The Winged Lion and the Eight-Pointed Cross
The Winged Lion and the Eight-Pointed Cross

Author: Victor Mallia-Milanes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1000936287

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The papers reprinted in this volume focus on the extraordinary and multifaceted relationship between two Christian States: the Republic of Venice and the Island Order State on Hospitaller Malta between 1530 and the late 1790s. It was marked by three distinct phenomena – military cooperation along with other Western allies against the Ottoman Empire; direct mutual confrontation, at times even leading to war; and commercial cooperation. A fourth phenomenon, this time involving the wider Mediterranean context within which the two interacted, concerns the idea of decline. Some of the papers that follow question the validity of the traditional view that the Mediterranean and Venice were in decline by the sixteenth century and that the Hospitaller Order, claimed to be in decline by the eighteenth, had given up Malta to the French as a result. This book will appeal to all those interested in Crusading Orders and the history of the Crusades, as well as the history of Venice, Malta, and the Mediterranean in the early modern period.

Engaging Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus
Engaging Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus

Author: Donald F. Duclow

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1000957632

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Engaging Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus contains two new essays and nine others published between 2005 and 2019. The essays explore Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus as bold thinkers deeply engaged with their times and culture. John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa are key figures in the medieval Christian Neoplatonic tradition. This book focuses on their engagement with practical, experiential issues and controversies. Eriugena revises Genesis’ Adam and Eve narrative and makes sexual difference and overcoming it central to his Periphyseon. Eckhart’s Annunciation sermons urge his hearers to give birth to God’s son within their lives, and he develops a distinctive approach to pain and suffering. His radical preaching on the Eucharist and mystical union was judged heretical but was later taken up by Nicholas of Cusa. Coins and banking became key symbols in Cusanus’ exploration of humanity as created in God’s image, and he used mechanical clocks in reflecting on time and eternity. "Engagement" also describes these thinkers’ reception of their predecessors and how later readers appropriated their works. Eriugena struggled with the legacy of Augustine and the Greek Fathers. Eckhart’s theology of suffering provoked varied responses from his students Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler and the twentieth-century therapist Ursula Fleming. Cusanus provides the volume’s lynchpin as two articles analyse his reading of Eriugena and Eckhart, and a third discusses how he deftly countered Johannes Wenck’s accusations of heresy. The book will be of interest to students of Medieval Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality and their place within Cultural History.

The Sciences in Islamicate Societies in Context
The Sciences in Islamicate Societies in Context

Author: Sonja Brentjes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-24

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1000987256

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This Variorum volume reprints ten papers on contextual elements of the so-called ancient sciences in Islamicate societies between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. They address four major themes: the ancient sciences in educational institutions; courtly patronage of science; the role of the astral and other sciences in the Mamluk sultanate; and narratives about knowledge. The main arguments are directed against the then dominant historiographical claims about the exclusion of the ancient sciences from the madrasa and cognate educational institutes, the suppression of philosophy and other ancient sciences in Damascus after 1229, the limited role of the new experts for timekeeping in the educational and professional exercise of this science, and the marginal impact of astrology under Mamluk rule. It is shown that the muwaqqits (timekeepers) were important teachers at madrasas and Sufi convents, that Mamluk officers sought out astrologers for counselling and that narratives about knowledge reveal important information about scholarly debates and beliefs. Colophons and dedications are used to prove that courtly patronage for the ancient sciences continued uninterrupted until the end of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, these papers refute the idea of a continued and strong conflict between the ancient and modern sciences, showing rather shifting alliances between various of them and their regrouping in the classifications of the entire disciplinary edifice. These papers are suited for graduate teaching in the history of science and the intellectual, cultural and social history of the Middle East and for all readers interested in the study of the contexts of the sciences.

Studies on the Life of Muhammad and the Dawn of Islam
Studies on the Life of Muhammad and the Dawn of Islam

Author: Michael Lecker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000987000

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This volume includes 20 articles published between 1994 and 2020 on the subject of Muḥammad and the history of early Islam, covered in five sections: Arabia on the Eve of Islam, Muḥammad at Medina, Muḥammad and the Jews, Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq and the sīra and studies on early Islamic literature. The book focuses on a variety of historical questions, from the presumed Ghassanid/Byzantine involvement in the hijra to Muḥammad’s treaties with the main Jewish tribes of Yathrib/Medina. Predilection for detail, especially in the realms of genealogy and geography, is a salient characteristic of Lecker’s research, which in recent years has been increasingly based on digitized text repositories. Many of the articles deal with the social and economic environment of early Islam, which is vital for the study of Muḥammad’s biography. They are conceived of as building blocks in a future critical biography of the Arabian prophet. Studies on the Life of Muhammad and the Dawn of Islam will appeal to those interested in the history of pre- and early Islam, with an emphasis on Muḥammad’s life and his relations with the Jews of Arabia.

Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium
Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium

Author: Liz James

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1040098002

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This volume consists of 15 articles published between 1991 and 2018. It falls into three sections, reflecting different areas of Liz James’s interests. The first section deals with light and colour and mosaics: four articles considering light and colour in mosaics and the making of mosaics, as well as the question of what it means to define mosaics as ‘Byzantine’ are reprinted. The second brings together four pieces on empresses: their relationships with female personifications and the Mother of God; their roles in founding and refounding buildings; and their employment as ciphers by some authors. Finally, seven papers cover a range of topics: what monumental images of saints in churches might have been for; what the differences between relics and icons might have been; how captions to images can be misleading; why touch was an important sense; how words can sometimes ‘just’ be decorative rather than for reading; why the materiality of objects makes a difference. There is also a brief section of additional notes and comments which add to, update and reflect on each piece now in 2024. Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium will be of interest to scholars and students alike interested in material culture, the depiction of regal women, and the use of relics and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

Continuity and Rupture in the Long Middle Ages
Continuity and Rupture in the Long Middle Ages

Author: Michael Edward Moore

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1040108261

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The “Long Middle Ages” indicates a span of time extending from Antiquity, across the Middle Ages, to the Early Modern period. The author tries to understand factors of historical continuity binding this period together and the periodic scenes of violent change that disrupted societies and traditions. The Long Middle Ages were established on classical and biblical foundations, while each generation interpreted and expanded on those origins. The cohesion of the Long Middle Ages was brought about by continuous acts of reflection and renascence. Scholarly practices and ideas of Antiquity were taken up in the monasteries and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, while during the Renaissance, and then the Baroque period, thinkers looked back to Antiquity and to the Middle Ages. Continuity and Rupture in the Long Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual history, which puts the history of ideas in the context of cultural, political, religious, and legal history. Medieval history is the central moment, while continuity and change are found in traditions extending from the Lord’s Prayer (AD 30) to Jean Mabillon (AD 1632–1707) and onward to moderns like Ernst Cassirer and Paul Ricoeur. Readers will discover new significance in historical figures like the Venerable Bede, Boniface of Mainz, Charlemagne, and Pope Formosus – in the laws of medieval kings and bishops – and institutions like the monastery of Cluny. These essays, gathered together for the first time in this Variorum volume, offer powerful new interpretations for students and researchers in the fields of medieval studies, legal and literary interpretation, legal history, and the history of European intellectual life from ancient to modern times.

Medieval Warfare: Technology, Military Revolutions, and Strategy
Medieval Warfare: Technology, Military Revolutions, and Strategy

Author: Clifford J. Rogers

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1040099548

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This volume explores the topics of military revolutions, strategy, and tactics both separately and as they relate to each other. It makes important contributions to understanding European warfare in the Early, High, and especially the Late Middle Ages, as well the military transition to the Early Modern Period. Readers will find detailed analysis of how technological and non-technological developments interacted to effect major changes in how wars were fought across the period. The evolution and capabilities of the English longbow and of early gunpowder artillery are examined in depth. Changes in the tools of war naturally affected plans to employ those tools to achieve political ends – military strategy – but strategy was never dictated by technology. That point is illustrated by examinations of English efforts to conquer Wales; the Anglo-Burgundian alliance of the late Hundred Years War; and the economic factors shaping medieval conquests in general. The nine studies in the volume have all been published previously, but a new introduction shows how they fit together, particularly explaining how they collectively rebut common critiques of Rogers’s controversial thesis that European warfare was reshaped by the Infantry and Artillery Revolutions during the era of the Hundred Years War. Two of the chapters have been substantially expanded, so that the versions printed here should be the ones consulted and cited in the future by scholars of medieval warfare and military revolutions.

Studies in Late Antiquity
Studies in Late Antiquity

Author: David Neal Greenwood

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1040006167

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Late Antiquity was an era of remarkable change as beliefs were shaped and reshaped by the competing philosophies of traditional Greco-Roman religion, Middle and Neoplatonist philosophy, and the theology of the early Church. Current narratives of both peaceful competition and violent struggle between Christianity and paganism are reductive. The research presented in this Variorum volume, originally published between 2013 and 2018 in the fields of history, divinity, and philosophy, demonstrates the complexity of the age and provides a more complete picture of major actors including the emperor Julian, Porphyry of Tyre, and Celsus. From the second to the fourth centuries, these were some of the major players in attempting to define the terrain in the conflict between their philosophies and the Christian religion. While the timeframe remains consistently within the late second to the mid-fourth centuries A.D., the sources range between inscriptions, literature, and historical accounts. The particular focus is the emperor Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus, d. 363), a figure of perennial interest, as not only the last pagan emperor, but the last anti-Christian polemicist of real significance in antiquity. This volume offers a new perspective on Julian, bringing together research from ancient history, Neoplatonist philosophy, and patristic theology, and will be useful to students and scholars alike.

Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum
Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum

Author: Terence Mitchell

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-05-30

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9047423399

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This volume publishes drawings of the impressions of stamp seals preserved on Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets, and other clay objects in the collections of The British Museum. The majority of these seals bears precise dates, ranging from the 9th to the 2nd centuries B.C.; represens the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenian and Hellenistic periods; and are set out in chronological order so that the changes in seal design can be clearly seen. Among the images from the Hellenistic period are representations of zodiacal signs. The volume also includes details of seal impressions on the handles of pottery jars from Palestine. Full bibliographical references to previous publications of the cuneiform texts are given, and the volume concludes with concordances and indices, including a pictorial index of all the seal images arranged typologically.

The Maple Leaf and the White Cross
The Maple Leaf and the White Cross

Author: Christopher McCreery

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2008-07-21

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1770702806

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As a foundation of the Order of St. John, St. John Ambulance has been providing first aid training programs in Canada for the past 125 years. From the sweatshops of the Victorian era and military hospitals of the First World War to a modern-day volunteer organization devoted to the service of humanity, this history recounts the remarkable story of the Order’s contribution to our country and those who made it possible. With connections to the hospitaller work of the Order of St. John in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Order of St. John finds its modern roots in the English revival of this charitable work in 1831. The 1883 establishment of the Order of St. John in Canada signalled the beginning of a long and distinguished history of service to Canadians and people around the globe. As a nationwide volunteer organization involving more than 25,000 Canadians, St. John Ambulance continues to be the principal provider of first aid training in Canada.