The classical literary tale of Thebes traces its origins and narratives to the Thebaid region of Upper Egypt and the Theban culture and language that flourished there in the Middle Kingdom period, ca 1500 BC, when the Theban scribal recension of the Books of the Dead were writte…
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The historical sources on medieval Greek diet provide extensive information on the identity of foods consumed, but are less informative regarding the proportions in which they were consumed. Thus, there are a number of outstanding questions regarding diet in medieval Greece. The…
The political economy and settlement systems of medieval Morocco witnessed major transformations between the ninth and fifteenth centuries A.D. Based on a recent theoretical framework, it was postulated that medieval Moroccan political economy changed from a reliance on agricult…
A multidisciplinary approach is utilized to assess the organization and use of ancient and medieval Near Eastern textual deposits. An elaborate survey of the published material in ancient Near Eastern studies and library and archival studies indicates a general and pervasive ins…
This dissertation addresses one facet of the significant but unanswered question of the relationship of men of learning to religious culture at the end of the Middle Ages. To do so, it considers the case of university-trained physicians, and brings into conversation facets of me…
In the antebellum United States, the curse of Canaan functioned as one justification for African slavery. Some scholars claim that certain negative references to black skin color in rabbinic literature were repeated in medieval Christian sources and directly contributed to the a…
The expansion of western European culture along the Slavic frontier during the Middle Ages, first as a missionary movement, then as a program of settlement, colonization, and urbanization, is the subject of this dissertation. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries migrants—…
The British Isles are a group of over 6,000 islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. From the first millennium BC onward, various tribes and invaders created a diverse cultural landscape of Celtic, Roman, and Germanic traditions, transforming the isles from barbarian outpost to worl…
In the later medieval period, the heart was thought to be responsible for maintaining the body's temperature, effecting emotional responses based on sensory perceptions and even receiving the Eucharist. This thesis intends to provide a literary, medical and religious history of …
The term “sgraffito” refers to a ceramic decorative technique in which a design is cut through a light-colored slip to reveal the dark-colored earthenware body of the vessel's fabric. Sgraffito ware was one of the most common and widespread forms of regular tableware in Islam an…
This dissertation examines aspects of the reception of Judah Halevi's Sefer ha-Kuzari in European culture and scholarship from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. This “classic” Jewish theological treatise is an important example of medieval Jewish apologetic as…
For the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, the rapid territorial expansion which took place between the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the fall of Seville in 1248 created a broad frontier with Muslim al-Andalus which would stand for two and a half centuries.…
This thesis examines how medieval Byzantium is represented in French epics, romances, and chronicles of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries within a discursive triangle formed by Exoticism/Orientalism/Otherness. Despite their geographical proximity with the Muslim world, …
Chapter one provides a multifaceted panorama of the Genoese community in medieval Seville that helps to link Francisco Imperial, an early 15th century poet, to a group of foreigners and naturalized Castilian subjects who, despite their marginality, contributed greatly to the kin…
This dissertation examines four twelfth-century Almohad congregational mosques located in centers of spiritual or political power. Previous analyses of Almohad religious architecture are overwhelmingly stylistic and tend to simply attribute the buildings’ markedly austere aesthe…
This study shows medieval writers transforming animal fable, twelfth century to Robert Henryson, with comparisons to bestiary. It discusses innovators in social satire and in witty freedom with meanings. Their moralizations for traditional stories provide test cases for modern t…
This dissertation examines medieval Christian images of Muslims and their influence on later European attitudes toward Islam and Turks. It elaborates a theory of collective identity as the dramatic or theatrical performance of a socially constructed collective Self that can be a…
To many people, the term "medieval cosmopolitanism" might seem like a contradiction in terms. Even though the European Middle Ages is period that is routinely excluded from debates about transnational cultural phenomena, medieval travel narratives brim with episodes of encounter…
The Middle English prose Brut, a history of England from its mythical foundation by the husband-murdering Syrian princess Albina and her 32 sisters all the way through 1333 (and beyond, in later continuations), was the dominant vernacular history of late medieval England. First …