Journal of Medieval Worlds最新文献

{"title":"Verifying Source Citations in the Hadith Literature","authors":"Mairaj U. Syed, Danny Halawi, Behnam Sadeghi, N. Saquib","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130002","url":null,"abstract":"Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134165088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indigenous Scripts in Mesoamerica and the Andes","authors":"S. Arbeláez","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130006","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reviews two recent contributions to the history of indigenous writing systems in Mesoamerica and the Andes: Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots and Mary Miller and Barbara Mundy’s Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"179 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124447920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Sense of Distance and the Perception of the Other","authors":"David R. Blanks","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130003","url":null,"abstract":"The following is a broad reflection on medieval travel and the ways in which western Christians encountered and imagined non-Christians and non-Europeans. It is interdisciplinary and multivalent, and it considers a variety of sources, both historical and literary, from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. An especial emphasis is placed upon the ways in which these sources—including material objects—were disseminated, “read,” and interpreted. In addition to presenting an overview of who travelled and why, where they went, and how they conveyed themselves, the principle aim of this essay is to demonstrate the wide variety of medieval responses to cross-cultural encounters. Medieval people were neither simplistic nor one-sided, and they often changed their minds, not only as the result of real-life interactions with foreign peoples, but also sometimes as the result of hearing or reading about them. Included are observations about the ways in which people at all levels of medieval society, including the illiterate and untraveled, perceived the “other.”","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116871447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Global and Gendered Perspectives on the Production of a Parisian Alms Purse, c. 13401","authors":"Sharon Farmer","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130004","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on recent technical analyses of an exquisite embroidered French alms purse that now resides at the Musée des Tissus et Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, this article argues that the purse, which was probably embroidered in Paris in the early 1340s, represents the culmination of the efforts of dozens of men and women on three different continents. Some of the women who worked in the fields where the flax was grown were simple day laborers, but many of the other men and women—both rural peasants and urban artisans—possessed specific technical knowledge and manual skills that could take years to perfect. Indeed, it took a global village of many talented individuals to create a fourteenth-century luxury alms purse from Paris. The article also explores the ecological impact of the extraction and processing of some of the raw materials that were employed in the purse.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116991205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embracing a Global Middle Ages","authors":"Philip M. Soergel","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130001","url":null,"abstract":"As I understand them, the Journal of Medieval Worlds has at least four goals. First, it aims to publish research that expands upon the concept of a “global Middle Ages.” The editors seek contributions, in other words, that both illuminate traditional Western European medieval studies from a global perspective as well as scholarship that treats parts of the world outside the traditionally accepted boundaries of medieval history in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Here, we have been particularly anxious to receive contributions that treat Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, as well as pieces that are thought provoking and make theoretical contributions to our understanding of this larger vision of the medieval period. Second, the journal aims to publish work that is comparative, setting the findings from one geographical or chronological space alongside another in an effort to make new observations about each. Third, we have been particularly interested to support research that illuminates traditional questions and problems—the migrations of peoples, the transmissions of texts, the development of social networks, to name just a few—through new methods. From the first, our discussions about the journal’s brief pointed to the growing body of research that draws upon new scientific methods like DNA analysis in the quest to deepen understanding of the movement of peoples, or the possibilities that computer-assisted research offers to mine large data sets. And finally, the journal is committed not just to the publication of original research, but to expanding readers’ understanding of best practices in pedagogy related to global studies and the Middle Ages.\u0000\u0000This issue offers something that speaks to all these goals. The first piece, “Verifying Source Citations in the Hadith Literature” by Mairaj Syed, Danny Halawi, Behnam Sadeghi, and Nazmus Saquib, reports on their efforts to evaluate the reliability of Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128078599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage and Christian Community in Early Islam by Lev Weitz","authors":"D. Powers","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130007","url":null,"abstract":"Lev Weitz. Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage and Christian Community in Early Islam . Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 352 pages, 6 illustrations. ISBN 978-0-8122-5027-5. $65.\u0000\u0000Historians of Islam during its formative period have a strong tendency to focus their attention on Muslim elites—who were a minority—at the expense of non-Muslim subjects of the caliphate—who were a majority. In Between Christ and Caliph , Lev Weitz reframes the historical narrative about the emergence of Islam by placing non-Muslims at the center of this narrative, with special attention to the field of law. He argues that Christian, Muslim, and other elites were part of what Hodgson called an “Islamicate” culture that was shared by all subjects of the caliphate. He asks: How did Christians respond to Islamic legal institutions and practices and what effect did this response have on legal institutions and communal identity? He answers: Islamic imperial governance motivated Syriac Christian elites to modify their communal institutions and to redefine their identity as religious communities by creating a new Christian law that treated obligations between husbands, wives, and other family members as defined by new rules relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the household ( baytā ). The argument unfolds in three parts of uneven length that are framed by an introduction and conclusion: Part I, Empire, Household, and Christian Community from Late Antiquity to the Abbasid Caliphate (chapters 1–3); Part II, Christian Family Law in the Making of Caliphal Society and Intellectual Cultures (chapters 4–8); and Part III, Islamic Family Law and Christian Jurists after Imperial Fragmentation (chapter 9). Each chapter begins with a short selection from a Christian legal source that exemplifies the problematic of that chapter.\u0000\u0000In Chapter 1 Weitz reviews the position of the Church on monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage as reflected in the New Testament, second-century church orders, and the proceedings of ecumenical synods in the fourth and fifth centuries, followed by a review of Christian marriage practices in Byzantium and …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114480373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield","authors":"P. Frankopan","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130008","url":null,"abstract":"Susan Whitfield. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas. Material Culture of the Silk Road . Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 339. ISBN: 9780520 281783. $29.95. paperback.\u0000\u0000“This is a book about things on the Silk Road,” writes Susan Whitfield at the start of this engaging, well-researched and informative survey of one of the most famous exchange networks in world history that linked East Asia with Europe and North Africa. “Things or objects speak to us,” says the author, helping to “create a narrative.”\u0000\u0000Telling history through material culture has become popular in recent years. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas provides an excellent example of why that is the case. Whitfield selects ten objects (or more accurately nine, plus an “unknown slave” who stands for the countless slaves whose lives were spent in one or more location along the Silk Roads) and uses each not only to talk about the individual artefact, manuscript, or text, but to set out investigations of much bigger topics too—such as maritime trade connections, literacy, the importance of the horse to Central Asia and China, or about the role of slavery, which after “marriage, family and religion” is arguably “the most ubiquitous social institution in human history.”\u0000\u0000Whitfield’s approach of zooming in close to look at the production, use, and meaning of individual pieces, but setting them within wider contexts, is highly effective. It works so well because as the author is careful …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116079983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Tepahtia","authors":"M. Cooley","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130005","url":null,"abstract":"This pedagogical article discusses sources and methods for teaching the history of imperial science and medicine in the Nahua world from 1400 to 1600, a period that ranges from the spectacular growth of the Aztec Empire through the conquest to the creation of New Spain. By providing students tools to explore non-European ontologies and world-building, this article presents several exercises in which students act as archival researchers and themselves puzzle out the complexities of information transfer in the archive of sixteenth-century Latin America. Combining European paleography workshops, linguistic tools pioneered by the IDIEZ Nahuatl program, the study of Mesoamerican archeological objects, and an engagement with Mexican medicinal plants to recreate early modern remedies, students gain access to a world of New Spanish knowledge-creation.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134237587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat by Aparna Kapadia","authors":"Keith E. Cantú","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130010","url":null,"abstract":"Aparna Kapadia. In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat . Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, New Delhi, and Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hardback. 183 + x pages.\u0000\u0000How does one exactly praise a king? Aparna Kapadia, Assistant Professor of History at Williams College, reminds us in her book that a satisfactory answer to this question requires a critical examination of who composed the praise, and to what end. As Kapadia points out, the Mughal emperors are typically thought to have been the first to integrate Sanskrit, Persian, and Indic vernacular poetic conventions to enhance their prestige among their diverse communities of subjects. However, the wealth of scholarship on Mughal courtly patronage often obscures the fact that these developments had already begun to take place in previous centuries, especially in Gujarati literature composed during what she calls a “century of transitions” between 1398 and 1511 C.E. (3). Her rigorous examination of primary source materials and royal chronicles, together with her astute analyses of Mughal, colonial, and contemporary-era histories of this period, allow for a vivid understanding of a compelling world in which Rajput chieftains and Muzaffarid sultans—an independent dynasty of Gujarati sultans that reigned between the rule of the Delhi sultanate and Mughal empire—vied for power and control in the region. Her study of the fluid religious identities of Hindus, Muslims, and …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128209141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan edited by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott","authors":"Morten Oxenboell","doi":"10.1525/jmw.2019.130009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130009","url":null,"abstract":"Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott, eds. Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan . Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2018. 570 pages. ISBN 978-0824872939. $64.95. Land, Power, and the Sacred is a welcome introduction to a topic that has not received its due attention by English-writing historians for far too long, and it does it in an inspiring and informative way. While the medieval Japanese estate system has been discussed extensively by Japanese historians, very few scholars in the West have taken on the task of discussing the estate system in detail, so the publication of this important anthology is cause for celebration. As the introductory and first chapters, as well as the last historiographical chapter of the volume all suggest, the paucity of research or teaching material on the Japanese estate system might be due to the fact that it has often been seen as boring and unengaging, buried deep in dry tax ledgers and land surveys. Outside the contexts of political maneuvers of the elite and the land struggles of the emerging warrior class, the estate system has langured for many years. This anthology edited by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott does an amazing job at filling this gap by providing overarching arguments about the estate system as an historiographical concept as well as close studies of individual estates. It is a thorough and hermeneutic study that is weakened only by the obvious challenges of being within an anthology where the relations between micro-level findings are picked up and used for more generalizing arguments only with difficulty. The anthology is the physical product of a conference held at University of Southern California in 2012 on various aspects of the premodern Japanese estates as well as of the collaborative efforts of a group of scholars and graduate students at USC working on the Ōbe estate and its connection to the monk Chōgen. This focus is carried over into the anthology, where 8 …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125777586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}