Muslim Roma in the Balkans

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Wild Animals ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Roma entered the Balkans from India during the Middle Ages. They reached Persia sometime in the ninth century and by the eleventh century had moved into the Byzantine Empire. According to the eleventh-century Georgian Life of Saint George the Athonite, the Emperor Constantine Monomachus asked the Adsincani to get rid of wild animals preying on the animals in his royal hunting preserve. Adsincani is the Georgian form of the Greek word Atsínganoi or Atzínganoi, from which the non-English terms for Roma (cigán, cigány, tsiganes, zigeuner) are derived. Adsincani means “ner-do-well fortune tellers” or “ventriloquists and wizards who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown.” “Gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a term often used by early modern chroniclers in the Balkans to refer to the Roma. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice that surround the word “Gypsy,” the Roma prefer a name of their own choosing from their language, Romani. Today, it is preferable to refer to the Gypsies as Rom or “Roma,” a Romani word meaning “man” or “husband.” Byzantine references to “Egyptians” crop up during this period as Byzantine political and territorial fortunes gave way to the region's new power, the Ottomans. There were areas with large Roma populations in Cyprus and Greece which local rulers dubbed “Little Egypt” in the late fourteenth century.

Greek as the receiving language in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2017) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Erich Trapp
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractDuring its long history, the Byzantine Empire – a polity that stretched across a whole millennium – came into contact with many neighbouring cultures and languages in Europe, Asia and Africa. In addition to Latin, the most important languages that enriched the medieval Greek vocabulary were: French, Italian, Slavic, Arabic and Turkish. Loanwords occurred – to a greater or lesser extent – in the following areas: nature and landscape, household, government and administration, society, military, church and religion, law and jurisdiction, trade and traffic. Beyond that, there were certain spheres that were influenced by specific languages in particular: Italian left its mark on sailors’ language; Arabic on the natural sciences (medicine, alchemy, astrology and astronomy); and both Italian and Arabic on coins, measures, and weights.

Greek as the receiving language in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Erich Trapp
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractDuring its long history, the Byzantine Empire - a polity that stretched across a whole millennium - came into contact with many neighbouring cultures and languages in Europe, Asia and Africa. In addition to Latin, the most important languages that enriched the medieval Greek vocabulary were: French, Italian, Slavic, Arabic and Turkish. Loanwords occurred - to a greater or lesser extent - in the following areas: nature and landscape, household, government and administration, society, military, church and religion, law and jurisdiction, trade and traffic. Beyond that, there were certain spheres that were influenced by specific languages in particular: Italian left its mark on sailors’ language; Arabic on the natural sciences (medicine, alchemy, astrology and astronomy); and both Italian and Arabic on coins, measures, and weights.

Early Medieval Poetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Medieval Poetry ◽  
The Middle Ages

This, the first of four chapters on the Middle Ages, explores the rise of vernacular verse from the fifth to eleventh centuries. There is a little surviving evidence for oral poetry in the vernacular languages prior to the fifth century, and the first written example comes from the beginning of that century. The story of Caedmon’s inspired poetry is examined, as is Bede’s ‘death song’ and other evidence for poetic activity in England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Several Old High German poems of the ninth century are considered, as well as Alfred the Great’s interest in poetry. Beowulf, dated somewhere between the late seventh and the eleventh century, includes scenes of poetic performance and may be itself an example of the kind of poem it depicts in performance. Also discussed are the Old English poems Deor and Widsith and the Viking and Viking-influenced poems of the tenth century.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, pp. 360, 29 illus.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-288
Author(s):  
Therese Martin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Multiple Levels

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Latin scripts from Antiquity to the Early Modern period, of codicology, and of the cultural setting of the mediaeval manuscript. The opening section, on Latin Palaeography, treats a full range of Latin book hands, beginning with Square and Rustic Capitals and finishing with Humanistic minuscule. The Handbook is groundbreaking in giving extensive treatment to such scripts as Old Roman Cursive, New Roman Cursive, and Visigothic. Each article is written by a leading expert in the field and is copiously illustrated with figures and plates. Examples of each script with full transcription of selected plates are frequently provided for the benefit of newcomers to the field. The second section, on Codicology, contains essays on the design and physical make-up of the manuscript book, and it includes as well articles in newly-created disciplines, such as comparative codicology. The third and final section, Manuscript Setting, places the mediaeval manuscript within its cultural and intellectual setting, with extended essays on the mediaeval library, particular genres and types of manuscript production, the book trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and manuscript cataloguing. All articles are in English. The Handbook will be an indispensable guide to all those working in the various fields concerned with the literary and cultural dynamics of book production in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

Stages in Diplomatic Production

2020 ◽  
pp. 610-618
Author(s):  
Olivier Guyotjeannin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines administrative documents of the Middle Ages and the major scholarly studies of them. It surveys the number of preserved documents and the problems surrounding the lack of documents in different periods and places. The author discusses the role and influence of the Church in the increased production and preservation of documents beginning in the eleventh century, leading to an enormous increase in the production of documents during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages.

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