medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 18/2023

This debate takes up the question whether the concept of »state« can be used meaningfully in the context of medieval studies. The opening article by Brent D. Shaw addresses the political organization of the Roman empire, and develops a comprehensive argument why even by high standards it should be regarded as a state. The six comments by Nicola Di Cosmo (Chinese History), Stefano Gasparri and Cristina La Rocca, Hans-Werner Goetz, Régine Le Jan (European Medieval History), John Haldon and Yannis Stouraitis (Byzantine History) draw on their own fields of expertise to provide theoretical and pragmatic views on the possible significance of the concept of state for political entities of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Schlagworte: medieval empire, »state«, political theory, Roman empire, Byzantium, Langobard kingdom, Ancient China

The ERC Starting Grant project ARITHMETIC focuses on editing, describing, and analyzing handwritten arithmetic treatises in German from the 15th and 16th centuries. This paper is the result of a first preliminary study on the material that was conducted at the Austrian National Library, where an exemplary corpus of seven manuscripts was analyzed in detail. The results of this short study on a selective but representative corpus will serve as a basis for the upcoming work on the almost 140 manuscripts that form the complete research corpus of the ERC project. This article focuses on two main aspects in detail: On the one hand, the methodological approaches concerning the description of the manuscripts and the transcription of the arithmetic texts will be reviewed. In addition, the transcription software Transkribus, which serves as a support tool for the project, is used to generate a suitable model for handwritten text recognition (HTR) that will be used on large parts of the corpus. On the other hand, first hypotheses on the material will be tested and result in short analyses of the sources concerning questions on the process of translation from Latin to German, the relevance of the context handed down with arithmetic texts in miscellanies, the dichotomy of theoretical texts and practical teachings, and the importance of mnemotechnical tools in pragmatic texts of the Late Middle Ages.

Schlagworte: Late medieval mathematics, practical knowledge, translation culture (Latin–German), emergence of a German mathematical jargon, development of HTR models for arithmetic texts using Transkribus, description of arithmetic texts, late medieval mnemonics, late medieval knowledge culture

This article uses a global history framework to compare peacemaking at the turn of the eleventh century between the English and the Vikings with that of the Northern Song and Kitan Liao dynasties in China. The article investigates the factors which shaped peacemaking after the English and the Northern Song dynasty suffered defeats, and the political influences which led to the decision to pay tribute to the Vikings and the Liao Empire respectively. The strategies of chief councillor Kou Zhun (1004-1006 CE) in advising Song Zhenzong (997-1022) provide a point of reference to identify salient points for further investigation on the English side. The Chinese data highlights the importance of religiously sanctioned letters, the nature of political scapegoating, and the cultural and tactical advantages enjoyed by the Liao Empire in the negotiations. A more extensive discussion follows on the English side with detailed investigation of annals to show how the peace agreement after the Battle of Maldon was re-evaluated between c. 1000 and c. 1020, and how Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990-94), became a political scapegoat for tribute payments to the Vikings during the reign of Æthelred II, king of the English (978-1016). Ecclesiastical letters and lists of authority are then used to understand the political stance and strategy of Sigeric, linked to discussion of diplomatic missions between the papacy, England and Normandy. The article adopts a comparative approach to take fuller account of the influences upon advisers and domestic politics in explaining the issues at stake in peacemaking after the English and Northern Song were defeated by those they regarded as »barbarians«, and shows how global history can be used to deepen understanding of the factors at work in peacemaking in different regions of Asia and Europe.

Schlagworte: Chanyuan, Covenant of, China, England, Khou Zhun chief councillor, Kitans, Liao Empire, Maldon, Battle of, Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, tribute, Vikings

This paper investigates which animals sleep and wake in general and which, in addition, are also able to dream, according to Barhebraeus (Bar ʿEbroyo, Arabic: Ibn al-ʿIbrī, 1226-1286 CE), the famous Syrian Orthodox polymath and theologian. Attention is also given to the authors who are his primary sources, namely, Avicenna and Aristotle. Parallel examples include Albert the Great as another author who is dependent on some of the same sources and Pliny the Elder as a Latin author without Arabic influences. Roughly, Avicenna and Barhebraeus can be understood as allowing for or stating the observation of far more dreaming animals than Aristotle himself did explicitly, while Albert allows for even fewer. The question of why on this matter Barhebraeus relied primarily on these two authors as his sources, though not on other post-Avicennan Arabic authors as he did in many of his other philosophical and even theological works, will also be briefly discussed. This select reliance could be connected to a historical change in the topics dealt with in the scientific curriculum, with the lack of coverage of zoological topics by Barhebraeus’s favorite source authors being one of the reasons that led him to rely on the older texts by Avicenna and Aristotle. However, this cannot be generalized as a rule, as there are at least two contrary cases in Barhebraeus’s works on physiognomics where he has had recourse to an older text rather than a treatise by one of his otherwise preferred source authors.

Schlagworte: Barhebraeus/Bar Hebraeus (Bar ʿEbroyo), Arabic: Ibn al-ʿIbrī, 1226-1286 CE), Aristotelian philosophy, Syriac philosophical works, Arabic philosophical works, Aristotle, Avicenna, Albert the Great, animals, sleeping, waking, dreaming, viviparous quadrupeds, mammals, physiognomics

This paper looks at the cosmological texts of the eminent Sufi al-Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (d. 309 AH/922 CE) through the prism of pseudo-Empedocles’s influence. The medieval scholar Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Daylamī was the first to juxtapose pseudo-Empedoclean doctrine and al-Ḥallāj’s passionate love (maḥabba). A connection between the two was postulated by L. Massignon, who reconstructed the line of succession of the Baghdad believers in pseudo-Empedocles’s ideas and assumed a link between the Nestorian monastery of Dayr Qunnā and these ideas. Analysing al-Ḥallāj’s cosmology reveals an influence of some pseudo-Empedoclean ideas as they appear in Arabic sources. Al-Ḥallāj’s fragmentary works and his quotations will be examined by considering some fragments in al-Daylamī’s Kitāb ʿAṭf al-alif, a Persian text from the Sharḥ al-shaṭḥiyāt of Rūzbihān Baqlī, and some fragments from al-Sulamī’s Tafsīr. There are also short cosmological fragments in the Kitāb al-Ṭawāsīn, and some are known from quotations. Several concepts such as azal, khiṭāb (as logos), qudra, dahr, maʿānī, and ṣuwar are encountered in pseudo-Empedocles’s texts. For al-Ḥallāj, the crucial concept in creation is passionate love (ʿishq, maḥabba), which serves as the catalyst for creation. Desire (mashī ̉a) is the first mode of the divine essence. Divine eternity (azal) is opposed to perpetuity (dahr). In al-Ḥallāj’s cosmology we find the concept of secrets (asrār) that resemble maʿānī. But at the same time, they resemble intelligent matter underlying the higher world. The question of two creations in these texts seems to go back to the understanding of the creation of the materia prima (ʿunṣur) and material bodies (the first and second creations). Al-Ḥallāj’s source for these ideas was probably connected with the Nestorian church, and this may go some way toward explaining the links between the Sufis of Baghdad and the Christian milieu in monasteries such as Dayr Qunnā.

Schlagworte: al-Ḥallāj, pseudo-Empedocles, Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Daylamī, Rūzbihān Baqlī, eternity (azal), passionate love (ʿishq), love (maḥabba), desire (mashī ̉a)

This edition project is part of the programme »Edition of Greek and Latin Texts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages« at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The progress of the project so far has resulted in the definite identification of previously unknown textual witnesses. It has revealed a completely new dimension of textual understanding by considering the way the various paratexts accompanying the main text evolved; it has developed new methods of editing the text; and it has discovered significant points regarding the transmission and reception of the text, including the texts that were transmitted together with it (Überlieferungsgemeinschaften, that is, in multi-text manuscripts). It has also uncovered the positioning of divergent redactorial levels, which is significant in terms of its cross-cultural reception history.

Schlagworte: Byzantine medicine, John Zacharias Aktouarios (c. 1275-1330), manuscript tradition, Critical Edition, medical paratexts, »burnout therapy«

The project »Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians« aimed to examine the social encounters of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars in the Abbasid Near East, in the period 132-656 AH/750-1258 CE. The Arabic biographical dictionary of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590/1194, d. 668/1269 or 1270) provides rich accounts of such interactions, sometimes occurring directly between scholars, but other times involving much larger networks of people with a wide variety of religious affiliations. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa weaves these figures throughout his biographical entries, revealing networks of scholarly interchange. In our project, we wanted to discover which people, places, and types of communication he shows as most central to exchange between communities of differing religious affiliations. The networks themselves we understand to be historiographical presentations by a physician who wished to trace the art of medicine through elite practitioners to his present day, relying in the process on both Islamic and other sources, as well as on information from his own broad range of acquaintances in the field. In this project report, we describe three processes crucial to our project. First, we identified and »tagged« people and places in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s text. This included creating entries for each person or place, which also served as authority data to which we could link using tags in the text of the History of Physicians. Second, we created prosopographical »factoids« for passages we wanted to study in detail. These are information nuggets that record in a machine-readable way what we understand the text to be asserting about people, relationships, and events. Finally, we loaded the tagged text and factoids into networks to help identify which persons, places, or features call for in-depth qualitative study in regard to exchange between religious communities.

Schlagworte: interreligious networks, knowledge exchange, Near East/Middle East, Abrahamic religions, Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE), Arabic, biographical literature, medieval science, medieval medicine, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590 AH/1194 CE, d. 668/1269 or 1270), network analysis

In this paper we discuss the notion of Arabic literary works which, to the best of our knowl-edge, have been lost over the course of history. We examine factors contributing to the like-lihood of transmission, address current interdisciplinary debates, and discuss digital tools applied to estimating the loss of literary heritage or to retrieving information on lost works. Our aim is to highlight the potential that bio-bibliographical works hold for the study of lost texts and manuscripts. Three possibilities are presented for studying lost books mentioned in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of Physicians (ʿUyūn al-anbā ̉ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā ̉), and these include the identification of lost works in bio-bibliografical reference works, the encoding of attestations for manuscripts written by the authors themselves, and the reconstruction of scholarly networks which contributed to a certain lost work. The examples discussed demonstrate the advantages prosopographical networks can offer if they include works and manuscripts. Therefore, we put a particular focus on the use of machine-readable assertions which involves encoding the claims and statements from primary sources in a format that enables computer systems to process and analyse them.

Schlagworte: Near East/Middle East, history of literature, biographical literature, Networks, medieval sciences, knowledge exchange, Arabic, lost literature, digital humanities, book history

In this article, I identify some of the challenges of labeling religious affiliation in a medieval Arabic biographical text. I further propose a solution for characterizing such affiliations in a network or database while preserving the nuances and uncertainties of primary-source evidence. The goal of the »Communities of Knowledge« project was to observe cross-communal interactions in scholarly circles as represented in the History of Physicians by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590 AH/1194 CE, d. 668/1269 or 1270). The network analysis at the core of the project’s large-scale view of these interactions presupposed linking hundreds or even thousands of individuals mentioned in the text to their various religious communities. Fundamentally, this linking involves two steps: (1) inferring an individual’s religious affiliation from the text and (2) making this inference accessible to the network analysis in the recording system. Both steps raise challenges. At the inference step, the concepts of religion and group adherence must be contextualized in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s text. Here I explore his explicit, implicit, and ambiguous references to affiliation. At the recording step, a labeling system should allow varying levels of precision for the affiliation, should show the type and certainty of the »signal« (the evidence for inferring the affiliation), and should record multiple signals of a person’s affiliation where present, even if these appear contradictory. The model I propose with TEI-XML examples makes multiple signals and their attributes machine-actionable. Finally, I consider how this model relates to the possibility of machine labeling affiliations with named entity recognition (NER). Arabic NER models do not currently include entity types for religious affiliation, but the tagged text of the History of Physicians could help to train NER models on the nuances of religious affiliation in medieval Arabic texts.

Schlagworte: religion and religious identity, interreligious relations, Near East/Middle East, digital humanities, Arabic onomastics, Abrahamic religions, Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE), Arabic, biographical literature, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590 AH/1194 CE, d. 668/1269 or 1270), network analysis, TEI-XML, named entity recognition (NER)