Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1049426
Ann Chamberlin
co-religionists in Africa. The book closes with a conclusion and is accompanied by an extensive forty-page bibliography and a comprehensive index. It is impossible to do justice to this finely-argued and richly-evidenced book in such a short review. Although the book’s specific arguments will no doubt provoke continued debate and further research, its overall thesis that Roman cultural identity was paradigmatic throughout the period is highly convincing and will hopefully inform studies of “long” late antiquity elsewhere in the post-Roman West.
{"title":"Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam","authors":"Ann Chamberlin","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1049426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1049426","url":null,"abstract":"co-religionists in Africa. The book closes with a conclusion and is accompanied by an extensive forty-page bibliography and a comprehensive index. It is impossible to do justice to this finely-argued and richly-evidenced book in such a short review. Although the book’s specific arguments will no doubt provoke continued debate and further research, its overall thesis that Roman cultural identity was paradigmatic throughout the period is highly convincing and will hopefully inform studies of “long” late antiquity elsewhere in the post-Roman West.","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"35 1","pages":"174 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77572866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1049431
Bettina Koch
{"title":"To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages","authors":"Bettina Koch","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1049431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1049431","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"40 1","pages":"181 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86692734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1049427
Sabahat F. Adil
Maribel Fierro's The Almohad Revolution features fourteen articles based on her previously-published work on the Almohads (Arabic al-Muwaḥḥidūn). In addition to the articles, the volume contains a ...
{"title":"The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries","authors":"Sabahat F. Adil","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1049427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1049427","url":null,"abstract":"Maribel Fierro's The Almohad Revolution features fourteen articles based on her previously-published work on the Almohads (Arabic al-Muwaḥḥidūn). In addition to the articles, the volume contains a ...","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"42 1","pages":"176 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83111970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1049432
Christopher Heath
This monograph analyses the central significance of Amalfi as not only a trading entrepot in the early and central Middle Ages but also as a fundamental point of contact between cultures and politi...
{"title":"Medieval Amalfi and its Diaspora 800–1250","authors":"Christopher Heath","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1049432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1049432","url":null,"abstract":"This monograph analyses the central significance of Amalfi as not only a trading entrepot in the early and central Middle Ages but also as a fundamental point of contact between cultures and politi...","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"6 1","pages":"183 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86657158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1049435
B. Catlos
The Mozarabs, long-neglected in the historiography of medieval Spain, have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention of late. No episode in their obscure history is more compelling that of the “voluntary martyrs” of Córdoba: the fortyeight Christian men and women who were put to death between 236/850 and 245/859 on charges of deliberate blasphemy or technical apostasy, and the two figures at the centre of the movement: St Eulogius of Córdoba (who was among the martyrs), and Paul Alvar, his layman friend and memorialist (who chose life). Long held by Catholic and nationalist historians to be emblematic of a broad Spanish, Christian resistance in the face of the Islamic domination of Hispania, the movement has been the subject of well-deserved revisions from the perspective of intellectual and social history, notably by Kenneth Baxter Wolf and Jessica Coope. Meanwhile, others, particularly Thomas Burman, have been subjecting the religious writings and intellectual culture of later period Mozarabs (post-1050) to careful analysis. Tieszen’s Christian Identity fills a space between these two approaches to the martyrs and the Mozarabs, by focusing primarily on the ninth century, but taking a Burman-like turn, subjecting the polemical and theological works of Alvar and his contemporaries to a much-overdue reexamination. Indeed, it is Tieszen’s intention not to use the polemics to plumbMuslim–Christian relations, but rather to explore these “authors’ Christian identity in the light of Islam”
{"title":"Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain","authors":"B. Catlos","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1049435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1049435","url":null,"abstract":"The Mozarabs, long-neglected in the historiography of medieval Spain, have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention of late. No episode in their obscure history is more compelling that of the “voluntary martyrs” of Córdoba: the fortyeight Christian men and women who were put to death between 236/850 and 245/859 on charges of deliberate blasphemy or technical apostasy, and the two figures at the centre of the movement: St Eulogius of Córdoba (who was among the martyrs), and Paul Alvar, his layman friend and memorialist (who chose life). Long held by Catholic and nationalist historians to be emblematic of a broad Spanish, Christian resistance in the face of the Islamic domination of Hispania, the movement has been the subject of well-deserved revisions from the perspective of intellectual and social history, notably by Kenneth Baxter Wolf and Jessica Coope. Meanwhile, others, particularly Thomas Burman, have been subjecting the religious writings and intellectual culture of later period Mozarabs (post-1050) to careful analysis. Tieszen’s Christian Identity fills a space between these two approaches to the martyrs and the Mozarabs, by focusing primarily on the ninth century, but taking a Burman-like turn, subjecting the polemical and theological works of Alvar and his contemporaries to a much-overdue reexamination. Indeed, it is Tieszen’s intention not to use the polemics to plumbMuslim–Christian relations, but rather to explore these “authors’ Christian identity in the light of Islam”","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"6 1","pages":"185 - 187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85333718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1002230
Jonathan P. Conant
Abstract The Italo-Byzantine sources for Aghlabid Ifrīqiya present a vision of Muslim–Christian relations in the region that is often darkly violent, and that contrasts with the image of this time and place found not only in the Arabic accounts, but even in most contemporary Latin Christian ones. Critically, however, the Byzantine texts most concerned with violence in the Aghlabid amirate comprise a small but important collection of hagiographic narratives about Sicilian and southern Italian Christians carried off into slavery by North African raiders. Indeed, in the third/ninth century, the Byzantine central Mediterranean was particularly hard-hit by raiding staged from lands under Muslim control, and Ifrīqiya appears to have been the market of choice for slaves captured in expeditions of this sort. North African society was doubtless characterised by some degree of interfaith tension in the Aghlabid period; but far more central to the violent vision of the Byzantine sources is the fact that hagiography provided a narrative space within which authors and audiences alike could grapple with anxieties about the possibility of capture and its physical and spiritual consequences.
{"title":"Anxieties of Violence: Christians and Muslims in Conflict in Aghlabid North Africa and the Central Mediterranean*","authors":"Jonathan P. Conant","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1002230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1002230","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Italo-Byzantine sources for Aghlabid Ifrīqiya present a vision of Muslim–Christian relations in the region that is often darkly violent, and that contrasts with the image of this time and place found not only in the Arabic accounts, but even in most contemporary Latin Christian ones. Critically, however, the Byzantine texts most concerned with violence in the Aghlabid amirate comprise a small but important collection of hagiographic narratives about Sicilian and southern Italian Christians carried off into slavery by North African raiders. Indeed, in the third/ninth century, the Byzantine central Mediterranean was particularly hard-hit by raiding staged from lands under Muslim control, and Ifrīqiya appears to have been the market of choice for slaves captured in expeditions of this sort. North African society was doubtless characterised by some degree of interfaith tension in the Aghlabid period; but far more central to the violent vision of the Byzantine sources is the fact that hagiography provided a narrative space within which authors and audiences alike could grapple with anxieties about the possibility of capture and its physical and spiritual consequences.","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"63 1","pages":"23 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82103476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1002243
J. Van Steenbergen
{"title":"Trading Conflicts: Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Officials in Late Medieval Alexandria","authors":"J. Van Steenbergen","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1002243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1002243","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"23 1","pages":"104 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76024857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1002237
James Doherty
{"title":"Cultural Encounters during the Crusades","authors":"James Doherty","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1002237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1002237","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"80 1","pages":"93 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82304072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1002232
J. Wood
Abstract The Christian martyr movement of 850s Córdoba has received considerable scholarly attention over the decades, yet the movement has often been seen as anomalous. The martyrs’ apologists were responsible for a huge spike in evidence, but analysis of their work has shown that they likely represented a minority “rigorist” position within the Christian community and reacted against the increasing accommodation of many Mozarabic Christians to the realities of Muslim rule. This article seeks to place the apologists, and therefore the martyrs, in a longer-term perspective by demonstrating that martyr memories were cultivated in the city and surrounding region throughout late antiquity, from at least the late fourth century. The Cordoban apologists made active use of this tradition in their presentation of the events of the mid-ninth century. The article closes by suggesting that the martyr movement of the 850s drew strength from churches dedicated to earlier martyrs from the city and that the memories of the martyrs of the mid-ninth century were used to reinforce communal bonds at Córdoba and beyond in the following years. Memories and memorials of martyrdom were thus powerful means of forging connections across time and space in early medieval Iberia.
{"title":"Persecution, Past and Present: Memorialising Martyrdom in Late Antique and Early Medieval Córdoba*","authors":"J. Wood","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1002232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1002232","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Christian martyr movement of 850s Córdoba has received considerable scholarly attention over the decades, yet the movement has often been seen as anomalous. The martyrs’ apologists were responsible for a huge spike in evidence, but analysis of their work has shown that they likely represented a minority “rigorist” position within the Christian community and reacted against the increasing accommodation of many Mozarabic Christians to the realities of Muslim rule. This article seeks to place the apologists, and therefore the martyrs, in a longer-term perspective by demonstrating that martyr memories were cultivated in the city and surrounding region throughout late antiquity, from at least the late fourth century. The Cordoban apologists made active use of this tradition in their presentation of the events of the mid-ninth century. The article closes by suggesting that the martyr movement of the 850s drew strength from churches dedicated to earlier martyrs from the city and that the memories of the martyrs of the mid-ninth century were used to reinforce communal bonds at Córdoba and beyond in the following years. Memories and memorials of martyrdom were thus powerful means of forging connections across time and space in early medieval Iberia.","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"21 1","pages":"41 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86295337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2015.1002238
G. Archer
in the last chapter, Turner's attempt to contextualize heresy trials is welcome, but the result is a mixed bag, again because of errors and confusions. For example, he argues that al-Mutawakkil's actions, '[c]ontrary to the usual understanding', do not define him as a Eanbal; (p. 135). But the real reason that the caliph cannot have been a Eanbal; is that, in the mid-third/ninth century, no one could be a Eanbal; (as Turner himself knows, since he quotes Christopher Melchert to that effect some seven pages later). In his conclusion, Turner asserts that, after al-Mutawakkil, no single group of sectarians could gain 'a decisive advantage. .. in determining normativity' (p. 149). But why assume that sectarians want everyone to agree with them? Declaring others out of bounds need not be about 'determining normativity'; it is just as likely to be about ensuring the purity of one's little group of faithful. In the early Islamic case, many sectarians both before and after al-Mutawakkil seem to have been content to follow their own truth and thereby ensure their own salvation. Whether others followed them or not was in most cases a matter of indifference. Of course Turner is right when he notes that caliphs were a special case: in theory at least, they were responsible for the salvation of the whole umma. But no doctrine of the imamate requires the imam to persuade others to join him. Rather, imami creeds make believers responsible for identifying and following the imam. This, pace Turner, is how the early caliphs seem to have understood their role. This book is valuable for its attempt to fit caliphal interventions into a broader political narrative. The point that AAmad ibn Eanbal's trial was not a wild divergence from the norm is well taken, and serves as a welcome corrective to arguments made by other scholars, including me. Here I should add that Turner has kind things to say about my work, for which I am grateful. But the book suffers from too many problems of definition to provide the revisionist history it promises. Under the influence of Protestant notions of religiosity, scholarship has long prioritized the inner experience and spirituality of the convert in studies of religious change. More recently, academics have historicized the very notion of conversion and put a greater emphasis on social and political dimensions as well 338 book reviews
{"title":"Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic","authors":"G. Archer","doi":"10.1080/09503110.2015.1002238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2015.1002238","url":null,"abstract":"in the last chapter, Turner's attempt to contextualize heresy trials is welcome, but the result is a mixed bag, again because of errors and confusions. For example, he argues that al-Mutawakkil's actions, '[c]ontrary to the usual understanding', do not define him as a Eanbal; (p. 135). But the real reason that the caliph cannot have been a Eanbal; is that, in the mid-third/ninth century, no one could be a Eanbal; (as Turner himself knows, since he quotes Christopher Melchert to that effect some seven pages later). In his conclusion, Turner asserts that, after al-Mutawakkil, no single group of sectarians could gain 'a decisive advantage. .. in determining normativity' (p. 149). But why assume that sectarians want everyone to agree with them? Declaring others out of bounds need not be about 'determining normativity'; it is just as likely to be about ensuring the purity of one's little group of faithful. In the early Islamic case, many sectarians both before and after al-Mutawakkil seem to have been content to follow their own truth and thereby ensure their own salvation. Whether others followed them or not was in most cases a matter of indifference. Of course Turner is right when he notes that caliphs were a special case: in theory at least, they were responsible for the salvation of the whole umma. But no doctrine of the imamate requires the imam to persuade others to join him. Rather, imami creeds make believers responsible for identifying and following the imam. This, pace Turner, is how the early caliphs seem to have understood their role. This book is valuable for its attempt to fit caliphal interventions into a broader political narrative. The point that AAmad ibn Eanbal's trial was not a wild divergence from the norm is well taken, and serves as a welcome corrective to arguments made by other scholars, including me. Here I should add that Turner has kind things to say about my work, for which I am grateful. But the book suffers from too many problems of definition to provide the revisionist history it promises. Under the influence of Protestant notions of religiosity, scholarship has long prioritized the inner experience and spirituality of the convert in studies of religious change. More recently, academics have historicized the very notion of conversion and put a greater emphasis on social and political dimensions as well 338 book reviews","PeriodicalId":42974,"journal":{"name":"Al-Masaq-Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean","volume":"31 1","pages":"95 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73874112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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