The Indies and the Medieval West
The Indies and the Medieval West

Author: Marianne O'Doherty

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503532769

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Winner of the 2014 ESSE Book award (in Cat B. Cultural Studies-Jr. Scholar) This volume offers a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary treatment of European representations of the Indies between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Drawing on encyclopedias, cosmographies and cartography, romance, hagiography, and legend, it traces the influence of classical, late antique, and early medieval ideas on the later medieval geographical imagination, including the imagined and experienced Indies of European travellers. Addressing the evidence of Latin and vernacular manuscripts, the book explores readers' encounters with the most widely read travellers' accounts, in particular, those of Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone, and Niccolo Conti. Chapters on The Book of Sir John Mandeville, medieval Europe's most idiosyncratic yet popular work of geography, alongside world maps produced across Europe, point to the ways in which representations of the Indies were inflected by temporal concerns, specifically, their relationship to Latin Christendom's past, present, and future. The Indies relates the texts, documents, maps, and manuscripts it discusses closely to the changing ideological concerns of their times, notably those of mission and conversion, crusade, conquest, and economics. Nonetheless, the relationships that the work delineates between spatial representations and notions of dominance, whether religious, political, economic, or epistemic, have implications for the post-medieval world.

The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West
The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West

Author: Colin Morris

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2005-03-17

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0198269285

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What was the impact of the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem on the history of western Europe? Colin Morris shows that the Holy Sepulchre had a vital influence on pilgrimage, the Crusades, the cult of the Cross, and art and architecture. The recovery of the Tomb was a central objective of the Crusades, and so Morris examines the emergence of hostility between Christendom and Islam.

Matters of Engagement
Matters of Engagement

Author: Daniela Hacke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-05

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0429949634

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By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods. All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800. The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.

The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades
The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades

Author: Ahmed M. A. Sheir

Publisher: Trivent Publishing

Published: 2022-06-22

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 6156405291

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This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi, the Coptic Abu al-Makarim and the Syriac Ibn al-'Ibri (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources.

The East and West in Late Medieval Travel Writings
The East and West in Late Medieval Travel Writings

Author: Na Chang

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-10-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1527577082

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This book traces the history of encounter between Eastern and Western cultures by closely examining a body of medieval travel writings penned or related by Europeans and by inhabitants of East Asia. Whilst these texts are usually considered in the context of kindred European or Chinese literature, this study will make a case for considering them as a common literature of medieval encounters with foreign people. For the modern historian writing in a world that so consciously thinks of itself as ‘global’, these accounts offer a precious lens through which to enter into the world before globalization. In particular, the book shows that these narratives show the similarity in how Eastern and Western travellers thought and behaved in the face of difference, and will show that individuals often held somewhat different views, shaped by their particular experience or agendas, than those of their government or of local cultural convention.

Medieval Ethnographies
Medieval Ethnographies

Author: Joan-Pau Rubies

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1351918613

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From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global perspective what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre's long-term impact rather than its mere empirical potential, or its ethnocentrism (all of which can also be found in China and in Islamic cultures). Hence what needs emphasizing is the multiplication of original writings over time, their increased circulation, and their authoritative status as a 'scientific' discourse. The empirical bent was more characteristic of travel accounts than of theological disputations - in fact, the less elaborate the theological discourse, the stronger the ethnographic impulse (although many travel writers were clerics). This anthology of classic articles in the history of medieval ethnographies illustrates this theme with reference to the contexts and genres of travel writing, the transformation of enduring myths (ranging from oriental marvels to the virtuous ascetics of India or Prester John), the practical expression of particular encounters from the Mongols to the Atlantic, and the various attempts to explain cultural differences, either through the concept of barbarism, or through geography and climate.

The Mineral and the Visual
The Mineral and the Visual

Author: Brigitte Buettner

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2022-06-29

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0271093684

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Opulent jeweled 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 medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled 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 medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

Westernness
Westernness

Author: Christopher GoGwilt

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-10-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 3110728427

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The word "West" is omnipresent and often unquestioned. The goal of this volume is to elaborate a critical reflection on this concept and make these implicit processes explicit. The articles focus on spatio‐temporal practices regarding the production and representation of westernness. Taking critical perspectives, which view the West from the inside and the outside, they address issues of highest political and social relevance.

The Martyrdom of the Franciscans
The Martyrdom of the Franciscans

Author: Christopher MacEvitt

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 081229677X

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A study of three hundred years of medieval Franciscan history that focuses on martyrdom While hagiographies tell of Christian martyrs who have died in an astonishing number of ways and places, slain by members of many different groups, martyrdom in a Franciscan context generally meant death at Muslim hands; indeed, in Franciscan discourse, "death by Saracen" came to rival or even surpass other definitions of what made a martyr. The centrality of Islam to Franciscan conceptions of martyrdom becomes even more apparent—and problematic—when we realize that many of the martyr narratives were largely invented. Franciscan authors were free to choose the antagonist they wanted, Christopher MacEvitt observes, and they almost always chose Muslims. However, martyrdom in Franciscan accounts rarely leads to conversion of the infidel, nor is it accompanied, as is so often the case in earlier hagiographical accounts, by any miraculous manifestation. If the importance of preaching to infidels was written into the official Franciscan Rule of Order, the Order did not demonstrate much interest in conversion, and the primary efforts of friars in Muslim lands were devoted to preaching not to the native populations but to the Latin Christians—mercenaries, merchants, and captives—living there. Franciscan attitudes toward conversion and martyrdom changed dramatically in the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, when accounts of the martyrdom of four Franciscans said to have died while preaching in India were written. The speed with which the accounts of their martyrdom spread had less to do with the world beyond Christendom than with ecclesiastical affairs within, MacEvitt contends. The Martyrdom of the Franciscans shows how, for Franciscans, martyrdom accounts could at once offer veiled critique of papal policies toward the Order, a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, and a symbolic way to overcome Islam by denying Muslims the solace of conversion.

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages
Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages

Author: Keagan Brewer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-29

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1317430352

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Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.