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Medieval Muslim Historians

In Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant seven leading scholars examine the lives and historical writings of seven medieval Muslim historians

Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant
Series: Muslim World in the Age of the Crusades
By Alex Mallett (Ed)
BRILL 2014
ISBN-10: 9004277412
ISBN-13: 978-9004277410

ABSTRACT:

In Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant seven leading scholars examine the lives and historical writings of seven medieval Muslim historians whose works are relevant to the history of the crusading period in the Levant (c.1097-c.1291). Contributors include: Frédéric Bauden, Niall Christie, Anne-Marie Eddé, Konrad Hirschler, Alex Mallett, and Françoise Micheau, Lutz Richter-Bernburg

CONTENTS:

  • Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant coverPreliminary Material
  • Introduction
  • Ibn al-Qalānisī
  • ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī
  • Ibn al-Athīr
  • Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī
  • Kamāl al-Dīn ʿUmar Ibn al-ʿAdīm
  • Ibn Wāṣil: An Ayyūbid Perspective on Frankish Lordships and Crusades
  • Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī
  • Index

ABOUT THE EDITOR:

Alex Mallett (Ph.D. 2009, University of Edinburgh) is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is the author of Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097-1291 (Ashgate, 2014), and co-editor of the five-volume series Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (Brill, 2009-2013).

Animals and Early Modern Identity

Animals were everywhere in premodern times. From mighty horses to humble sparrows princes as well as paupers were obliged to live with and interact with animals of all sorts. A new book explores these intimate interrelations between persons and animals.

Animals and Early Modern Identity
By Pia F. Cuneo (Ed.)
Ashgate 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4094-5743-5
ISBN Short: 9781409457435

ABSTRACT:

Animals and Modern Identity coverAnimals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them.

The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals – horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures – served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities.

Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for – and a concomitant recognition of – the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

CONTENTS:

  • Introduction, Pia F. Cuneo.
  • Man’s best friend? Dogs and pigs in early modern Germany, Alison G. Stewart
  • Every living beast: collecting animals and art in early modern Munich, Susan Maxwell
  • Where the sun don’t shine: animals and animality in Louis XIV’s royal labyrinth of Versailles (1668-74), Peter Sahlins
  • ‘For amusement, merry-making and good company’: horse racing at a German princely court, Miriam Hall Kirch
  • Breeding nobility: raising horses at early modern German courts, Magdalena Bayreuther
  • Horses and elite identity in early modern England: the case of Sir Richard Newdigate II of Arbury Hall, Warwickshire (1644-1710), Peter Edwards.
  • Horses as love-objects: shaping social and moral identities in Hans Baldung Griens’ Bewitched Groom (circa 1544) and in 16th-century hippology, Pia F. Cuneo
  • On the bit: Prince Maurits, Simon Stevin, and the Spanish warhorse, Ingrid Cartwright
  • The tusked hog: Richard III’s boarish identity, Karen Raber; Who are the animals in the Geese Book?, Corine Schleif
  • Settler stock: animals and power in the mid-17th-century contact at the Cape, circa 1652-62, Sandra Swart.
  • Individuality and the understanding of animals in the early modern Spanish empire, Abel A. Alves
  • World of wonders: exotic animals in European imagery, 1515-1650, Larry Silver
  • French early modern sea-monsters and modern identities, via Bruno Latour, Louisa Mackenzie
  • Ways of being, ways of knowing: fish, fishing, and forms of identity in 17th-century English culture, Elspeth Graham
  • Pedagogy and the art of dressage in the Italian Renaissance, Juliana Schiesari
  • Index.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Pia F. Cuneo is Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, USA. Her current work focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century hippology, and she competes locally in dressage.

 

Painted ceiling from Capestang

Medieval Painted Ceilings in Southern France

Painted ceilings became all the fashion in the later Middle Ages in Le Midi reaching from Catalonia to Northern Italy

In the later Middle Ages in Le Midi it became fashionable to lower the ceilings of the great halls in palaces by installing wooden ceilings constructed with wooden beams. Usually these beams were painted in glorious colours. Often the top of the wall was at the same time painted with a frieze – as in Palazzo Davanzati in Florence – or painted wooden boards were installed as part of the decoration, as in the Stag Room in the Papal Palace in Avignon – .

However, these examples represent no more than a gentle sounding board for the real treasures still found in public and private medieval houses in Le Midi (and further North). For more than a decade a group of dedicated art historians, archaeologists, architects and conservators /have worked to uncover and present this iconographic heritage, which gives an extremely important glimpse into the daily life of merchants, prelates and craftsmen from the 14th and especially 15th century.

Doves living behind a boards of a painted ceiling

One challenge here is that the ceilings are to be found in private homes. Many are not even known to the owners themselves as the painted celings still live a hidden life behind the white or stuccoed ceilings installed when that became fashionable. A third challenge is that French Law does not protect any old medieval house nor these precious pieces of art. Owners have been known to simply pry the painted boards from the ceilings and sell them on Ebay. Accordingly much work remains to be done, as is shown be a preliminary overview, which was published in 2011. Here 28 locations are presented in detail accompanied by sumptuous photos. The generosity of the group of academics should be complimented!

One of the places, where the public may fully enjoy the vibrant colours and funny vignettes is in the archiepiscopal palace in Capastang near Narbonne. Another place is the small village, Lagrasse, where the group has its organisational headquarters and where an exhibition recently opened in the ancient presbytery, telling the story of the painted ceilings. A third place is the La Maison des Chevaliers de Pont-Saint-Esprit in Nimes, where it is also possible to get a feeling for the late-medieval elite contexts of these painted treasures.

At the same time a new video has been released by the CNRS in Paris, which tells the story in detail about some recently uncovered wooden paintings in Lagrasse and elsewhere.

READ MORE:

Cover of plafonds prints medieval paired ceilingsThe main introduction to the “Plafonds peints médiévaux” – the medieval painted ceilings – can be found in a publication from 2011, which may be downloaded from the website of RCPPM or requested by post from DRAC du Languedoc-Roussillon (5 rue de la Salle L’évêque, Montpellier) or from “RCPPM: plafondspeints@sfr.fr (Post will be charged):

Images oubliées du Moyen Age. Les plafonds peints du Languedoc-Roussillon
Montpellier, DRAC, 2011

Another publication of interest may also be downloaded from the website:

Plafonds peints médiévaux en Languedoc, Actes du colloques de Capestang, Narbonne, Lagrasse, 21-23 février 2008
Études réunies par Monique Bourin et Philippe Bernardi.
Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, Perpignan, 2009, 249 p, 110 illustrations.

WEBSITE:

Association international de Recherche sur le Charpentes et les Plafonds Peints Médiévaux

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Les Maisons Aux Images. Un film de Claude Delhaye, produit par CNRS 2014

VISIT:

Medieval Painted Ceiling La Maison des Chevaliers de Pont-Saint-Esprit

Medieval Painted Ceilings in Lagrasse

Medieval Painted Ceilings in Capestang

Bravehart

Braveheart

In the film Mel Gibson’s Braveheart famously shouted freedom, while being racked to death at the front of the Tower of London

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