreas follow an approach to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History which suggests that the common focus on Caedmon’s Hymn draws attention away from the John of Beverly miracle: a story at the crossroads between miraculous Latin learning and English poetry in a mode of vernacular liberation.

Treating urges and passions as sparks that give the learning process a necessary heat, even as they threaten to scorch it beyond utility, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature sketches a subtle and sophisticated approach to human emotion and cognition in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014)

Thu, 02 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014) explores the extent to which the great medieval Hindu thinker Rāmānuja himself looked to the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (a 1st-4th century narrative work extolling the glories of the great god Viṣṇu) to bolster his theistic stance on the nature of truth.

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Ata Anzali, “‘Mysticism’ in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept” (U South Carolina Press, 2017)

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of the concept of ‘Irfan in medieval, early Modern, and modern contexts. Combining a mesmerizingly layered analysis of previously unexplored manuscripts with close attention to shifting social and political contexts, Anzali shows, with dazzling nuance, the processes and dynamics that informed the institutionalization of ‘Irfan in Iran. This nimbly written book will be of considerable interest to scholars of Muslim intellectual history and Religious Studies. In this conversation, we talked about the key themes, theoretical interventions, and arguments of this book.

SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Samuel England, “Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0000

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzes with remarkable nimbleness the interaction of literature, politics, and power in medieval imperial settings. Effortlessly traversing from Buyid Baghdad to Spain and Italy, England shows ways in which literary competition, especially in poetry, pollinated imperial visions and fissures of political sovereignty. Literature and literary duels performed in the space of the imperial court, England convincingly argues, were critical to assemblage of medieval imperial sovereignty. This finely written book will interest and delight scholars of literature, religion, politics, and history-students of Arabic will especially appreciate the copious exhibition of wonderful Arabic poetry throughout the text.

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Frances Kneupper, “The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0000

What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyzes apocalyptic prophecies of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire in terms of their genesis, perception, authorship and individual impacts in specific contexts. Kneupper furthermore illustrates the dynamics between the Church and Clergy and prophetic thought and shows how these texts shaped German identity.

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Joshua Parens, “Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy” (U Rochester Press, 2016)

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode, I am joined by Joshua Parens to discuss his innovative and engaging book Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy (University of Rochester Press, 2016). While one may easily confuse the book with something narrow or parochial—who is Leo Strauss and of what relevance is medieval political philosophy?—our discussion proved to be anything but. In arguing against the commonly held belief that Medieval Philosophy was simply a synthesis of Greek thought with the Bible, Parens reads the works of Alfarabi and Maimonides, two of the most influential pre-modern philosophers, through the works of Leo Strauss, the foremost political thinker of the 20th century. This subtle layering makes for an exciting braided text, cross-pollination between epochs that contextualizes these thinkers on their own terms as well as genealogically.

For Parens, the “theological-political problem” at the core of Leo Strauss’ work is neither strictly one of reason or of revelation but rather at the heart of metaphysics—of being and the relationship between morality and philosophy. In working out Strauss’ unfolding thinking on this problem the reader is guided through competing visions of the study of medieval philosophy and the manner in which Strauss re-centered the work of political thought from a scholastic setting to that of the Islamic world. At its heart lies the question of what Leo Strauss means by “political philosophy,” and thereby a long history from Plato through Maimonides and Alfarabi to the present day.

Joshua Parens is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas. He edits the series Rochester Studies in Medieval Political Thought.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes, shipwrecked, from a desert island somewhere in the Mediterranean.

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Alexander Orwin, “Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi” (U Penn Press, 2017)

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950) a philosopher who wrote on politics, metaphysics, and logic as well as mathematics, psychology, and music, was known by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the “second teacher,” second only to Aristotle. Although little of his biography is known, we have many of his works that were instrumental in preserving and adapting the Greek philosophical heritage in an Islamic idiom in the Middle Ages. Until the work of Leo Strauss and his students, Alfarabi was largely a forgotten figure to modern scholars.

Today’s podcast is a discussion with Alexander Orwin about his new book Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), a synthetic study across Alfarabi’s disparate oeuvre that weaves a thematic treatment of notions such as language, nationhood, religion, and politics with an analysis of each of his works in turn. Using the term umma (literally “nation,” although inclusive of terms like civilization or community) as a keyword, Orwin shows how Alfarabi strove to recast the Islamic umma as a community in both a religious and cultural sense. This not only provides a gateway into understanding Alfarabi’s works more broadly, but spotlights his competing loyalties to religion and philosophy. In rethinking the political thought of Plato and Aristotle and demonstrating that their vision of politics was not rendered obsolete by the Islamic faith, Alfarabi, and thereby Orwin, engages in a discourse around nationhood that precedes nationalism and comes to terms with diversity across ethnic, religious, and state boundaries.

Alexander Orwin is an assistant professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he will be interning this summer at Yoyodyne.

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Anna Andreeva, “Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2017)

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 11:00:00 -0000

In her recent monograph, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), Anna Andreeva focuses on a complex network of religious sites, figures, and texts to help us better understand the way in which Japanese deities were worshipped in medieval Japan. In so doing, she illuminates the medieval stages of a process that led to what was later called Shinto, and adds to the growing body of scholarship that challenges the relatively recent idea that Shinto is simply the native religion of Japan, unchanged since ancient times.

To tackle such a grand undertaking, Andreeva focuses on a mountain in central Japan called Mt. Miwa as well as on Ise, the location of the Ise shrines and the abode of the most important imperial deity. Beginning with the significance of Mt. Miwa as a religious site for pre-ninth-century Japanese rulers, Andreeva charts the decline of this mountain’s importance during the eighth-to-twelfth centuries and the subsequent revival of the site during the thirteenth century by non-elite practitioners of esoteric Buddhism stationed at small Miwa temples and by the Saidaiji lineage under the direction of the Buddhist monk Eison and his disciples. Continuing chronologically, she then shows how the thirteenth-century revival led some time later to the emergence of the so-called Miwa-ryu Shinto, an eclectic tradition which spread to different regions of Japan and whose influence continued until the early nineteenth century.

Central to Andreeva’s project is the world of Japanese esoteric Buddhist thought and ritual, for it was in this setting that the Japanese deities could be transformed from beings characterized by ignorance and desire into embodiments of Buddhist awakening. Throughout the book Andreeva addresses many religious elements, Japanese and not, that were incorporated into esoteric Buddhist traditions active at Mt. Miwa and Ise. These include the incorporation of deities from ancient Japanese mythology into medieval legends and esoteric ritual, serpentine and dragon imagery, initiation rites modeled on the enthronement of a king, pilgrimage, and the use of royal symbolism. In addition, she provides a number of detailed descriptions of rituals and translations of liturgical and exegetical works.

The book’s topic is very complex: Andreeva has opted out of the usual approach, which would be to trace the development of a single figure, text, idea, or institution. This makes the project far more difficult for the researcher, but has the invaluable advantage that it allows the reader to perceive and appreciate the fascinating networks that show how medieval Japanese religion actually existed and developed on the ground. Beyond its importance for understanding Japanese Buddhist intellectual history, esoteric Buddhist thought and ritual, and the development of Shinto, the book also serves as an example of how to study the intricate social, economic, and geographical networks that lie behind the development of religious ideas, practices, and institutions.

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Bryan D. Lowe, “Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2017)

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 12:56:00 -0000

In his recent monograph, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Bryan D. Lowe examines eighth-century Japanese practices that ritualized writing, or, in other words, conceptually and practically set sutra-transcription apart from other forms of writing. Drawing on a rich trove of eighth-century documents that describe everything from donation sums and sources, to the types of paper used, to the purification rites practiced prior to transcription, to records of which scribes had borrowed or returned their brushes, Lowe provides us not only with an expert analysis of the religious meaning of various aspects of sutra-copying, but also with a detailed description of the fascinating ritual and material culture of public and private scriptoria and intimate glimpses into the lives of the patrons and laborers of these institutions. More broadly, Lowe’s book asks us to rethink our assumptions about ritual, for in the case studies found within we see ritual used not simply symbolically–as a representation of a pre-extant cultural or political system–but rather as a social and ethical practice that generates new communal identities and offers opportunities for individual cultivation. Ritual, Lowe shows, is not just a result, but also a cause.

In the first part of the book Lowe looks at the ritualization of writing. Here we learn of the way in which sutra-copying and purification rites executed prior to copying are simultaneously ethical, soteriological, and ritually efficacious. That is, copying a sutra in the ritually correct and pure way was conceived as morally upright, but also as an act that would bring about the rituals intended results and by which one would make soteriological progress. In this part of the book Lowe also introduces a type of prayer text called a ganmon, and shows how these texts drew on Buddhist and non-Buddhist language to create a uniquely East Asian genre that was unquestionably Buddhist even as it incorporated norms and imagery from non-Buddhist sources.

In the second part of the book we learn about the ways in which ritualized writing was produced by certain forms of social and institutional organization, but also about the ways in which this practice in turn affected those forms of organization. Lowe discusses grassroots fellowships of pious friends that were formed for the purpose of commissioning sutra-transcriptions, and also examines private and public scriptoria, which were highly bureaucratic. A key theme in this part of the book, and indeed throughout this work, is that taking a closer look at the networks of people and institutions involved in the production of ritualized writing calls into question the stark divisions between state, aristocratic, clan, and popular Buddhism, divisions that are often assumed in research on this period. Many of the fellowships that Lowe examines, for instance, were created by individuals who had strong ties to the state and to certain clans, but whose intentions, while in part political and aimed at forming new social ties between groups, were also deeply personal, pious, and religious.

In the third part of the book Lowe provides us with two carefully crafted microhistories. First, we read about the career of a scriptorium worker who served as a scribe, proofreader, and administrator, and find that rather than simply being a cog in a sutra-copying bureaucracy, through his work this individual developed his own religious, literary,

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Hussein Fancy, “The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 16:09:00 -0000

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages.

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Matthew Gillis, “Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 21:56:00 -0000

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.”

That is, until around 840 CE, when one Gottschalk of Orbais began preaching what he called twin predestination. Gottschalk was heavily influenced by Augustine, who had argued that long before time began, God already ordained who would be among the elect and who among the damned. Gottschalk’s twin predestination theology made him into a figure Professor Gillis refers to as a “religious outlaw,” a “heretic in the flesh,” the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter.

Heresy & Dissent in the Carolingian Empire is a fascinating study of a figure whose meaning has been debated for centuries, but whose own moment in the 840s reveals a world beset with fears of sin and pollution.

Matthew Gillis is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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David Matthews, “Medievalism: A Critical History” (Boydell and Brewer, 2017)

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 21:58:00 -0000

A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, institutions, and moments that have driven societies around the world to reimagine and revive a medieval past. Eschewing shallow comprehensiveness, David Matthews instead offers a careful and extended handling of significant moments of medieval revival.

From Sir Walter Scott and Cardinal Newman embracing structures of medieval ceremony in the early nineteen century to today’s medieval reenactments and medieval markets that employ touristic capital by celebrating a medieval inheritance, Matthews explores the positive vision of the romantic middle ages. Imagined as a world of chivalry and preindustrial economy defined by courtesy and noblesse, the romantic medieval offers connection to the land, more primitive, and more peaceful, social relations, to those who long for a world before industrialism and global capitalism. Following the interlaced negative vision of the grotesque middle ages–a world of barbarity and violence, of cruelty, ignorance, superstition, and narrow parochialism–the argument examines the ways in which communities and thinkers recover both grim and grand visions of the medieval, also exploring aspects medievalism that fall outside this neat binary.

Medievalism: A Critical History moves deftly from examinations of medieval recovery in statecraft, aesthetics, art, literature, architecture, and the scholarly discipline of medieval studies. Matthews shows that an investment in the medieval has often reached far beyond academic interest in historical detail or popular interest in knights and castles. He pays particular attention to what is here called civic medievalism–attempts by writers and thinkers to recover that part of the middle ages that encouraged trade, labor, and industry, an interest on the part of statesmen and business leaders who find in the middle ages a worthy model of infrastructural expansion and open commerce. Likewise, with careful eye on ways in which being “medieval” can serve as a condemnation, Matthews pays close attention to how the idea of being medieval in the present day has the power to both attract and repel those who see an unevenness of time in our present world.

Discussing the ways in which various writers and communities have employed these modes of medievalism to great effect, Medievalism: A Critical History asks readers to consider why we employ the past to do work in the present, and how the pursuit of recovering the past makes that very past a malleable thing. Careful not to exaggerate the significance of medievalism in moments when it was merely one stream of many, while also directing attention to ways in which interest in the medieval world has been underrecognized, David Matthews makes a commendably searching and scholarly contribution to the study of medievalism.

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com.

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David I. Shyovitz, “A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural” (U. Penn Press, 2017)

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 10:00:00 -0000

In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Israel Studies, at Northwestern University, plumbs the worldview and theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Jewish Pietists, who flourished in the Rhine Valley and in Regensburg in the 12th and 13th centuries. Professor Shyovitz marshals compelling evidence to show that the Pietists submitted both the natural world and the human body to close and disciplined empirical study. While they were fascinated by inexplicable phenomena, bodily transformation, spells and incantations, and even bodily and effluvia and excrement, the Pietists’ fascination was driven by their effort to forge links between the natural world and their theological worldview.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.

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Augustine’s “Confessions,” a new translation by Sarah Ruden (Modern Library, 2017)

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:33:00 -0000

Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions.

Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations.

On this program, we talk about her new translation of Augustine’s Confessions, published by The Modern Library in June 2017. Publishers Weekly has called it “delightfully readable while still densely theological. In this lively translation filled with vivid, personal prose, Ruden introduces readers to a saint whom many will realize they only thought they knew.”

Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com.

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Gregory Reichberg, “Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Tue, 30 May 2017 10:00:00 -0000

When is war justified? What makes a just war?

These are difficult questions to answer, but particularly so for Christians, followers of Jesus, who suffered violence without responding in kind. One philosopher-theologian who wrestled with these issues was Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Gregory Reichberg, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, explores this subject in his new book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Not only does this work do an excellent job in probing in an accessible yet deep way Aquinas understanding of just war, Reichberg both reveals aspects of Aquinas thought on war that are rarely examined, such as the connection between the cardinal virtue of fortitude and military service, and connects Aquinas and the just war tradition to contemporary debates about the waging of war. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in this subject, and it has something to say both to people largely unfamiliar with it, as well as those who have studied the subject at length.

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Yuval Harari, “Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah” (Wayne State UP, 2017)

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 10:00:00 -0000

Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work challenges perceptions and categorizations of what Jewish magic is, and what its place in the Judaism of late antiquity was. It thus promises to facilitate a reappraisal of the performative practices, the beliefs and rituals, on which Jewish life as we know it is founded. Professor Harari’s work carefully and systematically examines a wide variety of Jewish texts and artifacts, and reveals the extent to which the practice of magic is woven into Jewish ritual, thought, culture, from Late Antiquity through and beyond the Middle Ages.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.

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Nathan Hofer, “The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325” (Edinburgh UP, 2015)

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 19:24:00 -0000

Medieval Egypt had a rapid influx of Sufis, which has previously been explained through reactionary models of analysis. It was argued that the widespread popularity of Sufism was marked by a public adoption of practices that satisfied the masses in ways the religious elite were not fully addressing. In The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Nathan Hofer, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, critiques the social binary that these assumptions create, as well as, rethinks the mechanisms within the social production of Sufi culture. He explores these concerns in the context of the Ayyubid and Mamluk states and their relationships with Sufi masters and communities. First, a state-sponsored Sufi lodge serves as the site for professionalization of Sufis and the public consumption of Sufi culture that aligns with state objectives. The emergence of the Shādhilīya sufi order serves as a case of the textualization of an idealized sufi identity, and its subsequent popularization through the production of a collective community. Finally, Hofer explores the unique context of Upper-Egyptian Sufism, which relied on charismatic authority and miraculous work in the creation of a community. In our conversation we discussed the notion of Popular Culture in the medieval world, hagiography and biography, miracles, the khanqah of Cairo, state religious sponsorship, professional sufis, and contemporary methods for investigating the past.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Surekha Davies, “Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 23:24:00 -0000

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in their chests). What is one to make of all these different kinds of humanity? And, more important from a historical point of view, what did Renaissance mapmakers think they were doing when they adorned their cartographical products with them? In her wonderful new book Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Surekha Davies offer answers aplenty, and good ones. Listen in.

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Gail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015/2017)

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:02:00 -0000

Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Harry Potter’s pageantry, Game of Thrones‘ swordplay, the Renaissance Faire, York’s mystery plays, America’s jousts, and Chaucer translated into a panoply languages: the European medieval endures in the global postmodern. In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury Academic; Hardcover 2015, Paperback 2017), Gail Ashton collects the work of 29 scholars studying the ongoing power and pleasure to be found in the ways that we resuscitate and remix remnants of the medieval world. This wide-ranging introduction to the study of contemporary medievalisms engages the questions of authority in interpretation, authenticity in translation and adaptation, and the accessibility of the past that inhere in the many ways that we engage the middle ages in the twenty-first century.

Do we think of the medieval, medievalism, and medievalists as a great premodern Other, or do we recognize within the medieval the roots and rhythms of speech and performance that still live in our own time and in our own tongues? How do we arrive at our ideas of the medieval, at the cultural markers we recognize as our own or as someone else’s based on time and distance? What does our ongoing reinterpretation of what makes something “medieval” reveal about how we produce and consume texts, create an identity based on historical claims, and come to feel that we belong to a community with a shared past? Through Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, Gail Ashton and the scholars that have contributed to this collection invite readers, writers, researchers, and educators to engage these questions by looking at our shared life today through the various ways that we play and replay a medieval past as a present to ourselves.

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com.

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Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, “The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World” (Thames and Hudson, 2016)

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 20:54:00 -0000

On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton) in November 2016.

The book looks at 45 featured manuscripts from across the globe and through 1,000 years of history, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Queen Mary Psalter, the Canterbury Royal Bible, the Old English Hextateuch, the Welles Apocalypse, and the Paduan Bible Picture Book, among others. With more than 300 illustrations, which have been meticulously color corrected for this new book, the authors shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it.

Dr. Scot McKendrick is the head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library. His publications include Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspective on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript; Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe; and The Bible as Book: Transmissions of the Greek Text.

Dr. Kathleen Doyle is the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. She was the co-curator, with Dr. McKendrick, of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, and the lead investigator for the Royal Manuscripts follow-on project, editing with Dr. McKendrick the volume 1,000 Years of Royal Books and Manuscripts.

Together the authors also edited Bible Manuscripts: 1,400 Years of Scribes and Scripture, published by the British Library in 2007.

To view some of the illuminated manuscripts discussed on this program, visit the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts at https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/.

You can also follow @blmedieval on Twitter, which is linked to the authors’ Medieval Manuscripts blog.

Garrett Brown is the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. He is a publisher and editor and blogs at noteandquery.com. Follow the channel on Twitter @newbooksbible.

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Andrew Cole, “The Birth of Theory” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:15:00 -0000

Was Hegel a medieval thinker?

In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval dialectical thinking and suggests that it is precisely Hegel’s engagement with medieval modes of thought that make his work a productive source for Marx and the later thinkers who develop dialectical thinking into theory as we know it today. The Birth of Theory challenges readers with insights won from strenuous contests with the writing of history, philosophy, religion, literature, and political economy. As he makes the case for rereading Hegelian dialectics based on the essentially feudal social and economic organization of Germany in Hegel’s moment, Cole drives at the arbitrary distinctions between medieval and modern but also those between dialectical and anti-dialectical thinking, writing a long arc of intellectual history that renegotiates theory’s relationship to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze and many others in between (xviii).

Along the way, the argument asks readers to dispense with a host of critical cliches as it winds deftly between close readings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to comparative readings of Hegel on the Eucharist and Marx on the commodity, closing with focused and revelatory attention on the legacy established by Hegel in using medieval genres in response to the modern condition.

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Christopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500” (Yale UP, 2016)

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 18:40:00 -0000

Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices of food available to people typically varied based on wealth and locale, helping to define the class and status of their consumers within English society. Yet Woolgar shows that food often served as a form of connection as well, with the experience of eating within the context of elaborate settings such as celebratory feasts was an important experience of bonding within and between various groups. Together these various choices and settings gave foods and their consumption a particular social and cultural significance that defined the lives of the people who ate them as peasants, townspeople, clergy or elites.

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Ahmed Ragab, “The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, Charity” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:54:00 -0000

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly.

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E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:51:00 -0000

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety.

Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts.

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Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016)

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 19:49:00 -0000

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized...

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Paul M. Cobb, “The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:13:00 -0000

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book.

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John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:02:00 -0000

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Aisha Geissinger, “Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015)

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 21:57:00 -0000

Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources, in terms their authority to make sense of the Qur’an. What does it mean, for example, when a particular Qur’an commentary mentions a hadith with women in the isnad, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional? Were they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Geissinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis in hadith compilations, and literature on the virtues of the Qur’an among other topics all the while engaging with a rich breadth of modern and premodern scholarship, ranging from Bukhari to Judith Butler. The footnotes are extensive, the prose is clear, and the book well-organized. The monograph will likely appeal to a number of disciplines, especially Islamic history, Qur’anic studies, and gender studies.

Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Miranda Brown, “The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 17:12:00 -0000

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi, Liu Xiang, Zhang Ji, and more, The Art of Medicine in Early...

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Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 05:01:00 -0000

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years, Hildegard’s reception in academic circles has, for good and compelling reasons, focused on her status as a powerful, educated, and brilliantly creative woman in an era when few women were afforded such opportunities. But this has not been Hildegard’s only legacy.

Jennifer Bain‘s recent book, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer (Cambridge University Press,2015), charts the 19th-century reception of Hildegard’s life and music, and in doing so provides valuable perspective on the version of Hildegard that we know and love today. As Bain demonstrates, Hildegard has been in an almost constant state of revival since the early 19th century, and at every turn she has meant something different: depending on the interests of the scholars who were reviving her (who were, themselves, grappling with very specific historical circumstances, including the long-term fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the very long-term fallout of the Protestant Reformation), Hildegard has been important as a German, a Catholic, a Benedictine, and a mystic, as well as as a woman.

Zeki Saritoprak, “Islam’s Jesus” (University of Florida Press, 2015)

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 12:26:00 -0000

In Islam’s Jesus (University of Florida Press, 2015), Zeki Saritoprak explores an old topic from a fresh perspective. The status of Jesus in Islam has been of interest for centuries, and relates to both Christianity and Islam, but the level of synthesis that Professor Saritoprak’s monograph offers is remarkable. He draws on a variety of Islamic literature, including commentaries on the Qur’an, works of theology, and collections of prophetic sayings. Moreover, he surveys not only the vast Arabic sources on his topic but also Turkish sources, and his research covers multiple schools of thought and time periods. Another hallmark of the monograph is the attention it gives to Jesus’ role in Islamic eschatology. Notably, Saritoprak demonstrates how mainstream as well as lesser known Islamic discourses on eschatology encompass numerous hermeneutical strategies; some, for example, understand the descent of Jesus as a physical phenomenon while others understand it as a non-material, spiritual phenomenon. The book highlights a number of other competing discourses as well, which are likely to challenge and even surprise the reader. The author’s clear writing style, combined with meticulous attention to scholarly rigor and textual engagement, makes the text accessible to a range of readers, which should render it useful to general audiences, as well as scholars of eschatology, Christian-Muslim relations, and Qur’anic studies.

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Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 )

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke.

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Karen Bauer, “Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:03:00 -0000

In Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Karen Bauer tackles one of the foremost hot-button questions of the day: What is the role of gender in the Qur’an? Dr. Bauer’s adroit study will leave the reader informed but perhaps also disrupted, given the vast spectrum of competing, sometimes contradictory, interpretive paradigms that she explores. A key strength of the text, moreover, is that in addition to its meticulous investigation of primary texts from medieval and modern traditions of Qur’anic exegesis, Dr. Bauer also conducts numerous in-person interviews with prominent scholars across the Muslim world, including Iran and Syria. Thus, from a literary perspective, the text presents the reader with a compelling style seldom found in Qur’anic studies publications, seamlessly weaving together close textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. Notably, Bauer also gives attention to Sunni as well as Shi’i perspectives on her study, thus offering provocative comparison and breadth of analysis. Given the careful scholarship of the book combined with its equally careful presentation, Bauer’s masterful monograph will almost certainly become standard reading for anyone interested in questions related to the Qur’an and gender. It will also interest scholars, more broadly, in the fields of Qur’anic studies, gender studies, law, political science, and the history of Islamic thought.

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Kecia Ali, “The Lives of Muhammad” (Harvard UP, 2014)

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:14:00 -0000

Muhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, 2014), Kecia Ali, Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, explores how several central components of the Muhammad biographical narrative are reframed by various authors within modern accounts. We find that biographers’ notions of historicity changed over time, emphasis on the miraculous and supernatural events in Muhammad’s life are interpreted differently, and Muhammad’s network of relationships, including successors, companions, and family members gain wider interest during this period. We also find that from the nineteenth century onwards, Muhammad is often framed within the history of ‘great men,’ alongside figures like Jesus, Buddha, or Plato. Descriptions of Muhammad’s life cross a range of genres, such as hagiographical, polemical, political, or seeking to facilitate inter-religious dialogue. In our conversation we just begin to scratch the service of this rich book, including Ibn Ishaq, sexual ethics, revisionism, Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, and young wife, Aisha, Orientalist William Muir, polygamy, attempts to counter perceived Western misinterpretations, marital ideals, and contemporary anti-Muslim animus.

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James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 12:44:00 -0000

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language, that for centuries was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life. Turner provides a detailed and fascinating study that traces philology’s beginning in Greek and Roman speculation about language and follows it to the early twentieth century. At the library in Alexandria, Greeks speculated about language, invented rhetoric, analyzed texts and created grammar. Roman diffusion and Christian adaptation spread the influence of philology. The medieval scholars kept it alive until the Renaissance when humanist gave it new life only to escape the most toxic aspects of the Reformation. By the nineteenth century, philology covered three distinct modes of inquiry: textual philology included the study of ancient and biblical literature, language theories of origin, and comparative historical studies of structure and language systems. All philologists held to the belief that history was key to understanding the diversity and change in language. Comparative methods and genealogical understanding accompanied historical analysis. These methods applied not only to texts but also to material objects, structures, art, people groups, and eventually became the foundation for the modern disciplines of anthropology, history, art history, linguistics, literary and religious studies we know today. Turner points to the need to reintegrate scholarly erudition away from insular disciplines and recover the expansive and humanistic reach of philology.

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Eugene N. Anderson, “Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 12:00:00 -0000

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature...

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Charlotte Eubanks, “Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (U of California Press, 2011)

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:10:00 -0000

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between MahÄyÄna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume. Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “What do sÅ«tras get?” She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies. Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sÅ«tras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second–the idea that texts can become bodies–Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sÅ«tras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sÅ«tras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon MahÄyÄna sÅ«tras’ concealment of their authorship. Indeed, certain sÅ«tras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts. This move allowed MahÄyÄna sÅ«tras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sÅ«tras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sÅ«tras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sÅ«tras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections. In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples). And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sÅ«tra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, MahÄyÄna sÅ«tras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice.

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Paul Copp, “The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” (Columbia UP, 2014)

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:03:00 -0000

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written and inscribed dharani were used to adorn and anoint the body. A central theme is Copp’s assertion that the diffuse dharani practices that appeared centuries prior to the flowering of a high Esoteric Buddhism in the eighth century were not simply a crude precursor to the later development of a fully systematized Esoteric Buddhism, but rather were a set of loosely related practices and ideas that continued to develop alongside Esoteric Buddhism. Through rich descriptions of dharani use and interpretation, and liberal use of Dunhuang materials, he shows that dharani were ubiquitous in all sectors of Chinese Buddhism: before, during, and after the eighth century. In this way Copp challenges the teleological view of early dharani-based practices as being but one stage leading to the eventual triumph of a comprehensive Chinese Esoteric Buddhism. In addition, Copp demonstrates how material dharani practices were a product of both Chinese and Indic input.

Drawing on archeological evidence, he notes that the way in which dharani were actually worn reflects Indian precedents, while on the other hand Chinese textual records describe and prescribe the wearing of dharani in terms borrowed from Chinese practices of wearing amulets, seals, medicines, and talismans. The book contains thirty-two illustrations of amulets, written dharani, dharani stamps, dharani pillars, and funerary jars that help the reader to better visualize and understand the material practices at the center of Copp’s work. This book will be of particular interest to those researching or wishing to learn more about the history of scholarship on dharani, Chinese practices of wearing enchanted objects, Chinese interpretations and uses of dharani (particularly outside of a systematized, ritual-philosophical Esoteric Buddhism), theories about the role of writing and inscription in religious practice, and Chinese Buddhist material culture.

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Eugene Y. Park, “A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea” (Stanford UP, 2014)

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 12:47:00 -0000

Eugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. The history of transformations in the family’s social status and geography parallels that of modern Korea, and...

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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse" (Columbia UP, 2014)

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 08:00:00 -0000

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), Rubenstein wonders why there is a proliferation of multiverse theoretical cosmologies by contemporary scientists. While the cosmos are generally considered to be singular and finite many well-respected physicists explain the universe's complexities as evidence of a multiverse. These explanations argue that our world is just one of the infinite number of universes existing simultaneously.

Worlds Without End shows that multiple-world cosmologies have had currency among many thinkers for over 2500 years. What draws philosophers, religious practitioners, and scientists together on these questions is there appeal to metaphysical postulates, which serve as pseudo-theologies for the contemporary age. In our conversation we discuss the Greek philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Atomists, and the Stoics, medieval Christian interpreters such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, the Telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, the Big Bang debate, cosmic shredding, the fine-tuning problem, dark energy, Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Intelligent Design.

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Ovamir Anjum, “Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment” (Cambridge UP, 2012)

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 12:31:00 -0000

In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum asks a series of foundational questions, such as: How have Muslims understood ideal government and political theology? What is the role of rulers in those politics? And what does it even mean to talk about “politics” as a category? In Anjum’s words “the relationship between Islam and politics in the classical age can neither be described as a formal divorce nor a honeymoon, but rather a tenuous and unstable separation of spheres of religious authority from political power that was neither justified in theory nor wholeheartedly accepted” (136). The “Taymiyyan Moment,” a rephrasing of the “Machiavellian Moment” comes during the life of the prodigious author, theologian, and jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). By honing in on Ibn Taymiyya’s magnum opus, Dar’ Ta’arud al-‘aql wa-l-naql (The Repulsion of Opposing Reason and Revelation)–not a political work, per se, but a theological one–Anjum reflects on, among other things, tensions between “community-centered” and “ruler-centered” visions of politics, and how scholars before Ibn Taymiyya had understood these ideas. Based on meticulous research of primary and secondary sources, Anjum’s monograph will likely encourage new scholarship on the post-classical era, including the impact of Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas on later generations, as well as interest among scholars from a variety of disciplines, ranging from History and Religious Studies, to Political Science and Law.

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Christina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 12:39:00 -0000

Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer. Christina Laffin‘s new book explores Abutsu’s life and written works, taking readers in turn through...

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Brian A. Catlos, “Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 11:34:00 -0000

In the current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more complicated picture. In Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brian A. Catlos, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, offers the first comprehensive overview of Muslim minorities in Latin Christian lands during the Middle Ages. The book provides a narrative history of regional Muslim subjects in the Latin west, including Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, expansion in the Near East, the Muslim communities of Medieval Hungary, and portraits of travelers, merchants, and slaves in Western Europe. Here we find that Muslims often had great deal of agency in structuring the subject/ruler relationship due to the material and economic contributions they made to local communities. The second half of the book explores thematic issues that were shared across Muslims communities of the Mediterranean world. Catlos surveys ideological, administrative, and practical matters, including Muslim concern about legitimacy and assimilation, legal culture, and everyday social life in these multi-confessional communities. In our conversation we discussed the reign of Christian Spains, Norman rule, the adoption of Arabo-Islamic culture, Morisco hybridity, Islam in Christian imagination, the role of Muslim women, and everyday public religious life.

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Najam Haider, “The Origins of the Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:03:00 -0000

When did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). This study is a boon for those with research interests in early Shiism, or the history of Islam prior to the ninth century. In the first section of his book, Haider announces his intention to test literary narratives of the origins of Shiism: namely, if Shiism did, in fact, develop during the early 8th century and if it was the product of the merging of two distinct groups.

To answer those questions he proposes to analyze the 8th-century Kufa traditions. Haider examines these traditions on the basis of their legal authorities and the composition of their narrative styles.He applies this method to three cases studies in the second section of his book: (1) the basmala in ritual prayer, (2) the use of qunÅ«t, a blessing or curse, in prayer, and (3) the prohibition of intoxicants. Each case study centers on ritual which Haider argues is a more determinative means of ascribing identity then an individual or group’s theology. Based on the results of these three case studies, Haider proposes a revised history of Shiism in his third section. Haider’s work stands out for the clarity of the questions he seeks to answer and the method he employs in doing so. Every chapter concludes with a concise summary of the major points and the entire work is filled with charts of data to help readers understand how the massive corpus of information he utilized was organized and categorized. Scholars will obviously benefit from its proposed revised history, but its readability makes it useful for undergraduates and laypersons.

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Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 06:00:00 -0000

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period.

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Rebecca Williams, “Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views” (Routledge, 2013)

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:53:00 -0000

Rebecca Williams‘ book Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views (Routledge, 2013) is one of the newest additions to the Routledge Studies in Classic Islam series. Despite the Qur’anic proclamation that the only “miracle” which served as proof of Muhammad’s propethood was the Qur’an itself, miracles and supernatural events have been ascribed to Muhammad in numerous Islamic literary and intellectual genres. Professor Williams, of the University of South Alabama, delivers a unique and fresh look at the supernatural in Islam.

Restricting her analysis to the works of Qur’anic exegesis and the biography, she focuses on four events in the life of Muhammad. Muhammad’s conception, his first occasion of public preaching, a vignette concerning a warning sent by one of Muhammad’s followers to the residents of Mecca prior to an attack, and a failed assassination attempt upon Muhammad’s life each contain some type of supernatural occurrence. Each of these events is connected to an important theme for Muslims in the medieval era, sex, politics, betrayal, and wrath, respectively. Professor William’s fascinating comparative investigation of the treatment of these supernatural occasions demonstrates important similarities and differences between these two scholars. Moreover, the reader becomes conscious of the milieu in which each scholar constructed their texts. While this is a significant contribution to the field of the study of Islam, the topics addressed are of great benefit to scholars of literature and folklore and its contents are accessible to a wide spectrum of readers.

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David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:39:00 -0000

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), David Spafford...

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Sarra Tlilli, “Animals in the Qur’an” (Cambridge UP, 2012)

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 11:06:00 -0000

In her book Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sarra Tlili carefully addresses a complex issue. What does the Qur’an say about non-human animals? And their relationship to humans? Tlili begins her study by discussing conceptions of animals in various religions, in addition to Islam, and not just “Abrahamic” traditions. The remainder of the book focuses on the Qur’an, its presentation of animals, and a range of exegetical literature that treats the topic of animals in the Islamic holy text. Tlili also ventures into Arabic literature more broadly. She adroitly demonstrates that classical Muslim scholars did not understand non-human animals as existentially inferior, and notes societal shifts in the modern world with reference to anthropocentrism and privileging human existence. Tlili also provides a comprehensive appendix that lists a host of qur’anic names for animals, demonstrating the significance of her topic as well as the lexical challenge that scholars face. Sarra Tlili’s articulate prose reads smoothly, moreover, and gives the reader an incentive to explore this fascinating text. The monograph should interest specialists and non-specialists alike as it provides an accessible window into the rich world of Animals in the Qur’an.

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Michael D. Bailey, “Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe” (Cornell University Press, 2013)

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 17:34:00 -0000

Superstitions flourish in our world–think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happiness (or relief) we might experience from finding a lucky (heads up only!) penny. Yet it is part of the mythology of modernity that ours is a “disenchanted” age (or at least so said German sociologist Max Weber in a famous 1918 lecture). Since the Enlightenment, there has been a tradition of invoking a superstitious Middle Ages as a supposed counterpoint to “our” own rationalized and intellectualized times (to paraphrase Weber). The Middle Ages was one of the historical entities against which European modernity in many senses constituted itself, and it continues popularly to be imagined as uniformly saturated with superstition.

Yet as Michael D. Bailey‘s latest book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2013) shows, that age had its own, highly developed, intellectually rigorous and contentiously debated notions of what was superstitious in practice and in thought. In the book, Bailey looks at how university-based academics and clerics, using the systematizing methods of scholasticism, formulated ideas about what was superstitious over two centuries–between, roughly, 1300 and 1500. He offers us, in other words, a history of evolving ideas of superstition and of what was considered superstitious by the most learned men of that era. Much as the category of superstition has been used to establish and manage putative boundaries between modern and not, late medieval scholars and clerics debated superstition–locating it in practices as varied as learned astrology, necromancy, and everyday medicinal charms–to patrol the shifting boundaries both of legitimate science and of proper religion.

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Martha C. Howell, “Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600” (Cambridge UP, 2010)

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 13:25:00 -0000

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property.

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Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:53:00 -0000

Kevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping...

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Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012)

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:42:00 -0000

In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science. Science can be characterized not by its content, but instead by its methodology. Starting from this premise, Beckwith focuses on a crucial part of this methodology, the recursive argument method. Developed among Central Asian Buddhist scholars, the recursive method was transmitted along with other core elements of medieval science (including the institution of the college) to Muslims in Central Asia, and from there to medieval Western Europe. Beckwith’s analysis of this transformation is based on a deep knowledge of disputational texts in many languages, and integrates archaeological evidence in a compelling account of the spatial and institutional relationships of the college, the European cloister, the Islamic madrasa, and the Central Asian vihara. The story of Warriors of the Cloisters ranges widely across India, Tibet, China, and Greco-Roman antiquity, while focusing on a Central Asian context that has largely been absent from global histories of science. It is an important contribution to what will hopefully become an emerging new field of scholarship on Central Asian science, medicine, and technology. Enjoy!

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Jack W. Chen, “The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty” (Harvard Yenching Institute, 2010)

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:23:00 -0000

After coming to power in a series of violent and deceptive acts, including tricking his father into cuckolding the Emperor, Li Shimin went on to become a ruler whose reign as Emperor Taizong has been hailed as a model of good government throughout East Asia. Jack W. Chen‘s recent book...

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Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet” (Brill, 2012)

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:39:00 -0000

Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he...

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Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:21:00 -0000

Christopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) will transform the way we think and write about medieval poetry in China. Nugent’s book urges...

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Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:02:00 -0000

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers through a fascinating exploration of the politics, society, and culture of pre-1600 Japan. One of the wonderful things about...

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Xiaofei Tian, "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China" (Harvard UP, 2011)

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:00:00 -0000

Xiaofei Tian's Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land and sea, in heaven and hell, in poems and prose, in China and beyond. The book uses a wonderfully trans-disciplinary humanistic practice to weave diaries, images painted in words and pigment, Daoist writings and Buddhist scriptures, ethnographic and travel accounts, and other kinds of text to understand the ways that individuals dealt with profound social, political, and cultural change at different moments in China's history. In a way, it's a story that any traveler will be able to identify with and learn from. There is so much in this book - explorations of race, gender, family, urban life, ideas of the family, personal identity, practices of experiencing oneself in a changing world - and it rewards a close and joyful reading.

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Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:11:00 -0000

In this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women, and children and childbirth. Historically, though, he has also been closely associated with death and is known as the protector of the six realms of rebirth. In some accounts, this bodhisattva is also conflated with King Yama, the lord of the hell realms, and it according to his mythology, Jizo has vowed now to enter full awakening until all the hell realms have been emptied of suffering sentient beings.

Prof. Glassman’s book is the culmination of decades of interest and research on the cult of Jizo . He is interested in how Jizo came to take such a prominent place in Japanese Buddhism and religious life and practice. His book is extremely well written and accessible, conveying through numerous stories and narratives the life this particular bodhisattva has had in Japanese religious history.

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Jay Rubenstein, “Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse” (Basic Books, 2011)

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:22:00 -0000

You’ve got to be pretty creative to get anything like “holy war” out of the New Testament, what with all that trespass-forgiving, cheek-turning, and neighbor-loving. By all appearances Jesus didn’t want his followers to fight for their faith, but rather to die for it as he had. And during the first three centuries of Christianity–in the time of the Roman persecution–that’s just what they did. “To die in Christ is to live,” wrote the Apostle Paul. And it seems a lot of early Christians believed him for they sought martyrdom. Jesus passively gave his life; and they passively gave theirs. What could be more fitting?

All this passivity makes the Crusades seem very strange indeed. If Christ’s message was one of peace, what in the world were Christians doing taking up arms in the his name? In his excellent Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse(Basic Books, 2011), Jay Rubenstein explains that the reason they did so had everything to do with the conviction that the world was going to presently end. The Crusaders fervently believed that the closing chapter in temporal history upon them and that they had a role in bringing it to the right conclusion. They didn’t know exactly what that role was, but there were good hints in ancient scripture and contemporary signs. Everyone agreed that, whatever part the Crusaders were to play, it involved liberating Jerusalem from the infidels. So off they went. Since they were on a holy mission–in fact the last holy mission before Christ’s return–the ordinary rules did not apply. The Crusaders forced Jews to convert or else die (many were murdered). They killed Muslims indiscriminately. They made sport of desecrating the bodies of their victims. They even roasted some on spits and ate them. That’s right: they roasted and ate them. It was like something out of the Book of Revelations. Which made sense, because the Crusaders believed they were in the Book of Revelations.

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Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:05:00 -0000

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework?

In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality.

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Joyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages” (Routledge, 2011)

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:20:00 -0000

I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury’s eye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know now how weird all that is.

People in the Middle Ages did not, so far as we know, love their animals. As Joyce points out, they used them, ate them, and even had sex with them. But they do not seem to have loved them, any of them. They did, or at least some of them, think about animals rather deeply. They wanted to know what animals were, really. They knew animals were God’s creatures. But there were nettlesome questions, like whether animals had souls. Well, probably not. Some of them, however, like lambs, were put forward as models for holy behavior (“the Lamb of God”). So do lambs, unlike all other animals, have souls? Another question: Could you eat animals? If they didn’t have souls, then you certainly could. But which ones? Not clear. The Christian Bible–unlike the Hebrew Bible–is rather short on dietary regulations. Yet another question: Could you have sex with animals? They were, after all, only things, and it didn’t really matter what you did with things (though “spilling your seed” in any case was a no-no). That said, having sex with an animal is rather unseemly. Still another question: If an animal killed someone, was it “guilty.” Aristotle said animals didn’t have reason, so that would suggest that animals couldn’t be “guilty” or “innocent.” Fine, but some animals were awfully smart, like the sly fox that everyone heard about in folk tales. So if some animals have some reason and are therefore human-like, are there some humans who are a touch bestial and therefore animal-like? Where exactly was the line between humans and animals? Thinkers of the Middle Ages had some interesting things to say about all these questions, many of which still have resonance today. Read Joyce’s fine book and learn all about it.

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Brett Whalen, “Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages” (Harvard UP, 2009)

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:59:00 -0000

In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of Days. He’s got bad news and good. First, everything was going to go hell, so to say: “And Jesus answered . . . many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.” (Mathew 24: 4-8 KJV). But then, Jesus says, things are going to get a lot better for those who hold fast: “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” (Mathew 24: 13-14 KJV) Now you may think all of this is allegory. But people in the Middle Ages didn’t. They took it to heart and acted on it, most significantly by launching the Crusades (which, as you know, were many). That’s one of the many interesting messages of Brett Whalen‘s new book Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard UP, 2009). The Christians believed that, as Jesus said, the gospel would be preached everywhere before the End. Well circa 1100 it was hardly preached everywhere. It wasn’t even preached in the Holy Land, which was of course held by Infidels. Clearly something had to be done about that. Thus was the Church of Christ turned into the Army of God, all in the name of speeding the End of Time. As Brett points out, things got a little out of hand in the period that followed. Turns out that not having God on your side can mean trouble. Read the book and find out how.

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New Books in Medieval History

Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Francis Young, "Fairies: A History" (John Wiley & Sons, 2026)

Nabil Ali, "Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Rory Naismith, "Offa: King of the Mercians" (Yale UP, 2026)

Katherine Harvey, "The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living" (Reaktion, 2026)

Elisheva Baumgarten, "Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Karima Moyer-Nocchi, "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America" (Columbia UP, 2026)

E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

Lucy Donkin, "Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

A. Bagliani and N, Şenocak, "A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050-1300" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Nena Vandeweerdt, "Women and Work Through a Comparative Lens: Gender and the Urban Labor Markets of Premodern Brabant and Biscay" (Leuven UP, 2025)

Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe" (Routledge, 2022)

Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)

Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

Jamie Kreiner, "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction" (Liveright, 2023)

Helen J. Nicholson, "Women and the Crusades" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present" (Yale UP, 2023)

Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)

Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)

Andrea Maraschi and Francesca Tasca, "Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Judith Jesch, "The Saga of the Earls of Orkney" (Birlinn, 2025)

Arthur Bahr, "Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Gian Piero Persiani, "Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan" (Brill, 2025)

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts﻿" (﻿Yale UP, 2025)

Michael Staunton, "Thomas Becket and His World" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Max Adams and Colm O’Brien, "Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field" (Birlinn, 2025)

John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

Eric Halsey, "State Builders from the Steppe: A History of The First Bulgarian Empire" (This is RETHINK, 2025)

Anastasija Ropa, "The Medieval Horse" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Elizabeth Currie, "Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio" (Reaktion, 2025)

John Blair, "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)

Rosemary Admiral, "Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

Karen Stollznow, "Bitch: The Journey of a Word" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Katherine L. French, "Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Steve Tibble, "Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood" (Yale UP, 2025)

Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Daisy Livingston, "Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Michelle P. Brown, "Bede and the Theory of Everything" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

Nabil Yasien Mohamed, "Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty" (Routledge, 2024)

David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025)

Anne M. Blackburn, "Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Jo Teeuwisse, "Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened" (Ebury Press, 2022)

Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024)

How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research

Craig E. Bertolet and Susan Nakley eds., "The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer" (Routledge, 2024)

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U ﻿Chicago Press, 2025)

John Eldevik, "Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and Its Manuscript Contexts" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)

Richard D. Oram, "A Land Won from Waste: Scotland AD 400-1400" (Birlinn, 2025)

Anna Wainwright, "Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance" (U Delaware Press, 2025)

Judith Vitale, "The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Asa Simon Mittman, "Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Faith Tibble, "Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings" (T&T Clark, 2025)

Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Letizia Osti, "History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)

Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Bruce L. Venarde, "The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Catalin-Stefan Popa, "The Making of Syriac Jerusalem" (Routledge, 2023)

Melissa Vise, "The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Martha Bayless, "Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Exploring Muslim Sicily with Nuha Alshaar and Shainool Jiwa

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Caroline Dunn, "Ladies-in-waiting in Medieval England" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)