New Books in Medieval History

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century scholar ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Arabic Poetics presents and explores a panoply of scholars and texts situated at the intersection of religion, and literature. Written with sparkling clarity, this book will also make an excellent text to teach in various undergraduate and graduate courses on the Muslim Humanities, Arabic, Religion and Literature, and Religious Studies more broadly.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fascination with the Viking Age seems to be at an all-time high, though it has never really gone out of fashion. There is something irresistible about the Vikings, a civilization dedicated to exploring the edges of the known world, forging an empire from north America to Kiev, which dominated the political and economic landscape from the Fall of Rome to the First Crusade. Writers, artists and musicians such as Richard Wagner and J. R. R. Tolkien have found inspiration in the stories, legends, and sagas of the Vikings, and modern culture too has successfully mined the canon for the inspiration behind blockbusters as “Vikings,” “Game of Thrones” and the Marvel films.But few scholars have delved-exclusively into the world of Viking women until now. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s recent book, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a deeply satisfying exploration of the lives of Viking women. Valkyrie is skillfully arranged around the skeleton of the life cycle of a woman—from birth through childhood, adolescence, marriage, and old age. But this skeleton is expertly fleshed out with cogent examples drawn from archaeology, contemporary accounts, and the rich literary vein of the Old Norse sagas. The result is a gripping read, which plunges us into the world of the Viking women as they grapple with the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence, weather transactional marriages, and navigate old age.The Viking Age (793-1100 CE) was a time of exceptional opportunity for social mobility. Viking raiding and trading had the potential to create substantial wealth for those of comparatively humble origins. “Valkyrie” looks at this phenomenon, too: charting the role women played in running successful enterprises, and sometimes even ruling countries. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttiralso explores the emotional lives of Viking women, and their capacity for protecting their loved ones as fiercely as they exact vengeance for wrongs done to them.“Valkyrie” is that rare academic book that reads like an action-packed thriller and is sure to appeal to serious scholars of early Scandinavian history as much as it will to those who are eager to learn more about the women behind the great men of the Viking age. This is a book that gives the hitherto unseen Vikingwomen a chance to take centre stage and emerge as powerful agents for change in their own right.Friðriksdóttir earned attained her PhD from the University of Oxford and has held teaching and research positions at Yale, The Árni MagnússonInstitute for Icelandic Studies, and Harvard. She is currently based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo. She is the author of Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words and Power, The New Middle Ages. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Find out more about Johanna at her website, vikingwomen.org.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (960-1270) to study with the Huayan (華嚴) master, Jinshui Jingyuan (晉水淨源) (1011-1088). During his fourteen-month stay in China, he became well-acquainted with monks of the Huayan, Tiantai, Vinaya, Chan, and Consciousness-only schools. Upon his return to Koryŏ, he compiled the "New Catalog of the Teachings of All the Schools," the first comprehensive catalog of essays and commentaries that reflects a pan-East Asian tradition. Ŭich’ŏn has been historically associated with abandoning his affiliation with the Huayan school, and founding the Ch’ŏnt’ae (Tiantai, 天 台) order of Korean Buddhism. Despite this, letters to Master Jinshui Jingyuan, in combination with addresses to novice disciples reveal that Uicheon did not abandon Huayan thought,but advocated that all forms of doctrinal knowledge be thoroughly understood in an age of declining dharma.Trevor McManis is a student at California State University, Stanislaus, who specializes in cultural geography with an interest in applying geographic thought to the study of East Asian Religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The myth of Jews killing Christian children emerged in 1144 CE, with the death of a boy named William in Norwich, England. Over the course of several centuries, this myth gained traction and became firmly rooted throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Magda Teter traces the history of this myth and analyzes how accusations of ritual murder have followed Jews from the 12th century to the contemporary period.Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University.Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth A. Cecil's Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (Brill, 2020) weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapurāṇa, physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons to provide groundbreaking insight into the earliest known community of Śiva devotees: the Pāśupatas. Through examining how the Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional Indian landscapes, this book explores issues of belonging, identity, community building and place-making in Early Medieval India.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century as a trading hub, a military outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a base for Roman Catholic prelates to convert both the pagan natives and the Orthodox Christians of Rus.Kevin O'Connor's new book, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019) charts the fascinating history of Riga from the earliest days to Peter the Great's conquest of the much-coveted trading port in the early 18th century.O'Connor's book recounts in fascinating detail the personalities who shaped and dominated Riga's political and economic history. For six centuries, Riga's fortunes rose and fell in step with major political events of Europe, as the uneasy triumvirate of the church, military, and merchants balanced control and power over the city, ever hopeful to keep goods such as furs, timber, resin, and beeswax flowing from the vast Russian forest lands, through Riga and onto the rest of the known world. O'Connor introduces us to the infamous Livonian Brotherhood of the Sword — a military order of knights based in the city, canny and diplomatic prelates, and the notorious Brotherhood of the Blackfaces, one of the city's professional associations.From the outset, Riga was a multi-national and polyglot city, much as it remains today. Her membership in the Hanseatic League — the European economic fraternity, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade — greatly enhanced the city's prestige and economic influence, as Germans, Poles, and other Hansa members established successful trading relationships with Riga's guilds. Riga's rapid adoption of Protestantism in the 16th century forged other strong links with her neighbors and separated her even further culturally from the growing might of Russia.Though Rigans cherished their independence, the history of their city is one of almost constant occupation or rule of a foreign power, as the larger players in the Baltic constantly fought to gain the prize that was the city on the Daugava. O’Connor’s accounts of German, Polish, and later Swedish occupations help readers understand why the city developed in the way it did.O'Connor leaves us at Riga’s nadir. As plague ravishes the war-torn city, Tsar Peter the Great captures Riga as part of his conquest of the Eastern Baltic in the Great Northern War, which established the Russian Empire as the preeminent naval power in the Baltic Sea, but relegates Riga to a second-tier trading hub. Moreover, O'Conner suggests, Russia's conquest of the city forces Riga to adopt "Eastern," which never sits comfortably with the centuries of Riga's primarily "Western" culture and nature. We are left hoping that perhaps now, as Riga sloughs off the Soviet occupation, she will once more take her rightful place in the Baltic’s panoply of prosperous ports.The House of Hemp and Butter is an impeccably-researched and very engagingly written account of Riga's fascinating social, economic, and political history.Kevin O'Connor is the Chair of History at Gonzaga University.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this volume Adrian Boas draws together an impressive range of academics, including work from renowned scholars as well as a number of though-provoking pieces from emerging researchers, in order to provide broad coverage of the major aspects of the period. This authoritative work will play an important role in the future direction of crusading studies.This volume enriches present knowledge of the crusades, addressing such wide-ranging subjects as: intelligence and espionage, gender issues, religious celebrations in crusader Jerusalem, political struggles in crusader Antioch, the archaeological study of battle sites and fortifications, diseases suffered by the crusaders, crusading in northern Europe and Spain and the impact of Crusader art. The relationship between Crusaders and Muslims, two distinct and in many way opposing cultures, is also examined in depth, including a discussion of how the Franks perceived their enemies.Arranged into eight thematic sections, The Crusader World considers many central issues as well as a large number of less familiar topics of the crusades, crusader society, history and culture. With over 100 photographs, line drawings and maps, this impressive collection of essays is a key resource for students and scholars alike.Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University) tells the story of how trade routes across the Saharan Desert facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects between the 8th and the 16th century. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, Caravans of Gold is a selection of chapters that reach across academic fields and genres of writing, seeking to evoke the exhibition’s central themes, including cultural movement, archaeological fragments, and global connection. We talk to the exhibition’s curator and the publications’s editor, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, about this expansive project. The conversation ranges from the exhibition’s conception, how the catalogue was designed in relation to it, and best practices associated with building a project like this one. Moreover, Kathleen details the major themes and questions associated with the exhibition. What is the “medieval”? How can we understand historical movements across the Sahara? How does religion –specifically, Islam– play a role in this project?Kathleen Bickford Berzock is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She is the author of For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection and the coeditor of Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display.Exhibition Schedule:Aga Khan Museum, TorontoSeptember 21, 2019–February 23, 2020Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DCApril 8–November 29, 2020Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are a handful of pieces from the Medieval and Renaissance periods that most music students learn about in their introductory history courses; among them are Guillaume Du Fay’s, Ave regina celorum III and Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. Some of these foundational compositions have been studied by musicologists for over one hundred years, but generally they have been examined in isolation as masterworks by great composers. In her new book Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jane D. Hatter effectively contextualizes these pieces within a larger repertory of motets and masses written between 1450 and 1550 that mention other musicians or explore complex theoretical topics. She sees these works as evidence of an international community of musicians that might have been separated geographically and isolated by their itinerant lifestyles, but who were connected through a shared attitude towards art and their own sense of themselves as composers and musicians. Connecting her insights to a similar phenomenon in the visual arts, Hatter shows that the repertory she studies reflects a musical culture that valued intergenerational connections between artists and compositional virtuosity based upon theoretical and pedagogical concepts that stretched back to antiquity, but that also permeated the musical training these composers received.Jane D. Hatter is a musicologist on faculty at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Jane has published on musical time in early sixteenth-century Italian paintings (Early Music, 2011) and also on intersections between popular devotions and ecclesiastical liturgy in Renaissance motets that include or quote the Ave Maria prayer (2012). More recently she has examined the persistence and conversion of music for women's churching ceremonies in both Catholic and Protestant contexts in the early Reformation period.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fran Altvater talks about the Medieval Pilgrimage, a practice that became central to Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages and evolved into the military pilgrimages of the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Altvater is a professor of art history at the University of Hartford. Her book, Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017.Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. Baptism marked the entrance of the faithful into the right relation, with the Catholic Church representing the main cultural institution of medieval society. In the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1220, the decoration of the font often had an important function: to underscore the theology of baptism in the context of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. This period witnessed a surge of concern about sacraments. Just as religious thinkers attempted to delineate the sacraments and define their function in sermons and Sentence collections, sculptural programs visualized the teaching of orthodox ideas for the lay audience. This book looks at three areas of primary concern around baptism as a sacrament incarnation, initiation, and the practice of baptism within the institution of the Church and the images that embody that religious discussion. Baptismal fonts have been recognized as part of the stylistic production of the Romanesque period, and their iconography has been generally explored as moral and didactic. Here, the message of these fonts is set within a very specific history of medieval Catholic sacramental theology, connecting erudite thinkers and lay users through their decoration and use.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices