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The twenty-four studies in this volume propose a new approach to framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women, moving beyond today's standard division of artist from patron.
Portrait of an Eighth-Century Gentleman. Khālid ibn Ṣafwān in History and Literature by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila is an in-depth study of the eighth-century Umayyad and early Abbasid orator and courtier Khālid ibn Ṣafwān and the development of his character in adab literature. The book collects and translates all his sayings and stories about him culled from a wide range of Arabic and Persian texts. In the book, Hämeen-Anttila studies the mechanisms of change in early narratives, showing how Arabic anecdotes developed and were modified by a series of authors during both their oral and literary transmission, changing a historical person into a literary character. Detailed chapters discuss Khālid in his various roles and analyse the literary techniques of the stories.
This book offers a study of what and how people ate in the Iberian Peninsula between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. It has long been recognized that Mediterranean cultures attach great importance to communal meals and food cooked with great refinement. However, whilst medieval feasting in England, France and Italy has been thoroughly studied, Spain and Portugal have both been somewhat neglected in this area of study. This volume analyses how medieval men of the Iberian Peninsula questioned themselves about different aspects deemed important in social feasting. It investigates the acquisition of table manners and rhetorical skills, the interaction between medicine and eating, and the presence of food in literature and religion. The book also shows how this shared society and culture, as well as their attitude towards food, connected them to a Western European tradition. The book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in food and feasting from the perspectives of literature, history, language, art, religion and medicine, and to those interested in a social, cultural and literary overview of life in the Iberian Peninsula during the late Middle Ages.
In twenty-five chapters by leading scholars, this volume propagates a nuanced understanding of Byzantine "literature", highlighting key problems, and presenting basic research tools for an audience of specialists and non-specialists.
This book investigates the geopolitics and strategic dimensions of US-American foreign policy during George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's presidential terms. Based on a vast amount of empirical and historical sources, the author offers deep insights into the recent political developments ('Arabellions') along the axis of Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, situating them in the context of the global geopolitical and geo-economical Great Game, either latent or overt, between USA/NATO and Russia. The author also analyses the influence of the US on these historical and political processes in the last two decades.
Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.
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In the ninth century, Vikings carried out raids on the Christian north and Muslim south of the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), going on to attack North Africa, southern Francia and Italy and perhaps sailing as far as Byzantium. A century later, Vikings killed a bishop of Santiago de Compostela and harried the coasts of al-Andalus. Most of the raids after this date were small in scale, but several heroes of the Old Norse sagas were said to have raided in the peninsula. These Vikings have been only a footnote to the history of the Viking Age. Many stories about their activities survive only in elaborate versions written centuries after the event, and in Arabic. This book reconsiders the Arabic material as part of a dossier that also includes Latin chronicles and charters as well as archaeological and place-name evidence. Arabic authors and their Latin contemporaries remembered Vikings in Iberia in surprisingly similar ways. How they did so sheds light on contemporary responses to Vikings throughout the medieval world.
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