Self-Revision and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Identifying Textual Reuse and Reorganization in the Works Of Al-Balā Dhurāi

While there is growing historiographical analysis of the reuse of circulating narrative materials in medieval books from various textual traditions, there have been fewer studies of the late antique and early medieval periods that have considered the process of authorial self-revision. This is especially the case with early Arabic/Islamicate texts. This study is a discussion of the historical material that is reused in the two surviving Arabic works of the Muslim author al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892 CE/279 AH), material which appears in his Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān (The Book of the Conquest of Lands) and that was apparently reused in his Ansāb al-Ashrāf (The Lineage of Nobles). In discussing how al-Balādhurī recycled this information and emplotted it in verbatim and near-verbatim forms, it shows how shifting the location of these shared traditions demonstrates the different goals of his two books and also showcases his work as an author: in the former, he places an emphasis on the creation of early Islamic institutions; in the later, he eulogizes the character and qualities of Islam's earliest leaders. Additionally, all of the reused material discussed here was identified through computer meditated analysis, so this study also highlights how the tools of the digital and computational humanities demonstrate immense promise in enhancing and expediting the research of scholars across the medieval globe.

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

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.

Alterity and Occidentalism in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Texts: Narratives of Travel, Conversion, and Dehumanization

This article analyses five fourteenth-century Old Norse travel narratives in light of the learned geographical tradition of medieval Iceland. Three of the narratives, Þorvalds þáttr víðfǫrla, Eiríks saga víðfǫrla, and Yngvars saga víðfǫrla, focus on the travels of Nordic people to eastern Europe and Asia; while the latter two, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, tell of travels to the continent later named North America. While the travels to the East deal with pilgrimage and the search for the terrestrial Paradise in the service of individual salvation and missionary activities in Scandinavia and Iceland more specifically, the travels to the West are focused on the violent conquest and Christianization of newfound peripheral areas and their peoples. What these narratives have in common, and owe to the learned (Plinian) tradition, is their dehumanized view of foreign and strange people: the giants and monsters of the East, and the skrælingar (indigenous peoples) and einfœtingar (sciopods) of the West. In these sagas travels to the East, while dangerous, introduce heroes to courtly manners, encyclopedic knowledge, and salvation; whereas travels to the West lead to mayhem and death and all attempts at settlement there fail miserably, making Greenland the westernmost outpost of Christianity in the world. This article aims to show how this learned tradition was adapted for use in saga literature to contrast the monstrous and heathen periphery with the more central and piously Christian Iceland.

Special Issue of The Medieval Globe: Medieval Re-Creations: Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation

The creative reuse of materials, texts, and ideas was a common phenomenon in the medieval world. The essays in this volume offer a synchronic and diachronic consideration of the receptions and meanings of events and artifacts, analyzing the processes that allowed medieval works to remain relevant in sociocultural contexts far removed from those in which they originated. In the process, they elucidate the global valences of recycling, revision, and relocation throughout the interconnected Middle Ages, and their continued relevance for the shaping of modernity.

Salvaging Meaning: The Art of Recycling In Sino-Mongol Quanzhou, ca. 1276–1408

This essay argues that expatriate residents of medieval Quanzhou recycled objects to create meaning across cultures. By tracing the mobility of imagery, iconography, and decorative idioms across belief structures, this essay demonstrates how the salvaging of artifacts between religions literally built a local visual and religious culture from available parts.

Biblical Apocrypha as Medieval World Literature

This article examines biblical apocrypha as cases for reconsidering literary history concerning the wider scope of the global Middle Ages. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Fifteen Signs before Judgment show how apocrypha were dynamic in the early medieval period, as they participated in a complex network of transmission across Afro-Eurasia.

Reflection

This contribution responds to the many insights about reuse and recycling generated by the contributors to this collection. Patterns of reuse are well known in archaeological and material-cultural circles and have been defined by a taxonomy of practices. As this collection suggests, however, it can be rewarding to apply these ideas beyond the material domain, and to think how they might help us understand the lives and afterlives of ideas, representations, texts, and landscapes. To think about reuse in this expansive way highlights processes or patterns that we may have missed by thinking about reuse primarily in the domain of the material.

When Curtains Fall: A Shape-Shifting Silk of the Late Abbasid Period

A silk intended for administrative use under the Buyids—the dynasty which ruled on behalf of the Abbasid caliphs from roughly 934 to 1062—was deconstructed under their successors, the Seljuks of Iran (1038–1194), so as to efface its associations with the defunct dynasty. When twentieth-century scholars re-established the piece's connection to the Buyids, linking the piece directly to the emir Bahāʼ al-Dawlah, they ironically overlooked the Seljuk alterations and their implications. Following the silk through its several iterations, this article argues that, for late Abbasid-era elites navigating a changing political terrain, re-use became a means of maintaining their standing in society, as well as an act of preservation for the silk itself.

Recontextualizing Indigenous Knowledge on the Prussian–Lithuanian Frontier, ca. 1380–1410

This article analyzes a compilation of navigational texts produced by the Teutonic crusading order around 1400, arguing that the recontextualization of geographic knowledge—from local guides to written records—illuminates a spectrum of encounters and exchanges, both violent and collaborative, between indigenous people and Western colonizers in northeastern Europe.

Medievalism, Misogyny, and Orientalism: The Representation of Queen Sibylla in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven

This article is an historian's engagement with Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and its portrayal of Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem. It demonstrates that the film presents a myth of medieval women's lack of agency, especially in the spheres of warfare and politics, and that it also projects modern misogynist and Orientalist tropes onto the medieval past. In addition to critiquing the film's historical claims, it draws on medieval sources to reconstruct what the historical Sibylla's roles were likely to have been, and to demonstrate the prevalence of women's involvement in allegedly "masculine" spheres of activity. Finally, it calls on historians to expose the dangerous uses of "medieval" imagery in contemporary popular culture and right-wing ideologies.