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"Studies the reconstruction of Byzantine Constantinople as the capital city of the Ottoman empire following its capture in 1453, delineating the complex interplay of socio-political, architectural, visual, and literary processes that underlay the city's transformation"--Provided by publisher.
This study is the first to examine the history and composition of the library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār (d. 1804), the famous governor of northern Palestine in the late eighteenth century, on the basis of the inventory of the library’s holdings. The chapters in the first volume situate the library, one of the largest in Palestinian history prior to the end of the nineteenth century, in its historical context, examine the materiality of the collection based on a study of the extant manuscripts and other historical sources, and analyse the contents of the library. The second volume consists of a facsimile of the inventory, a critical edition and index.
Book Comment from Leeds University "Dear X, Cool! How about senile, this has 2 letters less than demented? Do I have your approval now? All best wishes Shyam" "Look forward to it too. I just think suffering from dementia" sounds so much more sympathetic than "demented" but as you say you are straight to the point. I don't think I disagree with the substance of anything you say, ..as ever."
"This book investigates daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, the dawn of the Ottoman era, through the many ways in which humans experience food. This includes meals and the social interactions that they entail, of course, but also the production activities of peasants and gardeners, the exchanges of food between the common folk, merchants and the state, and the religious landscape that unfolds around food-related beliefs and practices. Using an array of sources ranging from hagiographies to archaeology and from Sufi poetry to endowment deeds, the resulting study presents a broad picture of a society's daily life and worldviews through the multiplicity of its interactions with food, in a style that both scholars and non-specialists will enjoy"--
It would not be an overstatement to say that Cemal Kafadar has transformed the field of Ottoman history. As a result of his pathbreaking books and articles, the field is experiencing a turn within itself as well as recasting its relationship with world history. This volume acts as a tribute to Kafadar and the important interdisciplinary work he has both done and inspired in the field. In line with the intellectual pluralism that Kafadar has cultivated over his career, readers will find a number of articles engaging with a wide range of questions, approaches, perspectives, and sources across Ottoman history. Kafadar's students and friends, individually or in pairs, researched and crafted contributions to this volume with a variety of conceptual premises, theoretical approaches, and interpretive tools to celebrate his thirty years of teaching, research, and mentorship, in addition to the overwhelming generosity of his intellectual and personal engagement.
The study of the family is one of the major lacunas in Byzantine Studies. Angeliki Laiou remarked in 1989 that ’the study of the Byzantine family is still in its infancy’, and this assertion remains true today. The present volume addresses this lacuna. It comprises 19 chapters written by international experts in the field which take a variety of approaches to the study of the Byzantine family, and embrace a chronological span from the later Roman to the late Byzantine empire. The context is established by chapters focusing on the Roman roots of the Byzantine family, the Christianisation of the family, and the nature of the family in contemporaneous cultures (the late antique west and the...
Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Aṭā’ī (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices ...
A study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the sultan's harem in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire.
In A Brief History of History, acclaimed historian Jeremy Black seeks to reinvigorate and redefine our ideas about history. The stories we tell about the past are a crucial aspect of all cultures. However, while the traditional storytelling process—what we think of as "history" in the proper sense—is useful, it is also misleading, not least because it leads to the repetition of bias and misinformation. Black suggests that the conventional idea of history and historians is constructed too narrowly, as it fails to engage with the broad nature of lived experience. By focusing on a singular idea or story within the history being explored, we fail to understand the interconnectivity of the everyday experience. A Brief History of History challenges accepted norms of the historical perspective and offers a view of human history that will surprise many and (perhaps) infuriate some. But above all, it is a history of historians written for this moment in time, a time when the traditional Eurocentric approach to history now appears wholly inappropriate.
Church Architecture of Late Antique Northern Mesopotamia examines the church architecture of Northern Mesopotamia between the fourth and eighth centuries. Keser Kayaalp draws attention to several aspects ranging from the small scale to the large, focusing on settlements, the variety of plan types, the remarkable continuity of the classical tradition in the architectural decoration, the heterogeneity of the building techniques, patrons, imperial motivations, and stories that claim and make spaces. Employing archaeological and epigraphical material and hagiographical and historical sources, a holistic picture of the church architecture of this frontier region emerges, encompassing the cities o...