Romance in/and the Medieval Mediterranean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Kinoshita
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
Traditional Classification ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Greek Novel

This chapter expands the traditional classification of medieval French romance by proposing ‘Mediterranean’ as a thematic category alongside ‘Antique’ and ‘Breton’. In addition to their geographical setting, ‘Mediterranean’ romances feature themes such as sea voyages, merchants, pirates, mutable identities, and the changes of fortune occasioned by the hazards of maritime travel. Floire et Blancheflor, first attested in French c.1150 and subsequently translated into many languages, provides the focal point for a discussion of medieval romance that draws inspiration from Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s 2000 study, The Corrupting Sea. The second part of the chapter tests the longue durée of the Mediterranean thematic by examining the Hellenistic romance Callirhoe. The close parallels between the two texts, corresponding to Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the Greek novel of adventure, also allows an assessment of their divergences as reflections of the shift from a late antique to a high medieval context.

Religion, war, and peace in premodern Islamicate polities and the Christian West

2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242098491
Author(s):  
Philippe Buc
Keyword(s):  
Strong Correlation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Armed Violence

The plural Islams and the various Christianities deriving from late Antique Catholicism constitute two families of monotheisms whose relation to armed violence and to peace can be compared over the longue durée. In both, war and peace coexist as values, with the sense however that there can be a corrupting bad peace and a wicked bad war. Both—albeit through different media—produced norms governing warfare. For both, there is a strong correlation between holy war and societal reform. In both, the potential to sacralize a space that then has to be defended (New Jerusalems or second Hejaz) figures prominently. In both, radical warfare, reform, and purge of one’s own group can be triggered by apocalyptic or eschatological expectations (with figures such as a person anticipating typologically the return of the vengeful Christ, a last world emperor, a mujaddid, or a Mahdī). While this contribution focuses mainly on the pre-modern world, it ends on an attempt to relate the current war waged by Boko Haram to this past.

THE Longue Durée of the Mediterranean

2001 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-102
Author(s):  
Ray Laurence
Keyword(s):  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean

scholarly journals Agricultural Treatises in Eurasia before ca. 1500: The Iceberg Method, a Survey, and a Grand Hypothesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Janken Myrdal
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Technologies ◽  
Agricultural Knowledge ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean

This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.

scholarly journals Greece as a frontline state in the historical longue durée

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis E. Kotoulas
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Mediterranean Sea ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Long Period ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Strategic Value ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean

Abstract Greece as a state in South-eastern Europe and the Mediterranean has perceived itself as a frontline state, especially after it became a NATO member in 1952 along with Turkey. The two states formed the south-eastern flank of NATO and along with Iran constituted the Greece, Turkey, Iran (GTI) Corridor, part of Rimland. Greece’s strategic value stemmed from its frontline position in relation to the Eastern Bloc. After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, Greece has reinvented itself as a frontline state, this time in the Mediterranean Sea. We use the historical notion of longue durée and loci of Classical Geopolitics, such as Heartland and Rimland, to assess Greece’s strategic value in the long period. We also propose an additional spatial unity, the New Rimland.

A New Battle for History in the Twenty-First Century?

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (02) ◽  
pp. 261-270
Author(s):  
Francesca Trivellato
Keyword(s):  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Moral Crisis ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Fernand Braudel

Abstract This article engages with some of the questions raised by David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s “The Return of the longue durée: An Anglo-American Perspective” and their resonance among readers of the Annales. In particular, it challenges the authors’ classification of a variety of different historical studies of short periods of time under the rubric of “microhistory.” It also questions their argument that such studies are evidence of a “moral crisis” that supposedly dominated anglophone historiography from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, the article contrasts the less conventional meanings that Fernand Braudel originally attributed to the longue durée with the ways that Armitage and Guldi interpret this expression. Finally, it asks how, in practice, historians are supposed to follow the authors’ invitation to move beyond specialized training and knowledge to produce sweeping new and original interpretations of millennia of human history.

Oceans of Longues Durées

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Gillman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Flexible Tool ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Temporal Dimensions

Anyone in literary studies who has looked recently at titles of books, conferences, research clusters, and even syllabi across the field cannot have missed two key words, borrowed from historical studies, that are doing substantial periodizing duty for literary and cultural criticism: one a chronological unit, the longue durée, and the other nominally a geographic unit, the Atlantic world. While it may not be obvious, each of these terms has spatial as well as temporal dimensions that reflect their shared origins with Ferdinand Braudel. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée (pioneered by Marc Bloch) during the 1940s when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. Braudel posits that time moves at different speeds, defined as geographic, social, and individual, each corresponding to a different durée (literally, a duration of time). The longue durée (usually translated as “long perspective” or “long term”) is the slowest-moving, operating on the scale of centuries, in which historical changes are humanly imperceptible. Braudel's Mediterranean constructs a geography commensurate with his theory of time, the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his book-its geohistorical plan, its comparative approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, shifting from the longue durée to the courte durée of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events, each section proposing a different mode of periodization and time scale. Braudel's Mediterranean thus consists spatially of multiple seas unfolding temporally over the longue durée and as such simultaneously provides literary studies with a flexible tool for revisionist periodization and Atlantic studies, both historical and literary, with the powerful model of a region as a unit of geographic and chronological analysis.

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