Medieval History Commons^™

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

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 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

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 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

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

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

No abstract provided.

The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

No abstract provided.

Magna Carta Then And Now: A Symbol Of Freedom And Equal Rights For All, Eugene K B Tan, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Jack Tsen-Ta LEE

Magna Carta became applicable to Singapore in 1826 when a court system administering English law was established in the Straits Settlements. This remained the case through Singapore’s evolution from Crown colony to independent republic. The Great Charter only ceased to apply in 1993, when Parliament enacted the Application of English Law Act to clarify which colonial laws were still part of Singapore law. Nonetheless, Magna Carta’s legacy in Singapore continues in a number of ways. Principles such as due process of law and the supremacy of law are cornerstones of the rule of law, vital to the success, stability and …

Reform In 1215: Magna Carta And The Fourth Lateran Council, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

By 1215 King John had lost almost all of his northern continental possessions. The core of the Angevin empire, Normandy, was lost. Anglo-French barons who still held lands in Normandy owed their primary allegiance to King Phillip Augustus, not to King John. The barons and churchmen who remained under his sovereignty chaffed under his rule. It is clear from the document that the barons forced John to sign when they met with John on Runnymede in 15 July 2015, they intended to impose reform on the king. We might sum up their objectives as being the administration of justice and …

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

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

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

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

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 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 …

The Medieval Globe 1 (2014) - Pandemic Disease In The Medieval World: Rethinking The Black Death, Monica H. Green, Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end?

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is …

Aaron Swartz’S Legacy, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

“Aaron Swartz’s Legacy,” Academe: Magazine of the American Association of University Professors 95(1): 19-23. Special issue on the “New Public Intellectual.” http://www.aaup.org/article/aaron-swartz%E2%80%99s-legacy#.UtZGm2RDtmk

Introducing The Medieval Globe, Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

The concept of “the medieval” has long been essential to global imperial ventures, national ideologies, and the discourse of modernity. And yet the projects enabled by this powerful construct have essentially hindered investigation of the world’s interconnected territories during a millennium of movement and exchange. The mission of The Medieval Globe is to reclaim this “middle age” and to place it at the center of global studies.

The Black Death And The Future Of The Plague, Michelle Ziegler

The Medieval Globe

This essay summarizes what we know about the spread of Yersinia pestis today, assesses the potential risks of tomorrow, and suggests avenues for future collaboration among scientists and humanists. Plague is both a re-emerging infectious disease and a developed biological weapon, and it can be found in enzootic foci on every inhabited continent except Australia. Studies of the Black Death and successive epidemics can help us to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks (and other pandemics) because analysis of medieval plagues provides a crucial context for modern scientific discoveries and theories. These studies prevent us from stopping at easy answers, …

Taking "Pandemic" Seriously: Making The Black Death Global, Monica H. Green

The Medieval Globe

This essay introduces the inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe, “Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death”. It suggests that the history of the pathogen Yersinia pestis, as it has now been reconstructed by molecular biology, allows for an expanded definition of the Second Plague Pandemic. Historiography of the Black Death has hitherto focused on a limited number of vector and host species, and on Western Europe and those parts of the Islamicate world touching the Mediterranean littoral. Biological considerations suggest the value of a broadened framework, one that encompasses an enlarged range of host species and …

The Anthropology Of Plague: Insights From Bioarcheological Analyses Of Epidemic Cemeteries, Sharon N. Dewitte

The Medieval Globe

Most research on historic plague has relied on documentary evidence, but recently researchers have examined the remains of plague victims to produce a deeper understanding of the disease. Bioarcheological analysis allows the skeletal remains of epidemic victims to bear witness to the contexts of their deaths. This is important for our understanding of the experiences of the vast majority of people who lived in the past, who are not typically included in the historical record. This paper summarizes bioarcheological research on plague, primarily investigations of the Black Death in London (1349–50), emphasizing what anthropology uniquely contributes to plague studies.

Plague Persistence In Western Europe: A Hypothesis, Ann G. Carmichael

The Medieval Globe

Historical sources documenting recurrent plagues of the “Second Pandemic” usually focus on urban epidemic mortality. Instead, plague persists in remote, rural hinterlands: areas less visible in the written sources of late medieval Europe. Plague spreads as fleas move from relatively resistant rodents, which serve as “maintenance hosts,” to an array of more susceptible rural mammals, now called “amplifying hosts.” Using sources relevant to plague in thinly populated Central and Western Alpine regions, this paper postulates that Alpine Europe could have been a region of plague persistence via its population of wild rodents, particularly the Alpine marmot.

Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes And Medieval Plague: An Invitation To A New Dialogue Between Historians And Immunologists, Fabian Crespo, Matt B. Lawrenz

The Medieval Globe

Efforts to understand the differential mortality caused by plague must account for many factors, including human immune responses. In this essay we are particularly interested in those people who were exposed to the Yersinia pestis pathogen during the Black Death, but who had differing fates—survival or death—that could depend on which individuals (once infected) were able to mount an appropriate immune response as a result of biological, environmental, and social factors. The proposed model suggests that historians of the medieval world could make a significant contribution to the study of human health, and especially the role of human immunology in …

The Creation And Transmission Of Justinian's Novels, Timothy G. Kearley

Timothy G. Kearley

Response To Francis Oakley, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Guilds, Laws, And Markets For Manufactured Merchandise In Late-Medieval England, Gary Richardson

Gary Richardson

The prevailing paradigm of medieval manufacturing presumes guilds monopolized markets for durable goods in late-medieval England. The sources of the monopolies are said to have been the charters of towns, charters of guilds, parliamentary statutes, and judicial precedents. This essay examines those sources, demonstrates they did not give guilds legal monopolies in the modern sense of the word, and replaces that erroneous assumption with an accurate description of the legal institutions underlying markets for manufactures in medieval England.

The Ius Commune, Suretyship, And Magna Carta, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Due Process, Community, And The Prince In The Evolution Of The Ordo Iudiciarius, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.