This volume, the second in the series of Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny’s selected articles to be published by Variorum, gathers the majority of her studies on the understanding of Islam in the West from the early Middle Ages until the mid-13th century; some related works will be included in a further selection. In the 12th century, as she shows, a serious effort was for the first time made to learn something of the reality behind the fabulous and scurrilous stories about Muhammad and Islam. A collection of translations from Arabic, including the Koran, was commissioned in 1140 by Peter the...

The papers assembled in this selection of studies range in subject matter from early Judaic magic to an inscribed monument of the Neo-Classical period. The principal emphasis of the collection is nevertheless on religious developments under the High Roman Empire: problems arising from the interpretation of oriental cults imported from the Hellenistic East but primarily the development of imperial cult, the one universal religion of the empire before the coming of Christianity. The essays divide into five categories: Divinity and Power; The Imperial Numen; The Imperial Cult: Review and...

This volume brings together articles (including two hitherto unpublished pieces) that Susan Reynolds has written since the publication of her Fiefs and Vassals (1994). There she argued that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as generally understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval historians from the works of medieval academic lawyers and the writers of medieval epics and romances. Six of the essays reprinted here continue her argument that feudalism is unhelpful to understanding medieval society, while eight more discuss other aspects of medieval...

This fourth Variorum collection of articles by Peter Linehan comprises items largely from the past decade. The studies represent further investigation of themes broached in earlier works, in particular the latest report on the movements of Cardinal John of Abbeville, and the related subjects of historiography and historians, the interplay of history and government, and aspects of sacral monarchy. Articles on Zamora's frustrated legal history and Zamora's cardinal extend the Castilian theme across the territorial frontier into the kingdom of Portugal, and two other items explore English...

The articles in this collection complement those in Professor Griffith's previous volume, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of 9th-Century Palestine, studying the first efforts of Christians living in the early Islamic world to respond to the religious challenges of Islam. In particular, the author shows how Christian apologists who wrote in Arabic adopted in defense of Christian doctrines the modes of discourse (kalam) then employed by Muslim controversialists (mutakallimun) to advance the claims of Islam. The writers whose works are studied here developed a truly Christian 'ilm...

The aim of these studies is to explore the scientific activity and learning that took place within the Ottoman empire, a subject often neglected by both historians of science and of the Ottoman world. Professor Ihsanoglu has been a pioneer in this field. In several papers he analyses the continuing tradition of Arabic science inherited by the Ottomans, together with the contributions made by the conquered Christian and incoming Jewish populations. The main focus, however, is upon the Ottoman reaction to, accommodation with, and eventual acceptance of the Western scientific tradition. ...

These studies by Wael Hallaq represent an important contribution to our understanding of the neglected field of medieval Islamic law and legal thought. Spanning the period from the 8th to the 16th centuries, they draw upon a wide range of original sources to offer both fresh interpretations of those sources and a careful evaluation of contemporary scholarship. The first articles expound the interrelated issues of legal reasoning, legal logic and the epistemology of the law. There follows a set of primarily historical studies, which question a series of widely held assumptions, while the last...

United by a common interest in the institutions, the social life and the commercial activities of the Ottoman empire in its heyday, these studies fall into three sections. The first concentrates upon Istanbul, the heart of the empire; the second covers the dealings between the Ottomans and foreign traders, amongst whom the Venetians held a prime position. Robert Mantran then turns to the Arabic provinces of the empire, examining their relations with the central government. In particular, he looks at Northern Africa, the history of which in the Ottoman period remains too little studied, and...

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was the most versatile humanist of the fifteenth century: author of numerous compositions in both Latin and Italian, and a groundbreaking theorist of painting, sculpture, and architecture. His Latin writings owe much to the model of Petrarch (1304-1374), the famed poet of the Italian Canzoniere, but also a prolific author of Latin epistles, biographies, and poems that sparked the revival of classical culture in the early Italian Renaissance. The essays collected here reflect some thirty years of research into these pioneers of Humanism, and offer important...

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics, disciplines, arguments or diseases in the present. Historians usually tend to assume such continuous identities of present attitudes and activities with past ones, and rarely question them; the contention here is that this gives us a false image of the very things in the past that we went to look for.