Thirteenth century

Women who commissioned manuscripts in the Welsh Marches produced, utilized, and engaged the exotic in Latin and vernacular religious texts to help regulate textual communities and regional identity. By employing exoticism, these religious manuscripts attempted to reconcile the t…

In the form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah, the literary image of God as a suckling mother constructs a metaphysical social relationship between God and humanity that is unprecedented in Jewish theological literature. This striking image arises from a stream of Jewish tho…

In the late eleventh century, with the collapse of the Iberian Caliphate, the Ebro watershed came under the control of the Christian principalities which would become the 'Crown of Aragon.' The majority of the vanquished elected to remain under terms of surrender negotiated with…

The imposition of Mongol political authority over the Seljuk realms of Anatolia during the mid-thirteenth century brought about vast changes not only in the demographics of the region, but also in its political structures and culture. This dissertation studies the dynamics of ea…

Born in the years following the Disputation of Barcelona of 1263, the Castilian Jew Abner of Burgos (c.1270--c.1347), known after his conversion to Christianity as Alfonso of Valladolid, wrote various anti-Jewish polemics in Hebrew that included arguments similar to those made p…

This Dissertation discusses the cultural, historical, and linguistic influences of Arabic civilization that led to the incorporation of Arabic words into the German language over the period from 700 to 1200 AD, when the Arab and Germanic cultures enjoyed an especially complex re…