Sixteenth century

In this thesis, the staple food of Mesoamerica features in a pair of comparison studies each containing two representations, one from colonial Mexico and another from the contemporary Southwest US. The association of the tortilla with indigeneity in these four representations si…

It has traditionally been taught that Iran, a Sunni state was converted to Twelver Shi'ism almost overnight when the armies backing the Safavid house conquered the country in 1501. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to question how, and how rapidly, the process of con…

The purpose of this study is to investigate Baha al-Din Muhammad ibn Husayn Amili, aka Sheikh Bahai, a sixteenth century Middle Eastern scholar and educator, and his mathematical work, Quintessence of Calculation (or Khulasat al-Hisab). To accomplish this objective a set of proc…

This thesis is a study of royal acts printed in French before 1601. The kingdom of France is a natural place to begin a study of royal acts. It possessed one of the oldest judicial systems in Europe, which had been established during the reign of St Louis (1226-1270). By the six…

This thesis explores attitudes of Christians toward Islam and Muslims in Spain in the sixteenth century and intends to destabilize Islam's traditional place as adversary in Early-Modern Spanish history. My research aligns itself with and employs new trends in historiography that…

The Ottoman-French alliance in the sixteenth century, when a Christian king allied with a Muslim sultan against another Christian ruler, has been regarded as a sensational aberration from the norms of Renaissance Diplomacy. It is argued here that this perception is the result of…

The common view that Islamic and Persianate painters were anonymous, lowly artisans, is primarily a result of the attitude which Islam demonstrated toward the plastic arts. In contrast, painters in the Europe of the Renaissance are thought to have enjoyed a life of prestige unkn…

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual issues that surround the most dramatic form of human encounter: that of imperial conquest. By examining the modes of thought available to conquering societies I examine the way in which specific narrative traditions influence the pro…

This dissertation addresses the reciprocal relations between rational speculation and devotional piety in the life and thought of Rabbi Moses Cordoeiro (= Cordovero - RaMaK, Safed, 1522-1570), arguably the most important mystical thinker in Jewish history. By featuring numerous …

This doctoral thesis, under the title "Territorial articulation in insular spaces: terrestrial communications in the Canary Islands from the XVI to the XIX centuries" , studies the road network in the light of its primitive structure, from the original settlements to the end of …

This dissertation examines Spanish treatment of subject Muslims (Moriscos) as a model for the assimilation and acculturation of Amerindians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It gives particular emphasis to formal, institutional roles of the government and Church in…

The urban development of Aleppo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is explored, focusing on the patronage of urban architectural complexes by Ottomans, members of the ruling imperial Elite based in Istanbul. The synchronic and diachronic study of architectural interventi…

This dissertation translates into English and provides annotations for the 254-page Ottoman Turkish manuscript, Mevâ'idü'n-Nefâ'is fi Kavâ'idi'l-Mecâlis , composed in 1599-1600 by the renowned Ottoman historian and bureaucrat Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli. This is the first translation…

Many postcolonial studies have dealt with the destructive impact of colonialism on the Other / the colonized with comparatively less attention paid to the mentality and motives behind colonialism. In addition to showing the colonial discursive practices, this dissertation will f…

The Chandayan romance, composed by the poet Maulana Da'ud of Dalmau in 1379 and relating the adventures of princess Chanda and the hero Laurak, is known today in five fragmentary and dispersed illustrated versions and two incomplete unillustrated copies. This dissertation focuse…

The dissertation examines arts of the book in Shiraz during the first century of Safavid rule. Scholarly literature has neglected Shiraz illustrated manuscripts, despite the fact that the number of extant manuscripts from this city exceeds those from all other centers combined. …

This work reads and interprets the painted story of the Conquest of Mexico made by the Nahua painters for Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's Book XII of the Florentine Codex. Between 1555 and 1579 Sahagún and his Indigenous collaborators transcribed into Nahuatl and translated into Sp…

This dissertation is an inquiry into the emergence of the pastoral landscape in the visual arts of Venice in relation to the culture's framework of spatial experience--both actual and fictive--during the Renaissance period. For although the development of the pastoral as an inde…

This dissertation explores the goals of Jesuit missionary activity and the organizations through which those goals were achieved by focusing on three of the first Jesuit confraternities founded in the 1540s in Rome. These confraternities administered houses for reformed prostitu…

As protestantism takes hold amongst the English populace in the sixteenth-century, increased focus on bible-reading and specifically the Old Testament, the literal hermeneutic, and the idea of God's covenant with a specific nation originating with Israel, converge to create a ne…