Journal of Medieval Worlds最新文献

{"title":"An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism","authors":"Geraldine Heng","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100003","url":null,"abstract":"An ordinary ship and its cargo can tell the story of far-flung global markets, human voyaging, and early industrialization in China that supplied exports to the world. Sometime after 825 CE an Arab dhow set sail from the port of Guangzhou in coastal south China, having unloaded its goods from the Near East, and reloaded with some estimated 70,000 ceramics and other items, on its return voyage to the Abbasid empire. Taking the route that has been called “the maritime silk road,” this hand-sewn ship made of planks fastened with coconut fiber (without any nails) seems to have decided to offload some cargo first in maritime Southeast Asia, perhaps intending to pick up a secondary cargo of spices, resins, and aromatics for which the Indonesian islands were famed. The dhow sank near the island of Belitung, at a reef called Batu Hitam (“Black Rock”).\u0000 Fifty-five thousand ceramic wares, along with gold and silver ornaments, ingots, mirrors, ewers, vases, jars, cups, incense burners, boxes, flasks, bottles, graters, and the like—and two objects that may have been children’s toys, and a re-soldered gold bracelet sized for a woman’s wrist—were excavated intact in 1998, and are housed at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. This ninth-century dhow is the only ship of its kind ever recovered, though hand-sewn ships that plied the Indian Ocean are described in travel accounts from as early as the first-century CE. The dhow is a remarkable example of the global ships carrying people, goods, ideas, religion, and culture, which knit the world into relationship along transoceanic routes. Its vast trove of ceramics is the earliest physical evidence attesting the industrial production of ceramics in China for export to foreign markets as early as the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Designs painted on the great majority of the ceramic wares were favored in the export market, not in China.\u0000 Part of the trove includes prototypes of blue-and-white ceramics for which China would become famous 400 years later: ceramic experiments that feature Iraqi designs attesting global interrelationships in art and the exchange of ideas. The crews of ships such as this one were multiracial, multireligious, and assembled from everywhere: The cargo, knowledges, and stories these diverse, anonymous voyagers helped to transfer across the world transform our understanding of scale, time, and globalism.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129822808","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: Imagining Chinese Medicine edited by Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett","authors":"Miranda Brown","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100008","url":null,"abstract":"Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett, eds. Imagining Chinese Medicine , Brill, 2018. Pp. xxii, 519, + 339 plates. $144; ISBN 1570-1484; 978-90-04-35511-1.\u0000\u0000It would be impossible to do justice to Imagining Chinese Medicine . The editors, Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett, have united scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America to provide the first sustained look at the intersection of visual culture and healing in China. By visual culture, I am referring to a wide variety of material related to the body: drawings, diagrams, color illustrations, advertisements, photographs, and cartoons, to name but a few. This volume is thus a formidable undertaking and reflects more than a decade of collaborative work.\u0000\u0000The 35 essays and two general introductions are intentionally wide-ranging. The editors have adopted a broad understanding of both China and medicine. “China” refers not only to the imagination of a state centered in the Yellow River Valley, but also a geographic mass that incorporated people of different ethnicities, religious, and linguistic persuasions. By “medicine,” they mean the multiplicity of strategies that people have used to understand and cure the broken human (or animal) body, as well as to promote vitality and to preserve health. The essays thus consider not only practitioners of the learned classical tradition, but also religious healers, veterinarians, Daoist practitioners, and adherents of sexual cultivation. The essays also span many centuries, mediums, and languages, from the Shuangbaoshan figurines and Mawangdui illustrations of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 CE), …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125140177","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":"Why We Need to Think About the Global Middle Ages","authors":"P. Frankopan","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100002","url":null,"abstract":"Medieval history has become synonymous with the study of western Europe. This article argues that it is important to widen the geographic focus to better understand the Middle Ages as a whole, and in doing so, counter Eurocentric views of the past that have dominated and shaped views of the past. At a time of profound global change today, it is worth reflecting on how and why other regions and cultures have been pushed into the shadows, and why it is imperative to show them now in new light.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128055868","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: Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference edited by Ryan Szpiech","authors":"D. Wacks","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100009","url":null,"abstract":"Ryan Szpiech, ed. Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean , New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 329. $55; ISBN 978-0-8232-6462-9.\u0000\u0000Ryan Szpiech’s volume contains thirteen essays on different aspects of medieval exegesis in the context of religious disputation, polemic, and co-existence. Some essays focus on the points of intersection between exegetical traditions, others on specific polemics, and still others on individual authors’ strategies in negotiating conversion, disputation, or coexistence. The essays are grouped into four thematic sections.\u0000\u0000The first section, “Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam,” contains essays on individual Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors writing in the Islamicate world and how they negotiate the relationship between the three exegetical traditions. Sarah Stroumsa, in “The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus” (29-39), presents two Andalusi views of Abraham as a paragon of the scientist. Both draw on material from outside the religious tradition of the author; the Muslim Ibn Masarra uses ideas from Jewish mysticism of Abraham as a bearer of special knowledge, while the Jew Maimonides borrows Islamic historiographical traditions of Abraham as a man of science.\u0000\u0000Sidney Griffith’s “Ibn al-Mahrumah’s Notes in Ibn Kammunah’s Examination of the Three Religions : The Issue of the Abrogation of Mosaic Law” (40-57) is a fascinating study of a polemic study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam authored by a Christian exegete and glossed by a Jewish scholar. They provide two different views (Jewish and Christian) on the question of the abrogation of Mosaic law as a basis for Christian theology.\u0000\u0000In “Al-Biqa’i seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic relationship with the Bible” (58-70), Walid …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"abs/2307.14642 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125283900","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: Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss","authors":"N. Latteri","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100007","url":null,"abstract":"Tzahi Weiss. Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 196. $59.95. ISBN: 9780812249903.\u0000\u0000The Hebrew text known as the Sefer Yeṣirah , or Book of Formation , has piqued the interest of scholars of early medieval Jewish philosophy and those of central- to late-medieval Jewish mysticism and magic for centuries. In Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Tzahi Weiss extends interest in this text to scholars of early medieval Jewish mysticism, magical praxis, and Jewish-Christian relations. Through an exploration of Sefer Yeṣirah ’s specific methods of letter speculation, grammar, and textual reception, Weiss presents a two-pronged argument. First, he contends that the much-debated compositional context of the Sefer Yeṣirah was most likely 7th-century Christian Syria. And, second, that early readers of the Sefer Yeṣirah understood it as a mystical and magical treatise long before the late 12th century, as is commonly assumed.\u0000\u0000Weiss divides his slim volume into an introduction, five chapters, an epilogue, and two appendices. The first appendix addresses scholarly arguments that the Sefer Yeṣirah originated in the Abbasid world and was influenced by Arabic grammar; the second appendix provides a Hebrew transcription of an 11th-century recension of the Sefer Yeṣirah (Ms. Vatican 299/4) that Weiss bases his arguments on, accompanied by Peter A. Hayman’s English translation. Along with a review of scholarship treating the text and a statement of Weiss’ departure from, indebtedness to, and contributions to the field, the Introduction provides a quick summary of the contents of the Sefer Yeṣirah as a treatise describing God’s formation of the world from numbers …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126266178","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":"Stories of the New Geography","authors":"Helen Barr","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100005","url":null,"abstract":"The Refugee Tales project holds a distinctive place amongst 20th and 21st century responses to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The project comprises collections of tales published in textual editions alongside a politically embodied campaign to call an end to the practice of indefinite detention of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The tales that are told take the form of an established writer giving voice to those that are caught up in this inhuman process. Some of the oral narratives come from refugees, some from care-workers and supporters, and some from from those caught up in the institutional processes of bureaucracy. These tales are heard and rehearsed on an annual walk that appropriates the pilgrimage route to a new geography that contests political space and its confinements. The project as a whole captures the spirit and purpose of Chaucer’s work. While engagement with textual detail is intermittent, but probing where it appears, this body of work, as Chaucer’s did, gives voice to those whose voices are unheard. The Refugee Tales pick up on how Chaucer integrated a narrative about England into an international geography—though with a difference. While Chaucer sets his stories chiefly outside the shores of England for literary purposes, The Refugee Tales appropriate the space of England to create a borderless nation that is hospitable to persons from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and in fact a whole international diaspora of nations whose people have become displaced. The Refugee Tales takes its inspiration from Chaucer not to produce a quaint exercise in medievalism or to update his work as a solely intellectual exercise. This project engages minds, body, creativity and political will. International in its remit, it frees the Father of English poetry to kick over the traces of borders that would separate nation from nation, children from parents, and human beings from each other. The Refugee Tales digs deep into the spirit of the medieval past to face up to a pressing and urgent global challenge.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128234401","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: The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach edited by Izumi Shimada","authors":"S. Arbeláez","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100010","url":null,"abstract":"Izumi Shimada, ed. The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. 392. $75.00; ISBN: 978-0-292-76079-0.\u0000\u0000The Inka Empire or Tawantinsuyu (the Quechua name for the “realm of four parts”) was the largest political system to develop in the New World. Tawantinsuyu extended over 2,000,000 square kilometers and encompassed at least 86 ethnic groups from Argentina and Chile to the current border between Ecuador and Colombia. Intriguingly, the Inka ruled their empire without wheeled technologies, markets, money, or phonetic writing systems. Instead, they kept the records of the empire in a complex system of knotted strings called khipus . For that reason, much of what we know of this interesting polity comes from post-conquest sources.\u0000\u0000This breathtaking collaborative volume, edited by Izumi Shimada, seeks to offer a holistic vision of the Inka empire, placing different disciplines, methods, sources, and perspectives in dialogue. It includes 19 chapters by 23 authors that consider linguistic and genetic evidence along with material culture and historical documents to study Inka origins, imperial infrastructure, administrative strategies, agricultural technology, accounting, architecture and landscape intervention, and political organization, among other aspects.\u0000\u0000The volume is divided into five parts, prefaced by a useful introductory chapter by Shimada that lays out the book’s aims and …","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125127243","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":"Building Medieval Worlds","authors":"J. Fleisher","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100006","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a course that I developed and co-taught with Dr. John Hopkins at Rice University in the spring of 2014, entitled “Virtual Reconstruction of Historic Cities.” In this course, student teams worked to digitally reconstruct ancient Roman and Swahili buildings. The final products followed from a semester-long engagement with research on these pasts, working with archaeological and textual sources, draft iterations of buildings, then digitally modelling the structures and building them into 3D worlds in open-source gaming software. In this paper, I describe the background to the course, how it was organized, and how the course unfolded.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128320951","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":"Holy War in Ibn Khaldūn","authors":"Javier Albarrán","doi":"10.1525/JMW.2019.100004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JMW.2019.100004","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to compare the different conceptions of holy war in Islam and Christianity by way of its depiction by Muslim sources, and to examine if the Islamic context would have conceived of a war carried out by Christians, and therefore infidels, as a holy one. This leads to analysis of whether the Islamic idea of holy war could be understood as a transcultural one or if, on the contrary, its sole conception was limited to those actions carried out by Muslims. To that end, Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 1406) Kitāb al-‘Ibar will be used as a case study, in which his famous Muqaddima serves as its introduction. The choice of this source is based on two considerations: it is one of the most important and influential historiographical works of the Islamic world; and Ibn Khaldūn maintains a universalist vision of history and its processes, and therefore specifically aims to be cross-cultural.","PeriodicalId":118510,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Worlds","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125338694","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}