Reorienting the Eastexplores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive ...investigation of Jewish travel writing from this era, this study engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies and contributes to the debate over the nature and history of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said.
Examining two dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries, Martin Jacobs asks whether Jewish travelers shared Western perceptions of the Islamic world with their Christian counterparts. Most Jews who detailed their journeys during this period hailed from Christian lands and many sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean aboard Christian-owned vessels. Yet Jacobs finds that their descriptions of the Near East subvert or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region. The accounts from the crusader era, in particular, are often critical of the Christian church and present glowing portraits of Muslim-Jewish relations. By contrast, some of the later travelers discussed in the book express condescending attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Near Eastern Jews. Placing shifting perspectives on the Muslim world in their historical, social, and literary contexts, Jacobs interprets these texts as mirrors of changing Jewish self-perceptions. As he argues, the travel accounts echo the various ways in which premodern Jews negotiated their mingled identities, which were neither exclusively Western nor entirely Eastern.
Through a focused and systematic examination of late medieval scholastic writers - theologians, philosophers and jurists - Joseph Canning explores how ideas about power and legitimate authority were ...developed over the 'long fourteenth century'. The author provides a new model for understanding late medieval political thought, taking full account of the intensive engagement with political reality characteristic of writers in this period. He argues that they used Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas to develop radically new approaches to power and authority, especially in response to political and religious crises. The book examines the disputes between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII and draws upon the writings of Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Bartolus, Baldus and John Wyclif to demonstrate the variety of forms of discourse used in the period. It focuses on the most fundamental problem in the history of political thought - where does legitimate authority lie?
Despite its significant influence on international law, international relations, natural law and political thought in general, Grotius's Law of War and Peace has been virtually unavailable for many ...decades. Stephen Neff's edited and annotated version of the text rectifies this situation. Containing the substantive portion of the classic text, but shorn of extraneous material, this edited and annotated edition of one of the classic works of Western legal and political thought is intended for students and teachers in four primary areas: history of international law, history of political thought, history of international relations and history of philosophy.
This collection of essays explores the complex relations between Christians and Muslims at the dawn of the modern age. It begins by examining two seminal works by Nicholas of Cusa: De pace fidei, a ...dialogue seeking peace among world religions written after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and Cribratio Alkorani (1460-61), an attempt to confirm Gospel truths through a critical reading of the Qur’an. After considering Nicholas, his sources, and his context, the book explores a wider range of late medieval texts on Christian-Muslim relations—not only Christian writings about Islam but also Muslim responses to Christianity. The book’s focus is historical, but it can also contribute to efforts at increasing Muslim-Christian understanding today.
This study offers an edition and fresh analysis of the fragmentary evidence for the views of Praxagoras of Cos (4th-3rd c. BC) on arteries, pulsation and pneuma. It presents the relevant fragments ...and draws new conclusions on Praxagoras' views and sources.
This is the first volume exclusively devoted to the Expositio by Berthold of Moosburg (c.1295-c.1361) on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. The breadth of its vision surpasses every other known ...commentary on the Elements of Theology, for it seeks to present a coherent account of the Platonic tradition as such (unified through the concord of Proclus and Dionysius) and at the same time to consolidate and transform a legacy of metaphysics developed in the German-speaking lands by Peripatetic authors (like Albert the Great, Ulrich of Strassburg, and Dietrich of Freiberg). This volume aims to provide a basis for further research and discussion of this unduly overlooked commentary, whose historical-philosophical importance as an attempt to refound Western metaphysics is beginning to be recognized.. Readership: Scholars and students interested in the history of metaphysics, the Platonic tradition, and the intellectual milieu of the German Dominicans from Albert the Great to the mid-14th century.
The work known as Pseudo-Kodinos, the fourteenth-century text which is one of two surviving ceremonial books from the Byzantine empire, is presented here for the first time in English translation. ...With facing page Greek text and the first in-depth analysis in the form of commentary and individual studies on the hierarchy, the ceremonies, court attire, the Blachernai palace, lighting, music, gestures and postures, this volume makes an important new contribution to the study of the Byzantine court, and to the history and culture of Byzantium more broadly. The unique traits of this ceremony book include the combination of hierarchical lists of court officials with protocols of ceremonies; a detailed description of the clothing used at court, in particular, hats and staffs; an account of the functions of the court title holders, a description of the ceremonies of the year which take place both inside the palace and outside; the service of the megas domestikos in the army, protocols for the coronation of the emperor, the promotions of despot, sebastokrator and caesar, of the patriarch; a description of the mourning attire of the emperor; protocol for the reception of a foreign bride in Constantinople all these are analysed here. Developments in ceremonial since the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies are discussed, as is the space in which ceremonial was performed, along with a new interpretation of the ’other palace’, the Blachernai. The text reveals the anonymous authors’ interest in the past, in the origins of practices and items of clothing, but it is argued that Pseudo-Kodinos presents descriptions of actual practice at the Byzantine court, rather than prescriptions.
Ruth Macrides is Reader in Byzantine Studies in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, UK; J.A. Munitiz, SJ, is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham, UK; Dimiter Angelov is Professor of Byzantine History in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, UK.
Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the ...originality of its twenty-six woodcut illustrations. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot—a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiously engaged with the potential of the new print medium to give an account of their experience.
The Peregrinatio also aspired to rouse readers to a new crusade against Islam by depicting a contest in the Mediterranean between the Christian bastion of the city of Venice and the region’s Muslim empires. This crusading rhetoric fit neatly with the state of the printing industry in Mainz, which largely subsisted as a tool for bishops’ consolidation of authority, including selling the pope’s plans to combat the Ottoman Empire.
Taking an artist on such an enterprise was unprecedented. Reuwich set a new benchmark for technical achievement with his woodcuts, notably a panorama of Venice that folds out to 1.62 meters in length and a foldout map that stretches from Damascus to Sudan around the first topographically accurate view of Jerusalem. The conception and execution of the Peregrinatio show how and why early printed books constructed new means of visual representation from existing ones—and how the form of a printed book emerged out of the interaction of eyewitness experience and medieval scholarship, real travel and spiritual pilgrimage, curiosity and fixed belief, texts and images.
La Villa Taegio, Bartolomeo; Beck, Thomas E
09/2011
eBook
Published in 1559 and appearing here for the first time in English,La Villais a rare source of Renaissance landscape theory. Written by Bartolomeo Taegio, a Milanese jurist and man of letters, after ...his banishment (possibly for murder, Thomas E. Beck speculates), the text takes the form of a dialogue between two gentlemen, one a proponent of the country, the other of the city. While it is not a gardening treatise,La Villareflects an aesthetic appreciation of the land in the Renaissance, reveals the symbolic and metaphorical significance of sixteenth-century gardens for their owners, and articulates a specific philosophy about the interaction of nature and culture in the garden.
This edition of the original Italian text and Beck's English translation is augmented with notes in which Beck identifies numerous references to literary sources inLa Villaand more than 280 people and places mentioned in the dialogue. The introduction illuminates Taegio's life and intellectual activity, his obligations to his sources, the cultural context, and the place ofLa Villain Renaissance villa literature. It also demonstrates the enduring relevance ofLa Villafor architecture and landscape architecture.La Villamakes a valuable contribution to the body of literature about place-making, precisely because it treats the villa as an idea and not as a building type.
The Jayhānī tradition contains the most detailed description of the Hungarians in the 9th century. It is a reconstruction of the lost book from Arabic, Persian and Turkic copies. This study focuses ...on the historical interpretation of the Magyar chapter.
