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Women, Politics, and Reform in Renaissance Italy
Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work. What echoes might we find of the foreign widow’s prophetic voice in their texts? This volume offers innovative investigations, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, of the profound impact of Birgitta of Sweden in Renaissance Italy.
Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.
Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.
Women, Politics, and Reform in Renaissance Italy
Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work. What echoes might we find of the foreign widow’s prophetic voice in their texts? This volume offers innovative investigations, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, of the profound impact of Birgitta of Sweden in Renaissance Italy.
Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.
Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.
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Talmudic sources recognize the dedication of assets for the benefit of the Temple alone (heqdesh). In Islamic countries, Jews encountered another form of asset endowment – the Islamic waqf – and fully embraced it. This article explores the utilization of waqf from a fresh perspective, focusing on urban communities in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, to examine its role in constructing community members’ self-identity. The allocation of waqf beneficiaries allowed the endower to delineate the community’s boundaries in their mind, reflecting the desired social circles they sought to be part of.
Analyzing documents spanning centuries reveals ongoing changes in this realm. Social and demographic shifts periodically led to reductions in the circles of waqf beneficiaries. The strained relations between Rabbanites and Karaites during the Mamluk Period, as well as waves of Jewish immigration from Europe and North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods, influenced the norms governing the endowment of houses, land, and money among Jewish property owners. These norms evolved again during the late Ottoman period when the boundaries between different Jewish groups became more blurred.
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This short introduction prefaces an ends special issue devoted to the topic of “interreligious founding”, whose contributions stem from an online workshop held April 8th–9th, 2021. This workshop was planned as a continuation of the dialogue on charitable foundations held between experts of various academic disciplines in Tokyo (2019) and Singapore (2020). As a result of discussions begun at these venues, it has become apparent that the scholarship on endowments, which has unfolded to the greatest extent within Medieval Studies and therefore with the context of the medieval Latin West foremost in mind, has not adequately addressed the phenomenon of interreligious patronage, that is the participation in foundation activities by persons of different religious traditions.
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This paper shows the spread of waqf endowments in the medieval Islamic world, especially in Egypt, Syria and Ottoman Turkey, based on narrative and archival sources, and discusses what purposes and motives for endowments and their social effects were. Finally, it goes on to state the features of the waqf endowment (combination of personal and religious motives, and of egoistic and altruistic wishes), in comparison with endowments in other regions such as Europe, India, China and Japan.
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This article offers a reassessment of the ties between the families of two half-brothers, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and ʿAbd al-Malik sons of Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam. The first succeeded their father as caliph, while the second was governor of Egypt at the turn of the eighth century. The modern historiography has made much of ninth- and tenth-century narratives of opposition between the two. Those narratives are reassessed with a focus on how ties of kinship were used as a literary tool to build a distinctive memory of the Marwanid family. Even if moments of competition are recorded between the two, the families of those two men were instrumental to the success of the Marwanids as a caliphal family. The focus here is on marriage ties between their sons and daughters as well as on how the sons and their fathers participated in the same marriage patterns. The paper offers to shift our perspective by placing emphasis on family members that are usually not given proper attention: mothers, daughters, sisters and a wider pool of sons.
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This paper investigates the overlooked topic of maternal ties of kinship in Umayyad history through the case study of ʿĀʾisha bint Hishām ibn Ismāʿīl al-Makhzūmī, the mother of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 105–125/724–743). Using a range of primary sources, including annalistic, adab, and eschatological sources, as well as early Islamic poetry, it investigates the significance of matrilineal kinship and naming practices in the Marwanid period. ʿĀʾisha’s representations across sources illuminates how sources discuss caliphal mothers and the role of the matrilineal family in marriage and naming practices. A brief prosopographical analysis also demonstrates the widespread use of maternal names in early Islamic society – ʿĀʾisha is said to have named her son after her father. Early Islamic poets praised maternal kinship ties, indicating an appeal to caliphal constituents from the maternal family. Overall, by incorporating maternal ties of kinship into Marwanid history, we may gain a more complete understanding of early Islamic society.
Sayyids, Tribal Kinship, and the Imamate in Zaydi Yemen under Imam Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn (d. 965/1558)
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Studies of Zaydi Yemen tend to underline the divisions, rather than connections, between sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, and tribal groups in the political sphere. This paper answers the question what value family connections to tribes had for ambitious sayyids in early modern Yemen who wanted to become Zaydi imams. To this end, the article examines a section of Imam Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn’s (d. 965/1558) unpublished biography, containing the genealogy of his second wife, Tāj al-Bahāʾ bint al-shaykh Sharaf al-Dīn. The paper argues that the imam and his circle valued the connections that the marriage to a daughter of a shaykh brought to the imamate, and that it is due to its symbolic value for the legitimacy of the imamate that her genealogy was included in the biography.
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The history of emotions is an established field in European studies. It covers all periods and many disciplines. Its premise is that emotions are shaped by culture, and that their expression and effects should be contextualised in time and place. More than this, the history of emotions asserts that emotion and intellect are interconnected, and that understanding emotion is central to understanding historical motivations and actions. This talk argues that we need an Arabic history of emotions, for which the written materials are both abundant and challenging. Identifying and interpreting emotions in medieval Arabic writing — those that it depicts, and those that it arouses in the reader — makes us ask where the task leads us. I have used an example that throws light on how adab functions as an overarching mode of thinking, and in reading it have tried to address the fundamental problem in text-based emotions history, which is distinguishing between literary (imagined) and lived emotions.
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According to a history of Medina written in the first half of the fourteenth century, in the year 557/1162 two Christians from the Iberian Peninsula attempted to steal the remains of the Prophet Muḥammad from his grave. In a later source, the culprit is presented as a Shīʿī. This paper seeks to explain how the story—full of colorful details—came into being, how it relates to other stories dealing with attempts at stealing the Prophet’s body and with Christian attacks on Muslim holy sites, and why in the earliest extant source the protagonists are Iberian Christians. This study demonstrates that to understand the central role given to Christian agents in such narratives one should consider how the Andalusīs, forced to migrate from their land because of Christian territorial advance in the Iberian Peninsula, tried—unsuccessfully—to influence the policies of rulers in the Mashriq (Islamic East) to save their homeland from Christian conquest.