This dissertation argues that the chivalric code and resulting “ethos” of chivalry creates a physical, religious, and social burden upon the medieval knights tasked with its application and adherence. The immediate result of this chivalric burden is the inability of knights to l…
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Saint James Apostle has been historically associated with his predications in the Iberian Peninsula. His cult started in the medieval times and has prolonged until the present, where he is considered the patron Saint of Spain. The construction and promotion of this symbol has be…
This dissertation examines the geography of the slave trade, the role of slavery in the household, and the lives of domestic slave women in the Egyptian Jewish community under the rule of the Fatimid caliphate and Ayyubid sultanate. I juxtapose Hebrew and Judaeo- Arabic document…
Fourteenth-century Iberia was a complicated and intricate place of intertwining cultural and religious entities; this mingling is particularly evident in the architecture of the Kingdom of Castile. In 1364, Pedro of Castile began a new renovation on the Real Alcázar in Seville t…
Most approaches to the history of Mozarabs (Christians with lineal roots in Muslim-ruled Iberia) in Castilian Toledo are framed within linear narratives of assimilation, treating the fates of their communal linguistic, legal, and liturgical traits—that is, the use of Arabic, the…
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, …
In southwest France starting in the early thirteenth century, an estimated 500 to 700 new towns were created over the course of about 150 years. These new towns, or "bastides," were most often created on unoccupied lands and took the form of a geometric grid plan that was design…
Based mostly on unknown manuscripts, this study offers the first analysis of the historical contours and cultural contexts of the early Muslim tradition of dream interpretation (700 A.D.-1100 A.D.), a divinatory technique that seeks to predict the future through an analysis of d…
The purpose of the following pilot study has been to speculate on the wider social interactions and phenomena of the Sicilian Middle Ages, particularly in terms of Muslim-Christian relations and cultural hybridization. This was attempted in two ways. First, by determining whethe…
This dissertation examines the economic, social and political life of La Plana, an area associated with an extensive irrigation system at the mouth of the Millars river in eastern Spain, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This was part of a new kingdom establi…
Afterlife and the concept of soul in Judaism is one of the main subjects that are discussed in the academia. There are some misassumptions related to hereafter and the fate of the soul after departing the body in Judaism. Since the Hebrew Bible does not talk about the death and …
This study is an investigation into the semiotics of carved ivory objects in the Frankish Empire of the ninth and early tenth centuries. It argues that a number of distinctive social practices involving ivory emerged in this period that made carved ivory a newly desirable catego…
In the tenth century, a confluence of two unrelated events shaped the Twelver Shia community in Baghdad: the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam in 939/329 and the takeover of Baghdad in 945 by the Buyid princes, who were largely tolerant towards their Shi'a subjects. Twelver intell…
This study examines the socioeconomics of state formation in medieval Afghanistan in historical and historiographic terms. It outlines the thousand year history of Ghaznavid historiography by treating primary and secondary sources as a continuum of perspectives, demonstrating th…
Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expend no small amount of effort depicting the differences b…
This dissertation offers a new solution to an old problem in the Canterbury Tales. It breaks with the accepted interpretation of the Knight and Squire characters, which have traditionally been read either as idealized representations of knighthood or symbols of late medieval dec…
The concealment of the Fatimid imam al-Tayyib following the assassination of his father al-Āmir in 524/1130 was a major turning point for the Yemeni Ismā`īlīs. They had to manage their lives and religion without the direct guidance of their infallible imam. This affected every a…
Scholars of medieval China agree that between the late Tang (618-907) and the early Song (960-1279), Chinese society underwent a remarkable cultural, social, political, and economic transformation. One of the most dramatic aspects of this "Tang-Song transition" was the upheaval …
Utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis and quantitative geography techniques, the research provides insights into the meaning of changing settlement patterns in the Pakistani province of Punjab between the 5th century B.C and 18th century A.D. The study of archa…