Professor Noonan here sets out to examine what Islamic silver coins (dirhams) reveal about the great trade between the Islamic world, European Russia, and the Baltic during the early Viking Age. Particular attention is devoted to the origins of this international commerce and the role of such peoples as the Vikings and Khazars. As he shows, the study of these coins also throws new light on mint output in the a Abbasid caliphate, the historical significance of specific dirham hoards, and how the patterns of trade evolved during the course of the ninth century."

This collection of Giles Constable's key articles on medieval monastic and ecclesiastical history provides nothing less than a comprehensive overview of research in the field. The book provides an insight into monastic life in the Middle Ages - from Germany to Normandy and from England to Sicily.

The conventional opposition of scholastic Aristotelianism and humanistic science has been increasingly questioned in recent years, and in these articles William Wallace aims to demonstrate that a progressive Aristotelianism in fact provided the foundation for Galileo's scientific discoveries. The first series of articles supply much of the documentary evidence that has led the author to the sources for Galileo's early notebooks: they show how Galileo, while teaching or preparing to teach at Pisa, actualy appropriated much of his material from Jesuit lectures given at the Collegio Romano in...

The articles in this volume provide a background to the study of pre- and early Islamic history. The studies are based on a wide range of sources, but often focus on illuminating particular accounts which are analyzed and placed in their historical context.

Angeliki Laiou (1941-2008), one of the leading Byzantinists of her generation, broke new ground in the study of the social and economic history of the Byzantine Empire. Economic Thought and Economic Life in Byzantium, the last of three volumes to be published posthumously in the Variorum Collected Studies Series, brings together twelve articles that reflect her perennial concern with the relationship of theory and practice in historical contexts. Two of these are translated from Greek and German, respectively, and another is here published for the first time. The six articles in the first...

Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary...

This book is about the human mind in ancient philosophy, with a focus on sense perception, a subject that Richard Sorabji has previously treated more in articles than in books. But it finishes with chapters offering a distinctive view on moral conscience and will. Sense perception raises the further questions of the mind-body relation, of self-awareness, of infinite divisibility and the continuum, of the capacities of animals and children and of the relation between perception and reason. On all topics the introduction interconnects the papers and presents fresh material to fill out the...

This volume complements the selections of Wilferd Madelung's articles previously published by Variorum (Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam, Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam and Studies in Medieval ShAism). The first sections contain articles examining intellectual and historical aspects of Mutazilism, the IbA a,iyya, a, anafism and MA turidism, Sufism and Philosophy. The final group of articles focuses on aspects of early Muslim history. A detailed index completes the volume.

The eighteen papers collected in this volume - fifteen of which are published in English for the first time - explore the transformations of religious practices between the third and the fifth centuries in the Western part of the Roman Empire. They share an approach that privileges the study of processes and interactions and does not take for granted the categories and roles traditionally ascribed to social actors. A first group of papers focuses on the sermons and letters of Augustine of Hippo. These texts are precious evidence for balancing the clerical perspective that characterizes most...