medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 3/2016
Open Issue
Nummer:
3
Jahrgang:
2016
MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting.
MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues.
Table of Contents
- Walter Pohl: Editor’s Preface
- Daniel G. König: Charlemagne’s ›Jihād‹ Revisited: Debating the Islamic Contribution to an Epochal Change in the History of Christianization
- Tsvetelin Stepanov: Venerating St. Michael the Archangel in the Holy Roman Empire and in Bulgaria, Tenth–Eleventh Centuries: Similarities, Differences, Transformations
- Jesse W. Torgerson: Could Isidore’s Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? Using the Concept of Genre to Compare Ancient and Medieval Chronicles
- Thomas Ertl - Markus Mayer: Acculturation and Elimination: Europe’s Interaction with the Other (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Century)
- Miriam Adan Jones: A Chosen Missionary People? Willibrord, Boniface, and the Election of the Angli
- Marieke Brandt: Heroic History, Disruptive Genealogy: al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī and the Historical Formation of the Shākir Tribe (Wāʿilah and Dahm) in al-Jawf, Yemen
- Daniel Mahoney: The Political Agency of Kurds as an Ethnic Group in Late Medieval South Arabia
- Anna Frauscher - Jelle Wassenaar - Veronika Wieser: Making Ends Meet. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism
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Charlemagne’s ›Jihād‹ Revisited: Debating the Islamic Contribution to an Epochal Change in the History of Christianization
In 2006, Yitzhak Hen published an article under the title »Charlemagne’s Jihad«, proposing that Charlemagne’s policy of forced conversion of the Saxons – the earliest combination of conquest and forced conversion in the history of Christianity – had actually been modelled on a typically ›Islamic‹ approach to other religious groups. Hen argued that Charlemagne’s expedition to Zaragoza in 777-778 as well as his reception of Hispanic refugees such as Theodulf at court acquainted the Frankish king with this Islamic approach which was then duly applied to the Saxons. The primary aim of the article is to raise and – at least partially – answer questions that arise from Hen’s hypothesis. The first part of the article is thus dedicated to questioning if Islam of the late eighth century had already developed a systematic approach to non-Muslim religions that could be adopted by external observers. Even if Islam had already developed clear principles of dealing with other religions in the period under investigation, it cannot be taken for granted that the Carolingians and their informants were aware of these principles. The second part of the article then examines what Charlemagne and his entourage could have known about the Muslim treatment of non-Muslims. Since Hen’s entire argument hinges on specific passages of the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae which he defines as ›Islamic‹, this part of the article also discusses if these passages clearly reflect Islamic influence or rather build on previous Christian methods of dealing with other religions and of promoting the expansion of Christianity. Against this backdrop, the conclusion takes into account the possible historical causes for the Carolingian merging of conquest and forced conversion.
Schlagworte: Spanish March, al-Andalus, Carolingian-Umayyad relations, cultural transfer, Islamic influence, Islam, forced conversion, Saxons, Charlemagne
Seite 3 - 40 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s3
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Venerating St. Michael the Archangel in the Holy Roman Empire and in Bulgaria, Tenth–Eleventh Centuries: Similarities, Differences, Transformations
The interest in the relations between Bulgaria and the Ottonians has existed for a long time and has recently intensified.1 This article, however, shall not discuss this topic, but will instead explore the phenomenon of the cult of St. Michael the Archangel, with the goal of examining it within the framework of Christian Europe during the early Middle Ages, where the Bulgarians will be viewed as representing its east and the Germans its west, respectively.
Schlagworte: Bamberg, Monte Gargano, Holy Roman Empire, early medieval Bulgaria, St Michael the Archangel
Seite 41 - 64 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s41
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Could Isidore’s Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? Using the Concept of Genre to Compare Ancient and Medieval Chronicles
Richard W. Burgess and Michael Kulikowski’s A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from its Origins to the High Middle Ages (Volume I in the authors’ planned series Mosaics of Time: The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD) posits that medieval studies has neglected to engage in a systematic, historically-informed reflection on the genre of chronicles. The present article asserts that this challenge to the field presents a unique opportunity for an interdisciplinary discussion of wide scope and lasting duration. I thus argue that Burgess and Kulikowski’s larger points may be reconciled with current scholarship on medieval chronicles by updating the theoretical premises that underlie our identification of historical genres. I aim to contribute to the discussion by turning to a consensus in current theoretical work, that genre is best discussed as a description of the way texts and their readers communicated. The article concludes by applying this hypothesis to an experiment in comparison: if it is not the differences but the similarities that stand out when Cicero and Isidore of Seville’s respective meditations upon chronicles are set side by side, then what are the implications for our methods of reconstructing the significance of chronicles in their own milieus?
Schlagworte: genre, Cicero, Isidore of Seville, History, chronicle
Seite 65 - 82 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s65
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Acculturation and Elimination: Europe’s Interaction with the Other (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Century)
This article examines the cultural contact between the core countries of western Europe and the European periphery. With the examples of Caffa, Ceuta and Dublin, it identifies the different methods and patterns utilised by persons from the core countries of Western Europe upon interaction with foreign peoples before the period of early modern expansion. The various types of interaction are discussed on the basis of Tzvetan Todorov’s theses on European expansion in America. Were Europeans such successful conquerors because they were masters of differentiating techniques of transcultural hermeneutics? This is the key question we would like to address here.
Schlagworte: Dublin, Ceuta, Caffa, Todorov, European expansion, Otherness, acculturation, Late Middle Ages
Seite 83 - 97 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s83
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A Chosen Missionary People? Willibrord, Boniface, and the Election of the Angli
In the seventh and eighth centuries, missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England travelled to the continent with the aim of spreading the gospel among its Germanic peoples. This movement has been seen as a response to a sense of collective vocation tied to the belief that the English were God’s chosen people. This article combs sources associated with the circles of the missionaries Willibrord (d. 739) and Boniface (d. 754) for evidence of such a belief. It breaks down the concept of ethnic election with a missionary purpose into its separate components to be analysed in turn. In the first section, it is argued that Anglo-Saxon missionaries saw themselves as belonging to the Angli, a people united by faith, homeland, and bonds of kinship. The second section presents evidence that the missionaries viewed their own people and its church as specially favoured by God; this favour was tied to the maintenance high standards of belief and practice. The final section considers whether this sense of election acted as a motivator for Anglo-Saxon missionary efforts. It concludes that, despite subsequent claims to the contrary by their contemporaries and successors, the missionaries themselves did not specifically connect the special status of their people with the purpose of evangelism.
Schlagworte: divine election, ethnicity, Boniface, Willibrord, mission, Anglo-Saxons
Seite 98 - 115 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s98
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Heroic History, Disruptive Genealogy: al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī and the Historical Formation of the Shākir Tribe (Wāʿilah and Dahm) in al-Jawf, Yemen
Genealogies are emic forms of social representation among many tribes in the Arab world. The formability of these genealogies for the purposes of politics and alliances is a common phenomenon. It becomes particularly obvious if one looks at the case of the Shākir tribe and its main divisions Wāilah and Dahm in the region of al-Jawf in northernmost Yemen. A comparison of their tribal genealogies and settlement areas in the tenth century CE, as described by the Yemeni scholar and historian al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī, with their tribal structures and territories in the twenty-first century shows the enormous extent of change to which the Shākir, especially Dahm, have been subject in the past millennium. These changes seem to reflect in part the continuous immigration of external tribal groups to which the fringes of the Rubʿ al-Khālī desert have historically been exposed, and their inclusion into the local societies and thus the evolving genealogy of Shākir. These elements of residential discontinuity and mobility contrast with the more general pattern of territorial continuity and stasis prevailing in the central areas of Yemen. Yet the genealogy of Shākir proved to be more open towards these intrusive groups than towards the original inhabitants of the area itself: in contemporary al-Jawf remain descendants of ancient groups who are considered the aboriginal inhabitants of the area and who were neither given equal status to Shākir nor included into the Shākir genealogy. Seen in this light, the genealogies and semi-legendary traditions of al-Hamdānī’s al-Iklīl also served to evoke a vision of community and of common identities among the heterogeneous societies of South Arabia and to legitimize them as heirs of a country and its history, which in parts was not inherently their own.
Schlagworte: Yemen, South Arabia, Bedouins, tribe, genealogy, Al-Hasan al-Hamdani
Seite 116 - 145 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s116
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The Political Agency of Kurds as an Ethnic Group in Late Medieval South Arabia
Kurds began to arrive to South Arabia as soldiers for the Ayyubid conquest at the end of the sixth/twelfth century,1 and continued in this military role for the Rasulid dynasty for the next few centuries. Over the course of this period, references to Kurds in chronicles indicate their increasing autonomy as independent mercenaries who rebelled against the Rasulids and aligned with the northern Zaydis. At the same time, they are also shown to have established a prominent community in the central highlands, which eventually bifurcated, merged with the family of the Zaydi Imam through marriage, and then seemingly disappeared from chronicles altogether. This article examines more closely the role of ethnicity in the promotion and maintenance of the Kurds as an influential group in the late medieval political landscape of South Arabia alongside other ethnic groups such as Arabs and Turks, as well as why the apparent deterioration of the Kurds’ ethnic cohesion appears to have led to the end of reports about them in the Yemeni historical record at the end of the eighth/fourteenth century.
Schlagworte: ethnicity, military, South Arabia, Zaydis, Rasulids, Ayyubids, Kurds
Seite 146 - 157 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s146
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Making Ends Meet. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism
The conference Making Ends Meet took place from 24 to 26 September 2015 in Vienna, Austria. It was organized by Vincent Eltschinger, Directeur d’études/École Pratique des Hautes Études (Section des sciences religieuses, Paris) and Veronika Wieser, VISCOM co-ordinator/ researcher, Institute for Medieval Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in line with the SFB F 42 VISCOM (›Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, 400-1600 CE‹).
Schlagworte: rebirth, demons, Gog and Magog, Paradise, Last Judgment, prophet, empire, computes, millennialism, Eschatology
Seite 158 - 164 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s158
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Ausgabe:
978-3-7001-7988-7, E-Journal, digital, 01.07.2016
Seitenzahl:
164 Seiten
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI (Link zur Online Edition):