scholarly journals Qamarayn

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Zayde Antrim
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Mutual Relation ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Sexual Encounters ◽  
1001 Nights

This two-part article argues that the earliest Arabic manuscripts of the 1001 Nights celebrate sameness, especially physical sameness, in sexual relationships to the extent that a category of erotic embodiment emerges that cannot be understood through a binary construction of sex. The first part of the article proposes a reading of a fifteenth-century manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies on their own terms. Eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. The resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. By contrast, when difference is stressed via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or threatening. The second part of the article presents a diachronic analysis of one story, “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. Manuscripts of the Nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest Arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. This case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.

A Crooked Mirror for Princes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Mirrors For Princes

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.

The Elders of Early Dilmun

2019 ◽  
pp. 220-239
Author(s):  
Alexis T. Boutin ◽  
Benjamin W. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Persian Gulf ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Mortuary Archaeology ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
The Third ◽  
Second Millennium Bce ◽  
The University

This chapter draws on bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology to investigate three adult men in a brief case study from Early Dilmun, a Bronze Age polity that spanned the western edge of the Arabian/Persian Gulf at the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium BCE. We draw our evidence from the Peter B. Cornwall Collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Cornwall (1913–1972) excavated this evidence from Bahrain during his expedition to the region in 1940 and 1941. Cornwall later analyzed these mortuary contexts in several works—including his doctoral dissertation and a handful of articles—and then eventually deposited the skeletal remains and objects in the Hearst Museum. Since 2008, we have been analyzing and publishing materials from this collection under the auspices of the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project. Using this evidence, we demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of investigating masculinity in one specific ancient Near Eastern society.

Enculturated, Embodied, Social: Medieval Drama and Cognitive Integration

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-137
Author(s):  
Clare Wright
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Cognitive Integration ◽  
Medieval Drama ◽  
Cognitive Work

Highlighting the embodied, collaborative, and spatially and temporally divers nature of medieval English plays, this essay argues that the cognitive work of medieval drama is best understood through the theory of cognitive integration, and in particular niche construction. Using the famous fifteenth-century York Play of the Crucifixion as a case study, the essay illustrates how this pageant constructed its particular niche, and its reliance on social as well as spatial and material affordances. The Play of the Crucifixion, it is argued, created opportunities for highly personal, individual devotional responses in the midst of what was fundamentally, and necessarily, a social and collaborative act. What is more, as a niche created for the purpose of devotion, it was focused on stimulating emotion and feeling, rather than supporting rational problem solving. It also overlapped with, and perhaps influenced, other devotional niches active beyond the frame of performance, contributing to extensive feedback cycles to which it was also subject.

scholarly journals The peregrinations of porcelain

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-288
Author(s):  
Leah R Clark
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of

Abstract The Medici of Florence have long been acknowledged as possessing the largest collection of Chinese porcelain in the fifteenth century, but this article reveals that in fact Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara had the largest such collection in Italy at this time. In fifteenth-century Europe, porcelain came not directly from China but rather through trade and diplomacy with foreign courts, so that its peregrinations gave rise to entangled histories and reception. Taking porcelain as a case-study, it is argued here that examining collecting through the lens of trade and diplomacy provides new interpretations of – and demands new approaches to – the history of collecting.

scholarly journals THE PRESERVATION OF CROSBY HALL, c. 1830–1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 687-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSEMARY SWEET
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

ABSTRACTThis article offers a case-study of an early preservation campaign to save the remains of the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, London, threatened with demolition in 1830, in a period before the emergence of national bodies dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments. It is an unusual and early example of a successful campaign to save a secular building. The reasons why the Hall's fate attracted the interest of antiquaries, architects, and campaigners are analysed in the context of the emergence of historical awareness of the domestic architecture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as wider recognition of the importance of this period for Britain's urban and commercial development. The Hall's associations with Richard III and other historic figures, including Thomas More and Thomas Gresham, are shown to have been particularly important in generating wider public interest, thereby allowing the campaigners to articulate the importance of the Hall in national terms. The history of Crosby Hall illuminates how a discourse of national heritage emerged from the inherited tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and highlights the importance of the social, professional, and familial networks that sustained proactive attempts to preserve the nation's monuments and antiquities.

scholarly journals Understanding the Southern Italian commons: polycentric governance on the mountains of Sila

Modern Italy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-348
Author(s):  
Claudio de Majo
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Polycentric Governance ◽  
Local Institution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Italian Unification

In this article, I examine patterns of collective action in the South of Italy, a region where commons scholarship presents several challenges, mainly due to its feudal heritage. In analysing the history of Southern Italian commons, Elinor Ostrom's theories on polycentric governance are adopted. I propose a case study on the mountains of Sila, where collective action was institutionalised through a municipal organisation known as universitas casalium, consisting of the city of Cosenza and its hamlets. This institution collaborated with the royal government, creating a polycentric governance system where institutional functions contentiously intermingled, generating conflicting relations, but also unique governmental arrangements. Yet how did previous historical interpretations miss this point? Documentary evidence provides a clear answer: while the institutional recognition of the universitas casalium can be traced back as far as the twelfth century, a series of institutional reforms initiated in the mid-fifteenth century led to the progressive decline of the local institution and accordingly of the commons economy related to it. This loss of legitimacy derived from the emergence of feudal barons and later of landowners from the middle class, leading to the progressive dissolution of collective action in Sila as Italy moved towards Italian unification in 1861.

scholarly journals Review of periodical articles

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-374
Author(s):  
FREDERICK BUYLAERT ◽  
GERRIT VERHOEVEN ◽  
TIM VERLAAN ◽  
REINOUD VERMOESEN
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
North West ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
Louis The Pious

Historians are held hostage by the sources that are available to them, and for that reason, the historiography of medieval towns is dominated by research on thirteenth-, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century case-studies. In preceding centuries, literacy was largely the monopoly of ecclesiastical milieus, who were often hostile or simply not interested in describing the urban settlements which then emerged all over Europe. An interesting exception, however, is the Breton town of Redon, which took shape around an abbey that was established in 832 with support of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. By navigating the unusually extensive set of Carolingian cartularies of this abbey, as well as the available cartographic and archaeological evidence, Julien Bachelier has developed an incisive sketch of the development of a town in the shadow of the Carolingian abbey in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (‘Une ville abbatiale bretonne. Redon du IXe au XIVe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine, 48 (2017), 133–54). This case-study confirms once again that the urbanization of medieval Europe was more than a side-effect of the rebirth of long-distance trade as the canonical Pirenne thesis would have it. The Redon case provides a valuable contribution to the revisionist perspective that stresses the importance of local demand from abbeys, episcopal palaces and castles as a stimulus for urban development (see esp. the seminal work of A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999)).

Recognising strategies for conquered territories: a case study from the Inka North Calchaquí Valley

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (334) ◽  
pp. 1141-1154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Félix A. Acuto ◽  
Andrés Troncoso ◽  
Alejandro Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Force Production ◽  
South American ◽  
Class Separation ◽  
Made In

In this detailed study of fifteenth-century settlements in Argentina, the authors show how the Inka did not just use force, production and ritual to subdue the indigenous population. The conquerors' strategy included the re-ordering of settlement plans, routeways and landscape, class separation and even the imposition of a rigorous discipline on the indigenous vision, controlling what could be seen looking out or looking in. The material readings made in these South American examples have much to offer to archaeologists working in colonial periods elsewhere.

scholarly journals Climate Aridity under Changing Conditions and Implications for the Agricultural Sector: Italy as a Case Study

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Salvati ◽  
Marco Zitti ◽  
Rosanna Di Bartolomei ◽  
Luigi Perini
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Potential Evapotranspiration ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Aridity Index ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Temperature Regimes ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
The Impact

A comprehensive diachronic analysis (1951–2010) of precipitation and temperature regimes has been carried out at the national and regional scale in Italy to investigate the impact of climate aridity on the agricultural system. Trends in climate aridity have been also analysed using UNEP aridity index which is the ratio between rainfall and potential evapotranspiration on a yearly basis. During the examined time period, and particularly in the most recent years, a gradual reduction in rainfall and growing temperatures have been observed which have further widened the gap between precipitation amounts and water demand in agriculture.

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