Monday, April 13, 2009
Collaboration spaces
Great that some of you have decided to venture in but of course I was hoping for more. Maybe this kind of thing just doesn't work here, but I thought I'd encourage you to make use of them, if only to include your name and email address under one of the topics. I'm sure you all have questions about your topics and the readings, this is the perfect place to ask them. And of course we'll stay out of the way. No promises on privacy of course, but thus far shielding the blog from search engines and Google's blogroll has made the blog known only to us, no sign of intruders. So of course it is up to you. I do believe that you will find it useful to have a group to whom you can turn as crunch time approaches.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
Concerning Prof Chamberlain's email today: I have a mac and I can get most of the learn@UW links to work if I click on the "undock" button (the 2nd button on the toolbar at the top of the page). Good luck!
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is'int the correct place to ask this, but anyway..
ReplyDeleteI've found a document on trade in the town of Amalfi before the Crusades. Apparently it was largely destroyed by a storm after 1300. The trick is that the author doesn't explain where it was located, and the only map I can find is to a modern city in Italy. Does anyone know where this place used to be?
On a related note, I've found this book by Henri Pirenne called Mohamet et Charlemagne. The book is (according to Amazon) on the influences of Islam on the development of medieval Europe. Is there a book that flips that concept around? The influences of medieval Europe on the Near East?
ReplyDeleteSorry to keep spamming the blog, but how do I quote a quote? I have a quote by Runciman that could potentially be useful, but it appears in another scholar's article. What's the best way to handle that?
ReplyDeleteGood question, not spamming at all. To quote a quote it goes like this: As Pirenne wrote, "This seminal figure in the history of the early modern Mediterranean was oft heard to say, 'I'd give my kingdom for a warm hearth and a friendly dog'". The larger quote has double " and the nested one has '.
ReplyDeleteIf both quotes end at the same place it is first the single ' and then the double ". Unless you are reading British authors or are yourself British: they do it backwards.
Amalfi was indeed the southern Italian city, an on and off independent city-state until the Normans conquered it in 1073. Like Sicily, its culture and architecture was a fascinating blend of Byzantine, Arab, and Latin Western elements. I'd be interested to hear more about this document: most sources and contemporary scholarship attribute its decline to two sacks of the city by the Pisans in the early 12th -Century. Arab scholars and travelers of the era were well aware of the city, as they were of Sicily, mainly because several Norman rulers were generous in their patronage of Arab scholars and maintained close links to the other side of the pond.
On the influence of medieval Europe on the Middle East there is very little to say. If you are interested in the issue the area where the scholarship is interesting is the history of technology. A British scholar, Donald Hill, is by far the most important - and often surprising - scholar on the subject.
ReplyDeleteMost scholars see the cultural and intellectual influences going in one direction only: from East to West. Our medieval sources in Arabic and Persian tended to view European intellectual and cultural accomplishments with a certain disdain, if not bemusement, convinced for good reason of the superiority of their arts, architecture, and sciences. A good example of this can be found in Usamah (or Osamah) ibn Munqidh's Autobiography, available on learn@uw.
Some scholars believe that it was unfortunate that the Islamic world held on to these attitudes for too long: by the time they noticed aspects of European progress, especially in arts of war, agriculture, and technology, it was too late to incorporate them into their own fields of endeavor. In this view, the various regions of the Islamic world were left with a choice: either to imitate or to adopt a posture of conservatism, holding onto their long-standing ways of doing things. What they couldn't do was engender the social, cultural, and political changes that would have permitted independent innovation. The issue is much debated, and the view I just described is too simplistic for my tastes (see Bernard Lewis', What Went Wrong for the best exposition of this point of view).
I found the article on Amalfi on Jstor. I read the attract but not much further, since I couldn't verify its relevance to my topic. There are two, I think by the same author. One was on trade and the other was on culture or politics or something.
ReplyDeleteThat's too bad about the lack of scholarship. Just because it's not a positive influence doesn't mean it's not any influence at all. The very existence of the Latin States had to have some affect (and according to my paper, it did) on the way things operated. I mean, seriously, a bunch of smelly white barbarians show up and start killing people by the thousands. Why is this just a blip on the radar?
I need a source that talks a little about Fatimid governing structures and policies etc before Salah al-Din took over. Can you point me in a good direction?
ReplyDeleteFatimids: see Marmon's chapter on them on learn@uw: all the references you could possibly desire.
ReplyDeleteA blip on the radar, nice way of putting it. That indeed is how most scholars see it. The Crusaders of course had a local impact, quite a strong one, but in terms of cultural influence we struggle to find any. The Crusaders themselves noticed this: no Muslims adopted their way of life, but crusaders who lived there for long enough tended to "go native", adopting Middle Eastern cultural ways while retaining their religion. This attracted a lot of attention from recently-arrived crusaders, who condemned their compatriots as corrupted cultural hybrids.
ReplyDelete