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Articles 1 - 30 of 37
Full-Text Articles in Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture
Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren
Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren
Medieval Ecocriticisms
Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.
Miraculous Monstrosity: Birth And Female Sexuality In The Illuminated Scivias And Cloisters Apocalypse, Jenna M. Mckellips
Miraculous Monstrosity: Birth And Female Sexuality In The Illuminated Scivias And Cloisters Apocalypse, Jenna M. Mckellips
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper compares the illuminations in two medieval apocalypses, the Cloisters Apocalypse and Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias, to inspect their similar constructions of female sexuality, motherhood, and monstrosity. It first analyzes the monstrosity of female sexual organs found in Hildegard’s portrayal of the Church and the Mother of the Antichrist. The paper then goes on to consider the uncanny slippage between images of birth and death in the Cloisters’s depiction of John and the Woman of Revelation 12. Ultimately, the paper not only explores the monstrosity of female bodies in apocalyptic manuscripts, but also concludes that medieval women’s …
Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken
Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In the Late Anglo-Saxon illustrated manuscripts of Prudentius's Psychomachia, vice and virtue are often shown ambiguously and the audience is encouraged to question what is male and what is female, and whether such categories are appropriate in understanding these illustrations. This paper utilises transgender theory to demonstrate how gender could be deployed in Late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to question the roles of men and women with the ultimate aim of stressing the importance of righteous behaviours.
Memorializing The Middle Classes In Medieval And Renaissance Europe, Anne C. Leader
Memorializing The Middle Classes In Medieval And Renaissance Europe, Anne C. Leader
Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe investigates commemorative practices in Cyprus, Flanders, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Offering a broad overview of memorialization practices across Europe and the Mediterranean, individual chapters examine local customs through particular case studies. These essays explore complementary themes through the lens of commemorative art, including social status; personal and corporate identities; the intersections of mercantile, intellectual, and religious attitudes; upward (and downward) mobility; and the cross-cultural exchange of memorialization strategies.
Portraits Of Human Monsters In The Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes, And Castrati As Idealized Anatomical Anomalies, Touba Ghadessi
Portraits Of Human Monsters In The Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes, And Castrati As Idealized Anatomical Anomalies, Touba Ghadessi
Monsters, Prodigies, and Demons: Medieval and Early Modern Constructions of Alterity
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters - dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals - who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-à-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. These monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. Although many images of and writings about these individuals depict them as jokes of nature or indices of courtly wit, others transcend these categories, combining a vocabulary of courtly self-fashioning with close observations akin to dissections that humanize monsters, while simultaneously stressing their anatomical difference. More importantly, the works examined in this book …
The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne
The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne
The Medieval Globe
This study explores the relationship between documentary-legal prescriptions of slavery and actual practice in late medieval Ethiopia. It does so in light of a newly discovered edict against the enslavement of freeborn Christians and the commercial sale of Christians to non-Christian owners, issued in 1548 by King Gälawdéwos. It demonstrates that this edict emerged from a dramatic and violent encounter between the neighboring Sultanate of Adal, which was supported by Muslim powers, and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which had the support of expanding European powers in the region. The edict was therefore issued to reaffirm and clarify the principles …
Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez
Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez
The Medieval Globe
This article compares and contrasts pre-Columbian indigenous customary law regarding land possession and use with the legal norms and concepts gradually imposed and implemented by the Spanish colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Natives accepted oral histories of possession going back as many as ten generations as proof of a claim to land. Indigenous custom also provided that a family could claim as much land as it could use for as long as it could use it: labor established rights of possession and use. The Spanish introduced the concept of private property …
Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
The Medieval Globe
This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chinese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo Geniza holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the earliest dated and localized query about the status of ṣīnī vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded …
The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner
The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner
The Medieval Globe
This article models a methodology for recovering the substance and nature of the Aztec legal tradition by interrogating reports of precontact indigenous behavior in the works of early colonial ethnographers, as well as in pictorial manuscripts and their accompanying oral performances. It calls for a new, richly recontextualized approach to the study of a medieval civilization whose sophisticated legal and jurisprudential practices have been fundamentally obscured by a long process of decontextualization and the anachronistic applications of modern Western paradigms.
Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn
Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn
The Medieval Globe
This introduction presents and draws together the articles and themes featured in this special issue of The Medieval Globe, “Legal Worlds and Legal Encounters.”
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
The Medieval Globe
This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal and other precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indian and early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for such comparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the fragmented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and spheres of authority existed side-by-side, make a direct comparison complex. Moreover, the time slippage between what scholarship understands to be the “early medieval” period in each region needs to be taken into account, particularly given the persistence of some provisions and the adapatation or abandonment of …
Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson
Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson
The Medieval Globe
Medieval sumptuary law has been receiving renewed scholarly attention in recent decades. But sumptuary laws, despite their ubiquity, have rarely been considered comprehensively and comparatively. This essay calls attention to this problem and suggests a number of topics for investigation, with specific reference to the first phase of European sumptuary legislation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that comparative study demonstrates that this chronology closely parallels the development of the so-called “Western fashion system” and that the ubiquity of sketchy or nonexistent enforcement is evidence for the symbolic importance of sumptuary legislation, rather than its instrumentality. Comparison across …
Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.
Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.
The Medieval Globe
In order to understand the legal use and significance of documents in medieval India, we need to start from the contemporaneous legal categories found in the Sanskrit scholastic corpus called dharmaśāstra. By comparing these categories with actual historical documents and inscriptions, we gain better insight into the encounter of pan-Indian legal discourse in Sanskrit and regional laws in vernacular languages. The points of congruence and transgression in this encounter will facilitate a nuanced history of documents and their use beyond unhelpfully broad categories of written and oral. A new translation of one major scholastic discussion of documents is presented as …
Authority Of Images / Images Of Authority: Shaping Political And Cultural Identities In The Pre-Modern World, Karen Fresco
Authority Of Images / Images Of Authority: Shaping Political And Cultural Identities In The Pre-Modern World, Karen Fresco
Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Focusing on language's political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe …
Tilting Toward The Light: Translating The Medieval World On The Ming-Mongolian Frontier, Carla Nappi
Tilting Toward The Light: Translating The Medieval World On The Ming-Mongolian Frontier, Carla Nappi
The Medieval Globe
Ming China maintained relationships with neighboring peoples such as the Mongols by educating bureaucrats trained to translate many different foreign languages. While the reference works these men used were designed to facilitate their work, they also conveyed a specific vision of the past and a taxonomy of cultural differences that constitute valuable historical sources in their own right, illuminating the worldview of the Chinese-Mongolian frontier.
Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler
Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler
The Medieval Globe
This essay explores how the poetry collection Wakan rōeishū becomes an important allusive referent for two medieval Japanese works, the travelogue Kaidōki and the nō play Tsunemasa. In particular, it focuses on how Chinese poems from the collection become the means for describing Japanese spaces and their links to power, in the context of a changing political landscape.
The Painter, The Warrior, And The Sultan: The World Of Marco Polo In Three Portraits, Sharon Kinoshita
The Painter, The Warrior, And The Sultan: The World Of Marco Polo In Three Portraits, Sharon Kinoshita
The Medieval Globe
In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial theory, Marco Polo is often cast as a quintessentially Western observer of Asian cultures. This essay seeks to break his text out of the binaries in which it is frequently understood. Returning the text to its original title, “The Description of the World,” it reconstructs the diversity of late thirteenth-century Asia through the portraits of three figures who were Marco’s contemporaries.
Towards A Connected History Of Equine Cultures In South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) Horses And “Horsemania” In Thirteenth-Century South India, Elizabeth Lambourn
Towards A Connected History Of Equine Cultures In South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) Horses And “Horsemania” In Thirteenth-Century South India, Elizabeth Lambourn
The Medieval Globe
This article explores ways that the concept of equine cultures, developed thus far principally in European and/or early modern and colonial contexts, might translate to premodern South Asia. As a first contribution to a history of equine matters in South Asia, it focuses on the maritime circulation of horses from the Middle East to Peninsular India in the thirteenth century, examining the different ways that this phenomenon is recorded in textual and material sources and exploring their potential for writing a new, more connected history of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Medieval Globe
Large numbers of outsiders were integrated into premodern Islamic society through the institution of slavery. Many were boys of non-Muslim parents drafted into the army, and some rose to become powerful political figures; in Egypt, after the death of Ayyubid sultan al-Salih (r. 1240–49), they formed a dynasty known as the Mamluks. For slave concubines, the route to power was different: Shajar al-Durr, the concubine of al-Salih, gained enormous status when she gave birth to his son and later governed as regent in her son’s name, converting to Islam after her husband’s death and then reigning as sultan in her …
Identity In Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich In The Interstices Of Medieval European History, Christian Raffensperger
Identity In Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich In The Interstices Of Medieval European History, Christian Raffensperger
The Medieval Globe
The politics of kinship and of monarchy in medieval eastern Europe are typically constructed within the framework of the modern nation-state, read back into the past. The example of Boris Kolomanovich, instead, highlights the horizontal interconnectivity of medieval Europe and its neighbors and demonstrates the malleability of individual identity within kinship webs, as well as the creation of situational kinship networks to advance individuals’ goals.
Periodization And “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation, Kathleen Davis, Michael Puett
Periodization And “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation, Kathleen Davis, Michael Puett
The Medieval Globe
The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material effects of the becoming of the Middle Ages and its relationship to conditions of globalization. On the other hand, “the medieval globe” brings to bear a comparative focus that does not ask when and …
Editor’S Preface, Carol Symes
The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), Carol Symes
Editor's Introduction To Pandemic Disease In The Medieval World: Rethinking The Black Death, Monica H. Green
Editor's Introduction To Pandemic Disease In The Medieval World: Rethinking The Black Death, Monica H. Green
The Medieval Globe
Extraction of the genetic material of the causative organism of plague, Yersinia pestis, from the remains of persons who died during the Black Death has confirmed that pathogen’s role in one of the largest pandemics of human history. This then opens up historical research to investigations based on modern science, which has studied Yersinia pestis from a variety of perspectives, most importantly its evolutionary history and its complex ecology of transmission. The contributors to this special issue argue for the benefits of a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to the many remaining mysteries associated with the plague’s geographical extent, rapid transmission, …
New Science And Old Sources: Why The Ottoman Experience Of Plague Matters, Nükhet Varlık
New Science And Old Sources: Why The Ottoman Experience Of Plague Matters, Nükhet Varlık
The Medieval Globe
Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science.
Plague Depopulation And Irrigation Decay In Medieval Egypt, Stuart Borsch
Plague Depopulation And Irrigation Decay In Medieval Egypt, Stuart Borsch
The Medieval Globe
Starting with the Black Death, and continuing over the century and a half that followed, plague depopulation brought about the ruin of Egypt’s irrigation system, the motor of its economy. For many generations, the Egyptians who survived the plague therefore faced a tragic new reality: a transformed landscape and way of life significantly worsened by plague, a situation very different from that of plague survivors in Europe. This article looks at the ways in which this transformation took place. It measures the scale and scope of rural depopulation and explains why it had such a significant impact on the agricultural …
Diagnosis Of A "Plague" Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale, Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Wolfgang P. Müller
Diagnosis Of A "Plague" Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale, Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Wolfgang P. Müller
The Medieval Globe
This brief study examines the genesis of the “misdiagnosis” of a fourteenth- century image that has become a frequently used representation of the Black Death on the Internet and in popular publications. The image in fact depicts another common disease in medieval Europe, leprosy, but was misinterpreted as “plague” because of a labeling error. The error was then magnified because of digital dissemination. This mistake is a reminder that interpretation of cultural products continues to demand the skills and expertise of humanists. Included is a full transcription and translation of the text which the image was originally meant to illustrate: …
Epilogue: A Hypothesis On The East Asian Beginnings Of The Yersinia Pestis Polytomy, Robert Hymes
Epilogue: A Hypothesis On The East Asian Beginnings Of The Yersinia Pestis Polytomy, Robert Hymes
The Medieval Globe
The work of Cui et al. (2013)—in both dating the polytomy that produced most existing strains of Yersinia pestis and locating its original home to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—offers a genetically derived specific historical proposition for historians of East and Central Asia to investigate from their own sources. The present article offers the hypothesis that the polytomy manifests itself in the Mongol invasion of the Xia state in the Gansu corridor in the early thirteenth century and continues in the Mongols’ expansion into China and other parts of Eurasia. The hypothesis relies to a considerable extent on work of Cao Shuji …
The Black Death And Its Consequences For The Jewish Community In Tàrrega: Lessons From History And Archeology, Anna Colet, Josep Xavier Muntané I Santiveri, Jordi Ruíz Ventura, Oriol Saula, M. Eulàlia Subirà De Galdàcano, Clara Jáuregui
The Black Death And Its Consequences For The Jewish Community In Tàrrega: Lessons From History And Archeology, Anna Colet, Josep Xavier Muntané I Santiveri, Jordi Ruíz Ventura, Oriol Saula, M. Eulàlia Subirà De Galdàcano, Clara Jáuregui
The Medieval Globe
In 2007, excavations in a suburb of the Catalan town of Tàrrega identified the possible location of the medieval Jewish cemetery. Subsequent excavations confirmed that multiple individuals buried in six communal graves had suffered violent deaths. The present study argues that these communal graves can be connected to a well-documented assault on the Jews of Tàrrega that occurred in 1348: long known as one of the earliest episodes of anti-Jewish violence related to the Black Death, but never before corroborated by physical remains. This study places textual sources, both Christian and Jewish, alongside the recently discovered archeological evidence of the …