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The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids
For over a millennium and a half, Egypt was home to at least two commonly used languages of communication. Although this situation is by no means exceptional in the ancient and medieval worlds, the wealth of documentary sources preserved by Egypt's papyri makes the country a privileged observation ground for the study of ancient multilingualism. One of the greatest contributions of papyri to this subject is that they capture more linguistic registers than other ancient and medieval sources, since they range from very private documents not meant by their author to be read by future generations, to official documents produced by the administration, which are preserved in their original form. T...
Becoming Byzantine
Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium presents detailed information about children's lives, and provides a basis for further study. This collection of eight articles covers matters relevant to daily life such as the definition of children in Byzantine law, procreation, death, breastfeeding patterns, and material culture.
Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond
The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally spiritual one, the papers seek to isolate the behaviours and circumstances that made conversion both such a common and such a contested phenomenon. The spread of Buddhism in Asia in broadly the same period serves as an external comparator that was not caug...
Writing 'true Stories'
The papers in this volume examine the interaction between history and hagiography in the late antique and medieval Middle East, exploring the various ways in which the two genres were used and combined to analyse, interpret, and re-create the past. The contributors focus on the circulation of motifs between the two forms of writing and the modifications and adaptations of the initial story that such reuse entailed. Beyond this purely literary question, the retold stories are shown to have been at the centre of a number of cultural, political, and religious strategies, as they were appropriated by different groups, not least by the nascent Muslim community. Writing 'True Stories' also foregrounds the importance of some Christian hagiographical motifs in Muslim historiography, where they were creatively adapted and subverted to define early Islamic ideals of piety and charisma.
Living the End of Antiquity
This volume covers the transition period stretching from the reign of Justinian I to the end of the 8th century, focusing on the experience of individuals who lived through the last decades of Byzantine rule in Egypt before the arrival of the new Arab rulers. The contributions drawing from the wealth of sources we have for Egypt, explore phenomena of stability and disruption during the transition from the classical to the postclassical world.
The Material and the Ideal
Reflecting the diverse interests of Jean-Michel Spieser, his colleagues, students and friends contribute papers focused on topics ranging from the changing role of the apse and the layout of late antique basilicas to holy relics said to have been brought from Constantinople. Many of the articles address the nature and impact of specific media - goldsmiths' work, ivory and ceramics - while a group of highly original, broader studies is devoted to such larger issues as ritual display in the tenth century, the metaphorical significance of pottery and an interrogation of the supposed influence of Byzantine icons on Western medieval art. Throughout, the achievement of the authors is to move from concrete observations of particular objects to the larger meaning they held for those who commissioned and made use of them.
Būluṣ ibn Rajāʾ
In eleventh-century Egypt, the Christian convert Būluṣ ibn Rajāʾ composed The Truthful Exposer critiquing Islam. This publication includes a study of Ibn Rajāʾ’s biography, his impact on Christian approaches to Islam, and an Arabic edition with English translation of his work.
Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds
Through words and images employed both by individuals and by a range of communities across the Graeco-Roman worlds, this book explores the complexity of multilingual representations of identity. Starting with the advent of literacy in the Mediterranean, it encompasses not just the Greek and Roman empires but also the transformation of the Graeco-Roman world under Islam and within the medieval mind. By treating a range of materials, contexts, languages, and temporal and political boundaries, the contributors consider points of cross-cultural similarity and difference and the changing linguistic landscape of East and West from antiquity into the medieval period. Insights from contemporary multilingualism theory and interdisciplinary perspectives are employed throughout to exploit the material fully.
