Stealing from the Saracens
Stealing from the Saracens

Author: Diana Darke

Publisher: Hurst & Company

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 1787383059

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Europeans are in denial. Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, they are increasingly distancing themselves from their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But while the legacy of Islam and the Middle East is in danger of being airbrushed out of Western history, its traces can still be detected in some of Europe's most recognisable monuments, from Notre-Dame to St Paul's Cathedral. In this comprehensively illustrated book, Diana Darke sets out to redress the balance, revealing the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. She tracks the transmission of key innovations from the great capitals of Islam's early empires, Damascus and Baghdad, via Muslim Spain and Sicily into Europe. Medieval crusaders, pilgrims and merchants from Europe later encountered Arab Muslim culture in journeys to the Holy Land. In more recent centuries, that same route through modern-day Turkey connected Ottoman culture with the West, leading Sir Christopher Wren himself to believe that Gothic architecture should more rightly be called 'the Saracen style', because of its Islamic origins. Recovering this overlooked story within the West's long history of borrowing from the Islamic world, Darke sheds new light on Europe's buildings and offers rich insights into the possibilities of cultural exchange.

Saracens
Saracens

Author: John Victor Tolan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0231123337

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Medieval Christian writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. This book provides a comprehensive study of Christian polemical responses to Islam in the Middle Ages.

How to Defeat the Saracens
How to Defeat the Saracens

Author: William (of Adam)

Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780884023760

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The fall of Acre in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. Extensive notes guide the reader through the historical context of this fascinating work

Franks and Saracens
Franks and Saracens

Author: Avner Falk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0429913923

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This is the first and only book to examine the Crusades from the added viewpoint of psychoanalysis, studying the hidden emotions and fantasies that drove the Crusaders and the Muslims to undertake their terrible wars. The reader will learn that the deepest and most powerful motives for the Crusades were not only religious or territorial - or the quest for lands, wealth or titles - but also unconscious emotions and fantasies about one's country, one's religion, one's enemies, God and the Devil, Us and Them. The book also demonstrates the collective inability to mourn large-group losses and the collective needs of large groups such as nations and religions to develop a clear identity, to have boundaries, and to have enemies and allies. Motives which the Crusaders and the Muslims were not aware of were among the most powerful in driving several centuries of terrible and seemingly endless warfare.

Writings Against the Saracens
Writings Against the Saracens

Author: Peter (the Venerable)

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2016-06-03

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 081322859X

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Peter the Venerable's extensive literary legacy includes poems, a large epistolary collection, and polemical treatises. The first of his four major polemics targeted a Christian heresy, the Petrobrussians (Against the Petrobrusians); the rest took aim at Jews and Saracens. Catholic University of America Press has published his Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews. This present volume will make available in their entirety Peter the Venerable's twin polemics against Islam - A Summary of the entire heresy of the Saracens and Against the sect of the Saracens - as well as related correspondence. These works resulted from a sustained engagement with Islam begun during Peter's journey to Spain in 1142-43. There the abbot commissioned a translation of sources from the Arabic, the so-called Toledan Collection, that include the Letter of a Saracen with a Christian Response (from the Apology of [Ps.] Al-Kindi ); Fables of the Saracens (a potpourri of Islamic hadith traditions); and Robert of Ketton's first Latin translation of the whole of the Qur'an. Thanks to Peter's efforts, from the second half of the twelfth century Christians could acquire a far better understanding of the teachings of Islam, and Peter may rightly be viewed as the initiator of Islamic studies in the West.

Saracens, Demons, & Jews
Saracens, Demons, & Jews

Author: Debra Higgs Strickland

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780691057194

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These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".

Saracens and the Making of English Identity
Saracens and the Making of English Identity

Author: Siobhain Bly Calkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1135471711

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This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these depictions, although historically inaccurate, served to enhance and advance assertions of English national identity at this time. The book examines Saracen characters in a manuscript renowned for the variety of its texts, and discusses hagiographic legends, elaborations of chronicle entries, and popular romances about Charlemagne, Arthur, and various English knights. In these texts, Saracens engage issues such as the demarcation of communal borders, the place of gender norms and religion in communities' self-definitions, and the roles of violence and history in assertions of group identity. Texts involving Saracens thus serve both to assert an English identity, and to explore the challenges involved in making such an assertion in the early fourteenth century when the English language was regaining its cultural prestige, when the English people were increasingly at odds with their French cousins, and when English, Welsh, and Scottish sovereignty were pressing matters.

Mirage of the Saracen
Mirage of the Saracen

Author: Walter D. Ward

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-12-17

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0520959523

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Mirage of the Saracen analyzes the growth of monasticism and Christian settlements in the Sinai Peninsula through the early seventh century C.E. Walter D. Ward examines the ways in which Christian monks justified occupying the Sinai through creating associations between Biblical narratives and Sinai sites while assigning uncivilized, negative, and oppositional traits to the indigenous nomadic population, whom the Christians pejoratively called "Saracens." By writing edifying tales of hostile nomads and the ensuing martyrdom of the monks, Christians not only reinforced their claims to the spiritual benefits of asceticism but also provoked the Roman authorities to enhance defense of pilgrimage routes to the Sinai. When Muslim armies later began conquering the Middle East, Christians also labeled these new conquerors as Saracens, connecting Muslims to these pre-Islamic representations. This timely and relevant work builds a historical account of interreligious encounters in the ancient world, showing the Sinai as a crucible for forging long-lasting images of both Christians and Muslims, some of which endure today.