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The late antique and early medieval Mediterranean was characterized by wide-ranging cultural and linguistic diversity. Yet, under the influence of Christianity, communities in the Mediterranean world were bound together by common concepts of good rulership, which were also shaped by Greco-Roman, Persian, Caucasian, and other traditions. This collection of essays examines ideas of good Christian rulership and the debates surrounding them in diverse cultures and linguistic communities. It grants special attention to communities on the periphery, such as the Caucasus and Nubia, and some essays examine non-Christian concepts of good rulership to offer a comparative perspective. As a whole, the studies in this volume reveal not only the entanglement and affinity of communities around the Mediterranean but also areas of conflict among Christians and between Christians and other cultural traditions. By gathering various specialized studies on the overarching question of good rulership, this volume highlights the possibilities of placing research on classical antiquity and early medieval Europe into conversation with the study of eastern Christianity.
The contributions in this volume deal with crucial subjects of political and theological dialogue and controversy that characterized the varying responses of the Christian communities in the Byzantine Eastern provinces to the Islamic conquest and its subsequent impact on Byzantine society and history.
A collection of essays from leading historians which explores the ways in which history was written in Europe and Asia between 400 and 1400.
The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, Syriac Christians wrote the first and most extensive accounts of Islam, describing a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic. Through its critical introductions and new translations of this invaluable historical material, When Christians First Met Muslims allows scholars, students, and the general public to explore the earliest interactions between what eventually became the world’s two largest religions, shedding new light on Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations.
Islam and the People of the Book features three dozen scholarly studies on the treaties that the Prophet Muhammad concluded with Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Zoroastrian communities, along with translations of Six Covenants of the Prophet in over a dozen languages. The combined effort of over forty-five academics, intellectuals, and translators from around the world, this work powerfully confirms the conclusions drawn by Dr John Andrew Morrow in his critically-acclaimed book on The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World, offers unprecedented insight into the original intent of the Messenger of God, and sheds light on the pluralistic nature of the constitutional state that he created.
This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to the inner dynamic of Islamic states without becoming a resource of political integration. Similarly, the political role of religion also differed between the emerging post-Roman worlds. Anybody interested in the development of the post-Roman Mediterranean, but also in the relationship between the Islamic World and the West, will gain new insights from these studies on the political role of ethnicity and religion.
Scholars have recognized that fake news is not a phenomenon peculiar to the 21st century. While efforts for a more focused approach to fake news in the ancient world have been carried out in the field of Roman history, the phenomenon of fake news in ancient Greece has received limited attention. The contributions in this volume offer a selective approach to this phenomenon by applying media and cultural studies instruments to ancient texts. They pinpoint parallels and differences between ancient and modern fake news by employing methods of literary and cultural studies, as well as historical-documentary analysis of ancient sources. In particular, they explore questions such as: To what exten...
The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.
This volume presents the results of the Leiden project on the identity formation of the Syrian Orthodox Christians, which developed from a religious association into an ethnic community. A number of specialists react to the findings and discuss the cases of the East Syrians, Armenians, Copts, and Ethiopians.
This study develops a methodology for approaching homilies that draws on a broader understanding of audience as both the physical audience and the readership of sermons. It then offers a case study on the Syriac preacher Jacob of Serguh whose metrical homilies form one of the largest sermon collections in any language from late antiquity.