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This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the e...
There was no sharp break between classical and medieval map making. Contributions by thirteen scholars offer fresh insight that demonstrates continuity and adaptation over the long term. This work reflects current thinking in the history of cartography and opens new directions for the future.
The relationship of texts and maps, and the mappability of literature, examined from Homer to Houellebecq. Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature. The literary map is not merely an illustrati...
This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in dif...
In the last two decades, research on spatial paradigms and practices has gained momentum across disciplines and vastly different periods, including the field of medieval studies. Responding to this ’spatial turn’ in the humanities, the essays collected here generate new ideas about how medieval space was defined, constructed, and practiced in Europe, particularly in France. Essays are grouped thematically and in three parts, from specific sites, through the broader shaping of territory by means of socially constructed networks, to the larger geographical realm. The resulting collection builds on existing scholarship but brings new insight, situating medieval constructions of space in relation to contemporary conceptions of the subject.
Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain’s first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecía. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion. In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation. Her discussion sheds light on how clerics perceived themselves and on the connections between literature and these other activities. Drawing on an extensive collection of early cartographic materials, much of it rarely considered in conjunction with the romance, Pinet offers an original and insightful view of the mester de clerecía and the changing role of knowledge and the clergy in thirteenth-century Iberia.