This is the third of three volumes reprinting the collected papers on Islamic subjects by Richard M. Frank, Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of America, and completes the set. The present volume on the Asharites and the classical Asharite tradition brings together articles written in the last two decades of Richard Frank's scholarly activity which represent his mature thought on the main philosophical and doctrinal elements of that tradition. The volume opens with two more general studies, one on the science of kalam, presenting Frank's most profound insights on its very nature...

The Republic of Venice experienced relentless crisis in the early sixteenth century-political, military, ideological, and commercial. Focusing on Venice's involvement in the Italian Wars, these essays examine various episodes and dimensions of that time of troubles. These include the impact of apocalyptic speculation on political action, the driving force behind the creation of the Ghetto, the Venetian contribution to the infamous Sack of Rome, links between the spice trade and military disaster, the significance of old age in the ruling class, the role of the family in patrician politics,...

Medieval art is wordy; inscriptions and poems, commentaries and chronicles accompany and adorn it. The Art of Words presents a series of detective stories by a renowned explorer of medieval philological evidence who here examines the thought and objects of the Venerable Bede and Theodulf of Orleans. What physical objects did Bede have in mind, for example, when writing about the paintings of his monastic churches? How did he conceive of the division of biblical books into chapters? Why was the famous Libri Carolini made for Charlemagne never published? Indeed what did it mean in the Middle...

Relations between Byzantium and its neighbours are the focus of this volume. The papers address questions of cultural exchange, with special attention to art historical relations as shown by technical, iconographic and diplomatic exchanges. While addressed to specialists, both their approach and the language make these papers accessible to students at all levels.

The twelfth century was a time of cultural renewal and innovation in Byzantium, just as it was in the west. In literature, the long disused genres of epic, satire and the novel (or 'romance') took new forms during that century; at the same time, in language, the vernacular made its first tentative literary appearances. These developments continued uninterruptedly through the late Byzantine and early modern periods. Scholarship since the nineteenth century has been sharply divided over these texts: do they represent the first 'breakthrough' of an emergent 'Modern Greek' literature, or merely a...

The studies here reflect Jonathan Riley-Smith's work as a historian, which began with research on the history of the military orders, the specific focus of the third section here. Out of this grew the concerns covered in the previous sections: an interest in the political and constitutional history of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the relations of the western settlers with the indigenous population of Palestine and Syria; the theory of crusading, involving research on theology and canon law, and the rAle of the popes as preachers, and at the same time detailed consideration of the responses of...

The essays reproduced in this volume analyze the guild system in Byzantium and the West, and investigate for the first time the process of price formation in Byzantium. Innovative approaches are devised to fathom the conceptual basis, institutional parameters, market organization and structures, and market dynamics which shaped price determination. Correlatively, it is persuasively established that the Byzantine guilds, unlike their counterparts in the West, did not fix prices through concerted action as they did not command the requisite market power or institutional support. Fundamentally,...

To complement his first collection of articles (Rome's Fall and After, 1989), Walter Goffart presents here a further set of essays, all but two published between 1988 and 2007. They mainly focus on two types of historiography: early medieval narratives, with special attention to Bede's Historia ecclesiastica; and printed maps designed to portray and teach history, with special attention to the ubiquitous 'map of the barbarian invasions'. The wide-ranging concerns represented extend from the underside of the Life of St Severinus of Noricum, and further evidence for dating Beowulf, to the...

This is the first of a pair of volumes by Jonathan Hodge, collecting all his most innovative, revisionist and influential papers on Charles Darwin and on the longer run of theories about origins and species from ancient times to the present. The focus in this volume is on the diversity of theories among such pre-Darwinian authors as Lamarck and Whewell, and on developments in the theory of natural selection since Darwin. Plato's Timaeus, the Biblical Genesis and any current textbook of evolutionary biology are all, it may well seem, on this same enduring topic: origins and species. However,...

In these studies Michael Macdonald examines the extraordinary flowering of literacy in both the settled and nomadic populations of western Arabia in the 1500 years before the birth of Islam, when a larger proportion of the population could read and write than in any other part of the ancient Near East, and possibly any other part of the ancient world. Even among the nomads there seems to have been almost universal literacy in some regions. The scores of thousands of inscriptions and graffiti they left paint a vivid picture of the way-of-life, social systems, and personal emotions of their...