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This volume presents the first substantial exploration of crusading and masculinity, focusing on the varied ways in which the symbiotic relationship between the two was made manifest in a range of medieval settings and sources, and to what ends. Ideas about masculinity formed an inherent part of the mindset of societies in which crusading happened, and of the conceptual framework informing both those who recorded the events and those who participated. Examination and interrogation of these ideas enables a better contextualised analysis of how those events were experienced, comprehended and portrayed. The collection is structured around five themes: sources and models; contrasting masculiniti...
How were the Crusades, and the crusaders, narrated, described, and romanticised by the various communities that experienced or remembered them? This Companion provides a critical overview of the diverse and multilingual literary output connected with crusading over the last millennium, from the first writings which sought to understand and report on what was happening, to contemporary medievalism, in which crusading is a potent image of holy war and jihad. The chapters show the enduring legacy of the crusaders' imagery, from the chansons de geste to Walter Scott, from Charlemagne to Orlando Bloom. Whilst the crusaders' hold on Jerusalem was relatively short-lived, the desire for Jerusalem has had a long afterlife in many cultural contexts and media.
This book examines slavery in India from the Turkish conquest of North India to the centuries of Mughal rule. It focuses on the northern Islamic regimes’ treatment of slavery but not limited or determined by the actions and demands of the ruling class alone. Societies normalized the practices, and the norms were socially constituted, which included slaves’ acceptance, resistance, and use of agency in the process. It shows how the transformations on the ground made the social-economic and ethical environment of slavery no longer the same over the centuries and the expansion or contraction of slavery corresponded to the structural changes and ethical developments specific to the Indian milieu. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, history and slavery.
This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.
First modern study devoted to one of the twelfth-century's most enigmatic, influential and fascinating figures.
This collection of studies investigates how people of the 10th to early 12th century experienced and represented processes of intentional change in the Church, and what the consequences are of modern scholars’ reliance on ‘reform’ to describe and interpret these processes. In 11 thematic chapters it takes stock of the current state of research and offers suggestions to deepen our understanding of the ideological, institutional, and cultural dynamics at play. Contributors are Julia Barrow, Robert F. Berkhofer III, Gordon Blennemann, Katy Cubitt, Nicolangelo D'Acunto, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Ludger Körntgen, Rutger Kramer, Brigitte Meijns, Diane Reilly, Rachel Stone, and Steven Vanderputten.
In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.
Images of Miraculous Healing in the Early Modern Netherlands explores the ways in which paintings and prints of biblical miracles shaped viewers’ approaches to physical and sensory impairments and bolstered their belief in supernatural healing and charitable behavior. Drawing upon a vast range of sources, Barbara Kaminska demonstrates that visual imagery held a central place in premodern disability discourses, and that the exegesis of New Testament miracle stories determined key attitudes toward the sick and the poor. Addressed to middle-class collectors, many of the images analyzed in this study have hitherto been neglected by art historians. Link to book presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79jHEmTOKnU
Introducing a new geographical paradigm for the study of medieval music, this path-breaking book uncovers the role of music, liturgy, and ritual in building Venice's empire in the eastern Mediterranean, activating the city's material culture, and shaping its state-craft of the imagination.
A study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the sultan's harem in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire.