scholarly journals Kātibī (d. 1277), Taḥtānī (d. 1365), and the

Author(s):  
Tony Street

The Epistle for Shams al-Din on the Rules of Logic is a much-studied textbook written by Najm al-Din al-Kātibī (d. 1277). It is a compact and difficult treatment of logic that concentrates above all on modal syllogistic, though it touches on all the major topics covered in the Arabic logical tradition. It reflects the results of the further development of Avicenna’s project of modifying Aristotelian logic, a project that attracted enormous attention through the thirteenth century. The Shamsiyya, as the epistle is commonly referred to, was initially received with some hostility, but came to be accorded a central place in the madrasa curriculum in the fourteenth century, in large part because of the commentary on it written by Qutb al-Din al-Razi (d. 1365).

Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin

This short anthology contains extracts from three Castilian prose texts, one from the second half of the thirteenth century (General estoria IV of Alfonso X the Wise), one from the first half of the fourteenth century (El conde Lucanor of don Juan Manuel), and one from near the mid-point of the fifteenth century (Atalaya de las corónicas of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera). These passages illustrate in context many of the phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of medieval Hispano-Romance described in the body of this book. A linguistic commentary discussing relevant forms and constructions, as well as the meaning of lexical items no longer used or employed with different meanings in modern Spanish, with cross references to the appropriate sections in the five main chapters, accompanies each selection.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Katalin Szende

Abstract This article revisits the origins of small towns in medieval Hungary from the perspective of their owners and seigneurs. The fourteenth-century development of small towns on the estates of private landowners resulted from the coincidence of several factors. Among these, the article considers the intersection of royal and private interests. The aristocrats’ concern to endow their estate centres with privileges or attract new settlers to their lands was dependent on royal approval; likewise, the right to hold annual fairs had to be granted by the kings, and one had to be a loyal retainer to be worthy of these grants. The royal model of supporting the mendicant orders, which were gaining ground in Hungary from the thirteenth century onwards, added a further dimension to the overlords’ development strategies. This shows that royal influence, directly or indirectly, had a major impact on the development of towns on private lands in the Angevin period (1301–87).


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.


1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony LÉvy

The ArgumentThe major part of the mathematical “classics” in Hebrew were translated from Arabic between the second third of the thirteenth century and the first third of the fourteenth century, within the northern littoral of the western Mediterranean. This movement occurred after the original works by Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra became available to a wide readership. The translations were intended for a restricted audience — the scholarly readership involved in and dealing with the theoretical sciences. In some cases the translators themselves were professional scientists (e.g., Jacob ben Makhir); in other cases they were, so to speak, professional translators, dealing as well with philosophy, medicine, and other works in Arabic.In aketshing this portrait of the beginning of Herbrew scholarly mathematics, my aim has been to contribute to a better understanding of mathematical activity as such among Jewish communities during this period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter John Worsley

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


1912 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 89-128
Author(s):  
H. G. Richardson

Until the thirteenth century records touching the parish clergy are scanty, but thereafter they increase in bulk and, with the fourteenth century, there exist, side by side, a number of literary works which afford more than a passing glance at their lives and deeds. The parish priests and clerks of these centuries were not perhaps typical of the mediaeval period, since no century or centuries will afford a type of any class or institution which will be true for the whole of the Middle Ages; and it is possible that the tenthcentury parish and its people resembled the parish and people of the fourteenth century as little—or as much—as the Elizabethan parish resembled the parish of the present day. The changes that affected so profoundly the organisation of the manor during the course of the Middle Ages did not leave its counterpart, the parish, unaltered; and the same economic forces that helped to make the villein a copyholder and serfdom an anachronism, helped also to raise the chaplain's wages from five to eight marks within thirty years of the Black Death. But although the


Author(s):  
Sherry D. Fowler

Two wooden sculpture sets of Six Kannon, the thirteenth-century set from Daihōonji in Kyoto attributed to the artist Higō Jōkei and the fourteenth-century set from Tōmyōji in the Minami Yamashiro district of Kyoto, are well-documented sets that show the history, modifications, and movement of the cult. Copious inscriptions inside images in the respective sets reveal diverse sponsorship, from an elite female patron in the former to a huge group of patrons from a variety of backgrounds in the latter. Extant thirteenth- to fifteenth-century written records on ritual procedures, such as Roku Kannon gōgyōki, which focused on Six Kannon, contribute to the knowledge of how the rituals related to Six Kannon were performed as well as how the Six Kannon functioned in response to different needs, such as assisting with the six paths, protecting the dharma, or bolstering sectarian heritage, throughout their changing circumstances and movement over time.


Author(s):  
Janine Larmon Peterson

This chapter explores antipapal views that increased in the wake of popes' decisions to use the charge of heresy to achieve temporal as well as spiritual control over communities in northern and central Italy. This region was the geographic arena for the political struggle that occurred between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, which divided Italian communities into rival factions. It was also the locus of papal efforts to assert religious authority over independent-minded towns that were responding to papal bureaucratization and consolidation of power. Within this context, the accusation of heterodoxy became one means by which the papacy punished those who refused to support papal aims. “Heresy” no longer reflected doctrinal error alone by the late thirteenth century. It had become a characteristic of political orientation, an expression of disaffection with the papacy, and an avowal of regional interests that superseded loyalty to Rome. The chapter then traces the steps that led late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italian communities to have political and spiritual antipathy toward the popes and their agents, which became a driving force for these communities to actively contest popes through championing suspect saints, heretical saints, and holy heretics.


Author(s):  
Russell Hopley

This chapter examines the responses of three important medieval Maghribī dynasties to the dilemmas posed by nomadic populations dwelling in their midst. These dynasties include the Almoravids in al-Andalus in the twelfth century, the Almohads in the Maghrib in the thirteenth century, and the Ḥafṣids, successors to the Almohads in Ifrīqiya, during the fourteenth century. The aim is to shed light on the challenges that nomadic populations posed to political legitimacy, and to suggest, paradoxically perhaps, that the presence of unruly nomads in the medieval Islamic west, and the effort to contain them, served an important role in each dynasty's attempt to gain political legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim community.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document