Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation,...

This volume brings together some of the latest research on the cultural, intellectual, and commercial interactions during the Renaissance between Western Europe and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between Western European Christian states and the Eastern Mediterranean Islamic states, and has therefore highlighted the incongruity of conceiving of an iron curtain bisecting the mentalities of the various socio-political and religious communities located in the...