Learning in a Crusader City

Learning in a Crusader City
Author: Jonathan Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2018-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316947106

Did the Crusades trigger significant intellectual activity? To what extent and in what ways did the Latin residents of the Crusader States acquire knowledge from Muslims and Eastern Christians? And how were the Crusader states influenced by the intellectual developments which characterized the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? This book is the first to examine these questions systematically using the complete body of evidence from one major urban centre: Acre. This reveals that Acre contained a significant number of people who engaged in learned activities, as well as the existence of study centres housed within the city. This volume also seeks to reconstruct the discourse that flowed across four major fields of learning: language and translation, jurisprudence, the study of Islam, and theological exchanges with Eastern Christians. The result is an unprecedentedly rich portrait of a hitherto neglected intellectual centre on the Eastern shores of the medieval Mediterranean.

Crusader Castles and Modern Histories

Crusader Castles and Modern Histories
Author: Ronnie Ellenblum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2007-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139462555

For the last 150 years the historiography of the Crusades has been dominated by nationalist and colonialist discourses in Europe and the Levant. These modern histories have interpreted the Crusades in terms of dichotomous camps, Frankish and Muslim. In this revisionist study, Ronnie Ellenblum presents an interpretation of Crusader historiography that instead defines military and architectural relations between the Franks, local Christians, Muslims and Turks in terms of continuous dialogue and mutual influence. Through close analysis of siege tactics, defensive strategies and the structure and distribution of Crusader castles, Ellenblum relates patterns of crusader settlement to their environment and demonstrates the influence of opposing cultures on tactics and fortifications. He argues that fortifications were often built according to economic and geographic considerations rather than for strategic reasons or to protect illusory 'frontiers', and that Crusader castles are the most evident expression of a cultural dialogue between east and west.

New Medieval Literatures 21

New Medieval Literatures 21
Author: Wendy Scase
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-03-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1843845865

New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Jerusalem Falls

Jerusalem Falls
Author: John D. Hosler
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300268696

The first full account of the medieval struggle for Jerusalem, from the seventh to the thirteenth century The history of Jerusalem is one of conflict, faith, and empire. Few cities have been attacked as often and as savagely. This was no less true in the Middle Ages. From the Persian sack in 614 through the bloody First Crusade and beyond, Jerusalem changed hands countless times. But despite these horrific acts of violence, its story during this period is also one of interfaith tolerance and accord. In this gripping history, John D. Hosler explores the great clashes and delicate settlements of medieval Jerusalem. He examines the city’s many sieges and considers the experiences of its inhabitants of all faiths. The city’s conquerors consistently acknowledged and reinforced the rights of those religious minorities over which they ruled. Deeply researched, this account reveals the way in which Jerusalem’s past has been constructed on partial histories—and urges us to reckon with the city’s broader historical contours.

Multilingualism and History

Multilingualism and History
Author: Aneta Pavlenko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009236253

Shattering the cliché 'our world is more multilingual than ever before', this book offers the first comprehensive history of our multilingual past.

A Pious Belligerence

A Pious Belligerence
Author: Uri Zvi Shachar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812253337

"This is a book about how Near Eastern communities clustered around pious warfare as a set of literary conventions and how these dialogical conventions infiltrated the semantics of contemporary authors"--

Crusader Castles

Crusader Castles
Author: Hugh Kennedy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1994
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780521799133

A general illustrated account of the history and architecture of Crusader castles.

Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory

Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory
Author: A. Edward Siecienski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190065060

"In 1576, as the Protestant Reformation continued to sweep across Western Europe and Catholic prelates tried to stem the tide through diligent application of Trent's reforming agenda, the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Charles Borromeo (1538-84) penned a letter to his clergy. In order to restore the Church to its former glory, he enjoined his "beloved brethren" to "bring back good observances and holy customs which have grown cold and been abandoned over the course of time." Chief among them, he wrote, was the custom, which although ancient, had been "practically lost nearly everywhere in Italy . . . I mean the practice that ecclesiastical persons not grow, but rather shave the beard, . . .a custom of our Fathers, almost perpetually retained in the Church" that was "replete with mystical meanings.""--