Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

The Making of the Medieval Middle East
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 664

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisibl...

The Life of Simeon of the Olives
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 224

The Life of Simeon of the Olives

"The first ever critical edition and complete translation of the Syriac Life of Saint Simeon of the Olives, who was an abbot of Qartmin Monastery in Tur Abdin and a bishop of the city of Harran in the late seventh and early eighth century AD"--

Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 331

Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries

Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries forges a new conversation about the diversity of Christianities in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, centered on the history of practice, looking at liturgy, performance, prayer, poetry, and the material culture of worship. It studies prayer and worship in the variety of Christian communities that thrived from late antiquity to the middle ages: Byzantine Orthodoxy, Syrian Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East. Rather than focusing on doctrinal differences and analyzing divergent patterns of thought, the essays address common patterns of worship, individual and collective prayer, hymnography and liturgy, as well as the indi...

Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 325

Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq

Reveals a religiously diverse pre-industrial society in the Middle East, broadening studies of global Christianity and challenging Islamic history's exceptionalism.

Transformations of Romanness
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 712

Transformations of Romanness

Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.

Conversion to Islam
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 321

Conversion to Islam

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2021
  • -
  • Publisher: Unknown

During the first three centuries of Islamic rule, Muslims first articulated what it meant to become Muslim. In early Islamic sources, references to conversion describe an act of religious, political, and social transition. Conversion stories were an important way for historians to emphasize Allah at work in the Muslim community and to convey the unique qualities of Muhammad and the Qu'ran. In these texts, historians not only revealed the diverse nature of conversion and perceptions of it, but also illuminated their own religious debates, social concerns, political orientations, and ideological agendas. Conversion to Islam is the first scholarly study to identify and analyze these conversion themes in early Muslim historiographies.

Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 381

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.

Medieval Bodies
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 306

Medieval Bodies

A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fasci...

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 543

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2020-06-22
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography offers the first comprehensive introduction and scholarly guide to the cultural practice and literary genre of letter-writing in the Byzantine Empire.

Islamic Empires
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 413

Islamic Empires

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2019-08-29
  • -
  • Publisher: Penguin UK

'Outstanding, illuminating, compelling ... a riveting read' Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and swathes of the Indian subcontinent. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its cities unrivalled powerhouses of artistic grandeur, commercial power, spiritual sanctity and forward-looking thinking. Islamic Empires is a history of this rich and diverse civilization told through its greatest cities over fifteen centuries, from the beginnings of Islam in Me...