For the first time in English, a catalog of the world through fourteenth-century Arab eyes--a kind of Schott's Miscellany for the Islamic Golden Age
An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes--here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time--it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual...