The Uses of Saladin in Medieval and Early Modern Literature The Kurdish sultan Salâh ad-Dîn Yûsuf ibn Ayyûb (1138-1193), known as "Saladin" in English-speaking countries, conquered Fatimid Egypt, annexed Syria, and retook much of the territory of the Latin Kingdom in Palestine, …
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This dissertation is a study of the elaborations of the cultures of politics in the Mughal capital of Shahajahanabad - modern day Delhi - from the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the invasion of the Iranian warlord Nadir Shah in 1739. While this period has frequently b…
Scholars have claimed that the commercial waning of the Mediterranean at the turn of the seventeenth century and the increasing volume of captives reflected how the sea had lost its earlier characteristic unity, and subsequently began a decline. This project argues that the rumo…
Within the framework of the increasingly imperial world of the early modern period, the Deccan Plateau of South India stands out as somewhat anomalous. From their emergence in the 1490s and until their submission to the Mughal Empire in 1636, the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapu…
This thesis explores the environmental history of Ottoman lands and especially the impact of climate events associated with the Little Ice Age. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Ottomans conquered the Near East, the empire instituted elaborate systems for the pr…
This dissertation is a study of two episodes of mass mortality, in Marseilles during 1720-21, and in Aleppo, Syria, during 1761-62. Linked by trade ties, missionary outreach, and diplomatic contacts, the two cities were a microcosm of eighteenth-century relations across the Medi…
The formation of the Spanish nation and empire reverberates in its 16 th- and 17th-century literature, as the so-called "Reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula by the Northern, Christian kingdoms (8th-15 th centuries) served to create both new national territory and also an identi…
This dissertation is a comparative study of early modern English and Spanish literature and historical documents. It focuses on representations of blackness, purity of blood and intersections of theories of purity of blood with those of rank, gender and inheritance. Scholars of …
Headlong he runs into Circe's snares: Representation and the Restoration Royal Mistress is an interdisciplinary study of the Restoration royal mistress. During the Restoration and for generations thereafter, the mistresses of Charles II (reigned 1660-1685) came to symbolize the …
In this project, I explore the pícara's representation as both prostitute and woman of hybrid origins. I argue that the pícara's representation as a racialized prostitute is designed to generate a distorted mirror image of those aspects of society that do not fit within the idea…
In the aftermath of the expulsion in 1492, the Sephardic expellees in the Ottoman Empire developed a unique interpretation of levirate marriage (yibbum), a commandment obligating the brother of a man who has died without an heir to marry the deceased's widow. Heavily influenced …
The dissertation studies the visual construction of outsider and socially marginalized groups in early modern European art, with an emphasis on prints and book illustrations. It shows that a similar iconography and strategy of representation were used for groups of Others as div…
Much debate in paleoanthropology has focused on the complex pattern of human evolution in Israel during the Late Pleistocene under the premise that climate change was a primary determinant for observed changes in human migration events. A paramount question is whether Neandertal…
The Red Jews are a legendary people; this is their history. From the late thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, vernacular German texts depicted the Red Jews, a conflation of the Biblical ten lost tribes of Israel and Gog and Magog, as a savage and unnaturally foul nation, w…
This dissertation argues that early modern English writers represent the sea and tides as offering multiple, often contradictory spaces of risk and possibility. On page and stage, the ocean appears threatening and protective, liberating and confining, barren and fecund. Merchant…
David and his Psalms were at the center of many poetical and political early modern controversies: from what to say or do in church or tavern, to who should run the country. Writings by Thomas Sternhold, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, King James VI/I, John Milton, and the ghostwri…
During the early modern period, New World exploration and colonization created a labor crisis that was eventually solved by the European superpowers through chattel slavery. In England during the late-sixteenth century, moralists celebrated the humanist ethics guiding the nation…
This study considers the development of the modern construction of identity as it is enunciated in a specific literary genre. The sonnet, a literary form developed as a vernacular poetry yet meant for private enjoyment, synthesizes cultural and personal identification in a way t…
On close examination of a number of early modern Turk and Moor plays written between 1586 and 1642 female characters are: cast in the shadow of Elizabeth, the rose of England, or wither in comparison; portrayed as temptresses who act as catalysts in the conversion and corruption…