Medieval Marvels And Fictions In The Latin West And Islamic World

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Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World

Michelle Karnes
Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World Book PDF

Author : Michelle Karnes
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022-07-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226819754

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Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World by Michelle Karnes Pdf

"It is a commonplace that 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 philosophic writing: magical objects with hard-to-explain powers abound. This is the first book to analyze these different bodies of writing alongside one another, comparing texts from both the Latin West (including writings in English, French, Italian, and Spanish) and in Arabic on the topic, attempting a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Michelle Karnes tells an untold story of the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that the strange and the unfamiliar travel unusually well across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space, and offers an ideal vantage point from which to understand Arabic and Latin intercultural exchange. Employing the notion of the near-impossibility, Karnes traverses this diverse archive, marking the outer boundaries of both nature's capabilities and human creativity. Imagination, she shows, invests marvels with their character and, ultimately, their power. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, the true and the false, imagination, for Karnes, endows marvels with indeterminacy and import, imbuing them with inherently interdisciplinary, boundary-resistant, perplexing properties. These near-impossibilities cannot be conclusively discounted; rather, they challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers here a rare, comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized to be central to medieval culture"--

Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World

Michelle Karnes
Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World Book PDF

Author : Michelle Karnes
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2022-07-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226819761

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Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World by Michelle Karnes Pdf

A cross-cultural study of magical phenomena in the Middle Ages. 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. This 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.

Islamic Ecumene

David S. Powers,Eric Tagliacozzo
Islamic Ecumene Book PDF

Author : David S. Powers,Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501772405

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Islamic Ecumene by David S. Powers,Eric Tagliacozzo Pdf

The essays in Islamic Ecumene address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit. Although the Muslim inhabitants of these lands speak dozens of languages, represent numerous ethnic groups, and practice diverse forms of Islam, they are united by shared practices and worldviews shaped by religious identity. To highlight these commonalities, the co-editors invited a team of scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine Muslim societies in comparative and interconnected ways. The result is a book that showcases ethics, education, architecture, the arts, modernization, political resistance, marriage, divorce, and death rituals. Using the insights and methods of historians, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, political scientists, and sociologists, Islamic Ecumene seeks to understand Islamic identity as a dynamic phenomenon that is reflected in the multivalent practices of the more than one billion people across the planet who identify as Muslims.

Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Albrecht Classen
Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age Book PDF

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 652 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2023-09-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9783111190228

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Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age by Albrecht Classen Pdf

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

The Book of Marvels

Larisa Grollemond,Kelin Michael,Elizabeth Morrison,Joshua O'Driscoll
The Book of Marvels Book PDF

Author : Larisa Grollemond,Kelin Michael,Elizabeth Morrison,Joshua O'Driscoll
Publisher : Getty Publications
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2024-07-16
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781606069042

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The Book of Marvels by Larisa Grollemond,Kelin Michael,Elizabeth Morrison,Joshua O'Driscoll Pdf

This fascinating volume explores an important fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript tradition that provides a revealing glimpse of how western Europeans conceptualized the world. From the classical encyclopedias of Pliny to famous tales such as The Travels of Marco Polo, historical travel writing has had a lasting impact, despite the fact that it was based on a curious mixture of truth, legend, and outright superstition. One foundational medieval source that expands on the ancient idea of the “wonders of the world” is the fifteenth-century French Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. The fifty-six locales featured in the manuscript are presented in a manner that suggests authority and objectivity but are rife with stereotypes and mischaracterizations, meant to simultaneously instill a sense of wonder and fear in readers. In The Book of Marvels, the authors explore the tradition of encyclopedias and travel writing, examining the various sources for geographic knowledge in the Middle Ages. They look closely at the manuscript copies of the French text and its complex images, delving into their origins, style, content, and meaning. Ultimately, this volume seeks to unpack how medieval white Christian Europeans saw their world and how the fear of difference—so pervasive in society today—is part of a long tradition stretching back millennia. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 11 to September 1, 2024, and at the Morgan Library & Museum from January 24 to May 25, 2025.

The Secret in Medieval Literature

Albrecht Classen
The Secret in Medieval Literature Book PDF

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2022-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781666917871

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The Secret in Medieval Literature by Albrecht Classen Pdf

The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

Reading the Middle Ages

Barbara H. Rosenwein
Reading the Middle Ages Book PDF

Author : Barbara H. Rosenwein
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2018-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442636736

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Reading the Middle Ages by Barbara H. Rosenwein Pdf

Reading the Middle Ages is well-known for providing thematic and geographical diversity, clear and informative introductions, and close integration with A Short History of the Middle Ages.

Micro Middle Ages

Paul Edward Dutton
Micro Middle Ages Book PDF

Author : Paul Edward Dutton
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 442 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2023-12-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783031382673

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Micro Middle Ages by Paul Edward Dutton Pdf

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,” starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

Becoming the Pearl-poet

Jane Beal
Becoming the Pearl poet Book PDF

Author : Jane Beal
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : English poetry
ISBN : 9781793646767

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Becoming the Pearl-poet by Jane Beal Pdf

"From Becoming the Pearl-Poet, students and scholars alike can learn about the Pearl-poet and the five poems attributed to him, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and St Erkenwald, exploring key ideas that will inform a deeper understanding and appreciation of this medieval English writer's work"--

Wonders and Rarities

Travis Zadeh
Wonders and Rarities Book PDF

Author : Travis Zadeh
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674287648

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Wonders and Rarities by Travis Zadeh Pdf

“As Zadeh concludes, reformers and modernists have closed the rich and varied archive revealed in Wonders and Rarities...In this beautifully written and engaging text, Zadeh takes his readers back to the world of surprise and enchantment that preceded this closure.”—Malise Ruthven, Financial Times “The wonders and curiosities of the Islamic imagination await discovery by a new generation of readers in this superb and very enjoyable book by Travis Zadeh.”—Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The astonishing biography of one of the world’s most influential books. 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. Restoring Qazwīnī to his place as a herald of the rare and astonishing, 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.

Reading the Middle Ages, Volume II

Barbara H. Rosenwein
Reading the Middle Ages Volume II Book PDF

Author : Barbara H. Rosenwein
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442606081

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Reading the Middle Ages, Volume II by Barbara H. Rosenwein Pdf

Spanning the period from c.900 to c.1500 and containing primary source material from the European, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, Barbara H. Rosenwein's Reading the Middle Ages, Second Edition once again brings the Middle Ages to life. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this volume contains 24 new readings, including 10 translations commissioned especially for this book, and a stunning new 10-plate color insert entitled "Containing the Holy" that brings together materials from the Western, Byzantine, and Islamic religious traditions. Ancillary materials, including study questions, can be found on the History Matters website (www.utphistorymatters.com).

Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West

Daniel G. König
Arabic Islamic Views of the Latin West Book PDF

Author : Daniel G. König
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2015-11-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191057014

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Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West by Daniel G. König Pdf

Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West provides an insight into how the Arabic-Islamic world perceived medieval Western Europe in an age that is usually associated with the rise and expansion of Islam, the Spanish Reconquista, and the Crusades. Previous scholarship has maintained that the Arabic-Islamic world regarded Western Europe as a cultural backwater at the periphery of civilization that clung to a superseded religion. It holds mental barriers imposed by Islam responsible for the Muslim world's arrogant and ignorant attitude towards its northern neighbours. This study refutes this view by focussing on the mechanisms of transmission and reception that characterized the flow of information between both cultural spheres. By explaining how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired and processed data on medieval Western Europe, it traces the two-fold 'emergence' of Latin-Christian Europe — a sphere that increasingly encroached upon the Mediterranean and therefore became more and more important in Arabic-Islamic scholarly literature. Chapter One questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords 'ignorance', 'indifference', and 'arrogance'. Chapter Two lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter Three deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters Four to Eight analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on themes such as the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter Nine provides a concluding re-evaluation.

Mapping Frontiers Across Medieval Islam

Travis Zadeh
Mapping Frontiers Across Medieval Islam Book PDF

Author : Travis Zadeh
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 564 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781786721310

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Mapping Frontiers Across Medieval Islam by Travis Zadeh Pdf

The story of the 9th-century caliphal mission from Baghdad to discover the legendary barrier against the apocalyptic nations of Gog and Magog mentioned in the Quran, has been either dismissed as superstition or treated as historical fact. By exploring the intellectual and literary history surrounding the production and early reception of this adventure, Travis Zadeh traces the conceptualization of frontiers within early 'Abbasid society and re-evaluates the modern treatment of marvels and monsters inhabiting medieval Islamic descriptions of the world. Examining the roles of translation, descriptive geography, and salvation history in the projection of early 'Abbasid imperial power, this book is essential for all those interested in Islamic studies, the 'Abbasid dynasty and its politics, geography, religion, Arabic and Persian literature and European Orientalism.

Idols in the East

Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Idols in the East Book PDF

Author : Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2012-04-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801464973

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Idols in the East by Suzanne Conklin Akbari Pdf

Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims—the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist—and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.

The Worlds of Medieval Europe

Clifford R. Backman
The Worlds of Medieval Europe Book PDF

Author : Clifford R. Backman
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Byzantine Empire
ISBN : 0199372314

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The Worlds of Medieval Europe by Clifford R. Backman Pdf

Deftly written and beautifully illustrated, The Worlds of Medieval Europe, Third Edition, presents a distinctive and nuanced portrayal of the Greater West during its medieval millennium. By integrating the histories of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds into the main narrative, author Clifford R. Backman offers an insightful, detailed, and often witty look at the continuum of interaction -- social, cultural, intellectual, and commercial -- that existed among all three societies. This compelling volume surpasses traditional textbook representations of the Middle Ages by balancing the conventional focus on political affairs, especially those of northern Europe, with equally detailed attention to medieval society as it developed in the Mediterranean. In addition, Backman describes the ways in which the medieval Latin West attempted to understand the unified and rational structure of the human cosmos, which they believed existed beneath the observable diversity and disorder of the world. This effort to recreate a human ordering of "unity through diversity" provides an essential key to understanding medieval Europe and the ways in which it regarded and reacted to the worlds around it.