New Books in Medieval History

In his fascinating and painstakingly research new book Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2022), the noted scholar of Islam Yohanan Friedmann details the religious thought and political movements of multiple actors who made messianic claims in premodern and modern Islam, spanning sites including South Asia, North Africa, and the Sudan. Over the course of this book, we learn extensively about a range of less known intellectual traditions-in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu-on questions of messianism and apocalypse in Muslim thought and history. Centered on the lives, messianic claims and aspirations, as well as the tensions and contradictions hovering over some of the most prominent Muslim actors across time and space, Friedmann highlights with glistening brilliance the importance of messianism to Sunni Islam. Throughout the book, Friedmann unleashes his signature prowess of presenting unexpected, finely grained, and yet eminently accessible readings of an encyclopedic reservoir of difficult texts and sources.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration.Key features: Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students and scholars through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.Thomas E. Burman is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the Director of the Medieval Institute. He is a scholar of Christian-Muslim-Jewish intellectual and cultural history in the medieval Mediterranean. His book Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.Brian A. Catlos is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the co-director of the Mediterranean Seminar. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean. His most recent book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, is available in eight languages and as an audiobook.Mark D. Meyerson is Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean and on the history of violence. His book A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain was runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, USA.Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020) by Dr. E. Amanda McVitty presents a groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s.This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties.Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, Dr. McVitty illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t even know the real name of the 11th century author Murasaki Shikibu. But we do know that her book, The Tale of Genji, is arguably one of the most influential Japanese texts to date. Genji quickly captured its readers’ imaginations with political intrigue and court drama, but it can also be read as an astute critique of Japanese elite society. Reginald Jackson is an associate professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature and Performance at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Textures of Mourning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), written by Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2022. In this rich and insightful book, Dr. O’Dell takes us through her own spiritual and physical travels, as well as gives us historical and Islamic mystic context to help us understand and cherish the words of Rumi on a deeper level.As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualizing his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily Jane O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes in Istanbul. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi’s classic work.At the heart of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love” which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gift of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati―gorgeously dressed and adorned men―to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power.Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials.This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great poetry or beautiful prose if often capable of challenging and delighting readers far more than dry, bland language. But why is that? Dalā’il al-Iʿjaz, or Indications of Inimitability, is a hugely influential Arabic text about exactly what it is that makes beautiful language beautiful. Its author, Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, used a theoretical, almost scientific method to demystify poetry and its lasting effects. Professor Alexander Key discusses why he’s working on the first English translation of this text and the huge impact that Jurjānī’s work has had on Arabic literary criticism. Alexander Key is an associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His studies focus on the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds. He is the author of Language Between God and the Poets. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possibly even the phrase ‘swan song’.Dr. Natalie Goodison’s Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022) explores the emergence of each of these ideas, starting with an examination of the medieval swan in natural history, exploring classical writings and their medieval interpretations and demonstrating how the idea of a swan’s song developed.Dr. Goodison then proceeds to consider literary motifs of swan-to-human transformation, particularly the legend of the Knight of the Swan. Although this legend is known today only through Wagner’s opera, it was a best-seller in the Middle Ages, and courts throughout Europe strove to be associated as ancestors of this Swan Knight. Consequently, the swan was projected as an icon of courtly and eventual royal status.The book’s third chapter looks at the swan as icon of the Lancasters, particularly important during the reign of Richard II and the War of the Roses, and the final chapter examines the swan as an important item of feasting, focusing on cookery and husbandry to argue that over time the right to keep swans became an increasingly restricted right controlled by the English crown. Each of the swan’s medieval associations are explored as they developed over time to the modern day.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation.The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Dr. Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. Dr. Ward stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth.Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Dr. Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) by Anthony Sattin tells the remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout history. Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative, sometimes bloody, sometimes peaceful and symbiotic relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two ways of living generates a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities. Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, this sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible to its seeming decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads explains why we leave home, and why we like to return again.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. Her work focuses on histories of nomad-state relationships and uses of architecture in nomadic contexts, with a focus on the Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices