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This landmark volume combines classic and revisionist essays to explore the historiography of Sardinia’s exceptional transition from an island of the Byzantine empire to the rise of its own autonomous rulers, the iudikes, by the 1000s. In addition to Sardinia’s contacts with the Byzantines, Muslim North Africa and Spain, Lombard Italy, Genoa, Pisa, and the papacy, recent and older evidence is analysed through Latin, Greek and Arabic sources, vernacular charters and cartularies, the testimony of coinage, seals, onomastics and epigraphy as well as the Sardinia’s early medieval churches, arts, architecture and archaeology. The result is an important new critique of state formation at the margins of Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West with the creation of lasting cultural, political and linguistic frontiers in the western Mediterranean. Contributors are Hervin Fernández-Aceves, Luciano Gallinari, Rossana Martorelli, Attilio Mastino, Alex Metcalfe, Marco Muresu, Michele Orrù, Andrea Pala, Giulio Paulis, Giovanni Strinna, Alberto Virdis, Maurizio Virdis, and Corrado Zedda.
Set on the Italian island of Sardinia, Sing Me Back Home explores language and culture through songwriting as an ethnographic method. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork writing songs with Sardinian musicians, artisans, shepherds, poets, and language activists, Kristina Jacobsen asks: How are Sardinian lives and language ideologies narrated against the backdrop of American music? The book shows how Sardinian musicians sing their own history between the lines. It reveals how Sardinian songs become a site of transduction where, through the process of songwriting, recording, and performance, the energy from one genre of music and lingua-culture is harnessed to signal another one much closer to home. Sing Me Back Home is accompanied by original songs written and recorded in the field, with links to songs in each chapter. It includes songwriting prompts and lyrics, a glossary of key terms, and photographs from the field. Drawing on work from critical collaborative research, auto-ethnography, public anthropology, arts-based research, and ethnographic poetry, this sensory ethnography offers new ways for us to hear culture through stories and songs.
The Crown of Aragon. A Singular Mediterranean Empire recovers the history of an empire which was of great importance in the late medieval Mediterranean, but which has since been relegated almost to oblivion by the course of history. The Crown of Aragon was a Mediterranean crossroads: between west and east for the economy, and between north and south for culture and religion, drawing in many different peoples, covering Iberia to Greece. A new vision of the Crown of Aragon as a framework of overlapping identities facilitates its historiographical recovery, showcased in the chapters of this volume which analyse the economy, institutions, social evolution, political strategy and cultural expression in literature and art of the Crown of Aragon. Contributors are David Abulafia, Lola Badia, Xavier Barral-i-Altet, Pere Benito, Maria Bonet, Jesús Brufal, Alessandra Cioppi, Damien Coulon, Luciano Gallinari, Isabel Grifoll, Adam J. Kosto, Esther Martí-Setañés, Sebastiana Nocco, Antoni Riera, Flocel Sabaté and Antoni Simon.
The first English-language survey of medieval and modern Sardinia, this volume offers access to long-awaited European scholarship on a critical missing link in the Mediterranean. Based on new archaeological fieldwork and current research from a variety of academic perspectives— architecture, colonialism, ecclesiastic history, cartography, demography, law, musicology, politics, trade, and urban planning—the authors provide the foundation to incorporate Sardinia into a broader European history. Among other contributions, archaeology adds critical insight into the relationship between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish inhabitants of Sardinia, through examinations of urban and rural settlement patterns. This volume aims to stimulate further analysis of the critical role Sardinia has played as one of the largest and most strategically located islands in the Mediterranean. Contributors are Laura Biccone, Nathalie Bouloux, Henri Bresc, Marco Cadinu, Roberto Coroneo, Laura Galoppini, Henrike Haug, Michelle Hobart, Rossana Martorelli, Giampaolo Mele, Marco Milanese, Giovanni Murgia, Gian Giacomo Ortu, Daniela Rovina, Olivetta Schena, Cecilia Tasca, Raimondo Turtas, and Corrado Zedda.
Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were frequently moving between North America - specifically, the United States and British North America - and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests, and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New World passed between travellers through word of mouth and letter writing. Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic challenges the idea that national origin - for instance, Italianness - constitutes the only significant feature of a group's identity, revealing instead the multifaceted personalities of the people involved in these exchanges.
This volume offers insights into the nature of warfare, diplomacy and peacemaking on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and the influences and entanglements resulting from these processes. The essays collected here emphasize both violent conflict and the brokering of allegiances and settlements, either within polities and common endeavours or between rival entities (such as the taifas of Seville and Badajoz in the fractious eleventh century). The volume begins with an account of Muslim warlords who sought service under Christian rulers in the tenth century and their historiographical fates, and embraces the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, from its western coast, in an analysis of the tightrope walked by the Galician monastery of Oia in maintaining its Portuguese domains at times of bitter conflict between Castile and its neighbour, to its eastern coast, as Catalan and Aragonese merchants coped with pirates and state-sponsored confiscation in the fifteenth century.
For almost sixty years Professor David Jacoby devoted his research to the economic, social and cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean and this new collection reflects his impact on the study of the interactions between the Italian city-states, Byzantium, the Latin East and the realm of Islam. Contributors to this volume are prominent scholars from across Medieval Studies and leading historians of the younger generation.
Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history. Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources in all relevant languages - narrative, homiletic and documentary - in trustworthy editions, but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades appears in both print and online editions.
An award-winning historian reconstructs the life of Francis of Assisi and his medieval world, uncovering the man behind the myths
This book investigates how minorities contributed to medieval society, comparing these contributions to majority society’s perceptions of the minority. In this volume the contributors define ‘minority’ status as based on a group’s relative position in power relations, that is, a group with less power than the dominant group(s). The chapters cover both what modern historians call ‘religious’ and ‘ethnic’ minorities (including, for example, Muslims in Latin Europe, German-speakers in Central Europe, Dutch in England, Jews and Christians in Egypt), but also address contemporary medieval definitions; medieval writers distinguished between ‘believers’ and ‘infidels’, betwe...