Global medieval history

The thousand-year period often known as the Middle Ages (roughly 500-1500 C.E.) was a period of vibrant life and sometimes violent change. In diverse societies, people worked to understand their place in the world, and how they might best live in it. Many questions medieval people asked--for instance, how religious belief should relate to social order--are questions we are still asking and answering today. Through lectures, readings, and most of all through class discussion, we will explore topics in political, religious, social, economic, and gender history. Because our learning is a shared endeavor, you will be expected to attend and participate in class regularly.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity.

Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages.

Essays by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Sussan Babaie, Roland Betancourt, Jerry Brotton, Jill Caskey, Kristen Collins, Morgan Conger, Michelle Craig, Mark Cruse, James Cuno, Eyob Derillo, Soren Edgren, Elizabeth Eisenberg, Tushara Bindu Gude, Sylvie L. Merian, Byron Hamann, Melanie Holcomb, Kaiqi Hua, Alexandra Kaczenski, Bryan C. Keene, Rheagan Eric Martin, Asa Simon Mittman, Megan O’Neil, Alka Patel, Pamela A. Patton, Alexander West.

Featuring 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Article about the reception of a putative volcanic dust veil across Europe in September 1465 and the hypothesis it might be the infamous Kuwae eruption, long time dated to 1452, now recently to 1458. The contribution aims to reconstruct the possible impact of the eruption in the second half of the 1460s, but makes also clear that it might be wrong to assume all volcanic mega eruptions behaved like Tambora 1815. Finally the article puts forward the assumption (and gives examples) that volcanic events of the kind might be a good starting point for a medieval environmental history with global aspects.

Bauch, Martin, The Day the Sun Turned Blue. A Volcanic Eruption in the Early 1460s and its Possible Climatic Impact – a Natural Disaster Perceived Globally in the Late Middle Ages?, in: Schenk, Gerrit J. (Hg.), Historical Disaster Experiences. A Comparative and Transcultural Survey between Asia and Europe, Heidelberg 2017, S. 107-138.

See full volume here: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319491622

Global Medieval Contexts 500–1500: Connections and Comparisons provides a unique wide-lens introduction to world history during this period. Designed for students new to the subject, this textbook explores vital networks and relationships among geographies and cultures that shaped medieval societies. The expert author team aims to advance a global view of the period and introduce the reader to histories and narratives beyond an exclusively European context.

Key Features:

Divided into chronological sections, chapters are organized by four key themes: Religion, Economics, Politics, and Society. This framework enables students to connect wider ideas and debates across 500 to 1500.
Individual chapters address current theoretical discussions, including issues around gender, migration, and sustainable environments.
The authors’ combined teaching experience and subject specialties ensure an engaging and accessible overview for students of history, literature, and those undertaking general studies courses.
Theory boxes and end-of-chapter questions provide a basis for group discussion and research. Full-color maps and images illustrate chapter content and support understanding.
As a result, this text is essential reading for all those interested in learning more about the histories and cultures of the period, as well as their relevance to our own contemporary experiences and perspectives.

This textbook is supported by a companion website providing core resources for students and lecturers.

This second part of the study of Daoist seals focuses on types, building on Wang Yucheng’s earlier studies. They come in four: 1) seal script; 2) heavenly scripts; 3) talisman-inspired; and 4) graphic. The underlining criterion is the Daoist strategy of image-making: it sheds light on the interlocking relationship of Daoist texts and images. The first type is purely script-based, while the fourth is purely graphic. Between the two is the core zone of Daoist visual culture as it blends image with text.

Global Medieval Travel Writing: A Literary History addresses the need for an authoritative literary history of medieval travel accounts and geographical reports from the beginning of the Middle Ages to the Reformation. This will be the first pan-European, Middle Eastern, and global guide through the bewildering maze of medieval travel narratives. The History will also strive for comprehensiveness: its 40+  chapters will cover texts from the entire Continent and from the Middle East, including a majority of European and Middle Eastern writing traditions and literary languages. Each chapter will be written by a leading specialist in his or her geographical area. At the same time, the geographical scope of this collection, with chapters on travel writing produced by Persian, Arabic, and Chinese writers, will challenge the term ‘(late) medieval’ and Western periodisation from the outset. Using the dates 1200 and 1550 CE as boundaries for a global period of intercultural and intercontinental contact, the volume (despite its European epicentre) will not attempt to interpret ‘medieval’ beyond marking a chronological spectrum.

Published in: Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, ed. by A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız, all at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ashgate 2015 (http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9781472448637&lang=cy-gb)

The ports and coastal zones constituted the most important points of interaction between the interior of Anatolia and the Mediterranean world; only along the 600 km long coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, for instance, medieval sources list almost 100 ports and landing places.  With the (anew) advance of the Seljuks towards the coast (conquest of Attaleia/Antalya in 1207, conquest of Sinope in 1214) and the increasing presence of Italian merchants in the harbours of the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Levant, maritime Asia Minor became a zone of intensive contacts between Byzantines (after 1204 in the exile realms of Nicaea and Trebizond), Armenians (in the Kingdom of Cilicia), Turks, Persians and Arabs (in the Sultanate of Konya) and “Latins” respectively “Franks”, thus also between Orthodox, Oriental and Western Churches as well as Islam (in its various denominations). With the fragmentation of Seljuk central power after the defeat against the Mongols in 1243 into various Emirates and their expansion especially into Western Asia Minor towards the Aegean and the establishment of Italian colonies (including “Catholic” bishoprics) in coastal towns and offshore islands (e. g. the Genoese on Chios and in Phokaia/Foça) and of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, the number of zones of interaction, but also conflict increased (relocation of crusading efforts towards the Aegean in the 14th century, for instance). At the same time, Venetians and Genoese integrated all these locations and regions as hubs and nodes into their commercial networks and into the late medieval “World System”.  With the Ottoman Expansion, these territories were absorbed into one imperial framework once more (as it has existed under Byzantine rule until the 11th century), which finally also included the remaining western colonies (Rhodes in 1522/1523, Chios in 1566, Cyprus in 1571). During this period, “no other region of Europe or the Mediterranean became a cynosure of so many ethnicities in such a small place”.
Some of these aspects, such as the intensive trade between Venetian Crete and the Emirates in South-western Anatolia or the Genoese and the Turks in the 14th and 15th century , the military conflict between Crusaders and Turks in the Aegean  or the establishment of Latin monastic communities and bishoprics in the region  have already been analysed in greater detail. The same is true for aspects of religious transformations (especially conversions to Islam) in the region in the early modern period  as well as in late medieval centuries, but less so for maritime aspects of the organisation, identity and dynamics of various religious groups.  A view from the sea towards the coasts of Anatolia also opens a new perspective away from a “continental” overlapping of competing territorial claims towards a sum of potential nodal points within the late medieval network of socioeconomic interactions, which often modified or even overcame lines of religious, ethnic or political differentiation.
As we demonstrate in this paper, there existed various and manifold channels of encounters across religious border in maritime Asia Minor; their systematic survey and mapping contributes to a further embedding of the processes of political, economic and religious transformation in Anatolia in these centuries within the late medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world, complementary to already existing projects just as “The Islamisation of Anatolia” (https://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk/).

This essay synthesizes the perspectives of eleven participants in a colloquium that brought together experts in medieval language and culture, second-language acquisition, and video game production to assess the use of three-dimensional (3D) immersive environments for learning about inaccessible or lost cultures. We suggest that technology offers a unique method for experiencing the past; and when harnessed effectively, immersive environments can increase empathy and learning while appealing to a new generation of students. The global Middle Ages were a highly visual period during which objects, images, and public performance played an outsized role in supporting communicative and representational strategies.

»Der politische Aspekt im Islamischen Denken des Mittelalters«. Global intellectual history has attracted traction in the past decade, but the field remains focused on the modern period and the diffusion of Western political concepts, ideologies, and methodologies. This paper suggests that juxtaposing political texts from the medieval Islamic world with their Christian counterparts will allow for a better understanding of the contours of the debate on the space for politics, framed in primary sources as the perennial tug of war between religious and lay authority. The implications of this line of inquiry for the history of European political thought are significant as well. Many of the premises and characteristics that are considered singularly European, such as continuity between past and present, as well as a strong performative regard to political thought, are equally present in non-European (in this instance Islamic) debates. It is more a matter of perspective than essence that distinguishes the history of European political thought, and a wider perspective through juxta-position of texts and concepts would enhance the global debate by introducing new questions from rarely visited quarters.

Abstract: The aim of this study is to revisit Lullian literature, to evaluate its appropriation by nationalism and demonstrate the importance of understanding its globality. We will prioritize the global and Mediterranean aspects of this literary corpus, with emphasis on its transculturality, transmission, translation, and adaptation. To do so, we will examine the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, the Blaquerna, and the Book of Marvels.

This essay synthesizes the perspectives of eleven participants in a colloquium that brought together experts in medieval language and culture, second-language acquisition, and video game production to assess the use of three-dimensional (3D) immersive environments for learning about inaccessible or lost cultures. We suggest that technology offers a unique method for experiencing the past; and when harnessed effectively, immersive environments can increase empathy and learning while appealing to a new generation of students. The global Middle Ages were a highly visual period during which objects, images, and public performance played an outsized role in supporting communicative and representational strategies.

Interview for the Website of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/detail/news/karl-der-grosse-und-der-kaiser-von-china/

Die Spätantike war nicht nur durch ein einziges globales Zentrum geprägt. Der ÖAW-Historiker Johannes Preiser-Kapeller schreibt in seinem aktuellen Buch eine neue Globalgeschichte-und lässt dabei die eurozentrische Perspektive hinter sich.

The Department of Art, St. George campus, and the Tri-Campus Graduate Program in the History of Art are pleased to announce that they are embarking on a Getty Foundation-funded Connecting Art Histories project, "Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History," in partnership with the School of Arts and Humanities at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA). Through a program of exchange teaching and funded fieldtrips for faculty and students at both institutions to sites in China and Sicily, this project aims to develop connective and comparative understandings of medieval art and art history in China and North America. In this way it seeks to establish durable links between scholars and graduate students of medieval art, broadly conceived, in both regions, thus contributing to the worldwide growth of the discipline of art history.

Tanaïs at the mouth of the river Don was the most important trading post of the Venetians in the Northern Black Sea and a city of many religious and ethnic groups; fortunately, notarial records for the period September 1359-August 1360 allow us to reconstruct its religious and ethnic environment in greater detail. Under the sovereignty of the Golden Horde, Tanaïs attracted in this period many merchants from Venice and its hinterland as well as its colonies, but also many other Italians as well as Catalans from the far west of the Mediterranean. In addition, we also find also “Greek” traders from Constantinople and Trebizond, other orthodox Christians from Russia and Alania, Armenians from Diaspora communities in the Black Sea region as well as from Armenia proper, Jewish merchants and Muslim merchants, some of them subjects of the Golden Horde, but also from Eastern Anatolia and Tabrīz in the Ilkhanid realm (see picture 1). This mosaic becomes even more multifaceted if we look at the places of origin of the most important commodity traded in Tanaïs: slaves. Most of them originated from the immediate hinterland of the city, but we also encounter Russian, Greek, Armenian and Jewish slaves as well as one Chinese girl. As Francesco Pegolloti in the 1330s informs us in his famous handbook of trade, Tanaïs was also the starting point for Italian merchants who intended to travel to Cathay (China; see picture 2). Thus, the hub of Tanaïs was a perfect basis for a hierarch overseeing such a widespread flock as the one of Alania.

Cf. also: J. Preiser-Kapeller, Webs of conversion. An analysis of social networks of converts across Islamic-Christian borders in Anatolia, South-eastern Europe and the Black Sea from the 13th to the 15th cent. International Workshop: „Cross-Cultural Life-Worlds In Pre-Modern Islamic Societies: Actors, Evidences And Strategies“, University of Bamberg (Germany), 22-24 June 2012. (online: http://www.academia.edu/1243539/Webs_of_conversion._An_analysis_of_social_networks_of_converts_across_Islamic-Christian_borders_in_Anatolia_South-eastern_Europe_and_the_Black_Sea_from_the_13th_to_the_15th_cent)

»Der politische Aspekt im Islamischen Denken des Mittelalters«. Global intellectual history has attracted traction in the past decade, but the field remains focused on the modern period and the diffusion of Western political concepts, ideologies, and methodologies. This paper suggests that juxtaposing political texts from the medieval Islamic world with their Christian counterparts will allow for a better understanding of the contours of the debate on the space for politics, framed in primary sources as the perennial tug of war between religious and lay authority. The implications of this line of inquiry for the history of European political thought are significant as well. Many of the premises and characteristics that are considered singularly European, such as continuity between past and present, as well as a strong performative regard to political thought, are equally present in non-European (in this instance Islamic) debates. It is more a matter of perspective than essence that distinguishes the history of European political thought, and a wider perspective through juxta-position of texts and concepts would enhance the global debate by introducing new questions from rarely visited quarters.