The Medieval History Journal recent issues

Introduction

Juneja, M., Siebenhuner, K. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

Research on religious conversion has grown into an extraordinarily dynamic field in the course of the past decade. While the subject was never absent from the agenda of an earlier historiography, the mid-1990s witnessed a fresh resurgence of interest across the world in the phenomenon of conversion. The explanation for this might lie in the fact that recent approaches to conversion intersect with the concerns of a culturally-oriented historiography, thereby affording fresh perspectives and modes of coming to grips with the centrality of religion as an analytical category of pre-modern history. Religious faith is indeed an important constitutive factor that shapes our understanding of pre-modern societies within and beyond Europe. Investigating the process of a change of faith can provide new entry points into the domain of religious transformation and can help map the shifting boundaries of religious communities and identities. Such identities are a site of contention in most modern multi-cultural societies, where a dominant community wields overwhelming power. Historiography in young post-colonial nations tends to either project present-day conflicts on to a pre-colonial past or else, seeks resolution of these tangled issues through suggesting an overweening cultural commonality that transcends religious difference. Historicising the study of religious conversion then becomes an important exercise that might help to find a way of accommodating conflict and rupture within the process of negotiating religious plurality.

Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim 'Conversion' in Punjab and Bengal, 1300-1700

Eaton, R. M. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

This article discusses the growth of predominantly Muslim populations in two regions of South Asia—western Punjab and eastern Bengal. No evidence supports conventional understandings that Islamisation in these areas resulted from a desire for social liberation on the part of the lower orders of the Hindu caste system. Nor should Islamisation in these regions be characterised as instances of ‘conversion’, a term embedded in the nineteenth century Protestant missionary movement and thus, inappropriate for reconstructing religious processes in medieval Bengal and Punjab. Rather, transformations of religious identity in these two regions appear to have been gradual and unselfconscious in nature. They also appear to have been part of larger socio-political and economic changes that were occurring in the regions, in particular the diffusion of settled peasant agriculture.

Conversion and Coercion: Personal Conscience and Political Conformity in Early Modern France

Luria, K. P. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

This article examines the conflict between two understandings of conversion: one which saw it as a voluntaristic transformation, free from compulsion and another which claimed that coerced conversions could be valid. Rival Catholic and Protestant churches believed that true conversion resulted from an individual’s search for truth while also recognising a role for constraint in maintaining conformity. Theological traditions underpinned both views. Catholics reconciled the contradiction by equating religious orthodoxy with political fidelity to the monarchy. Minority Protestants also insisted on their loyalty, but Louis XIV’s 1680s campaign to force their conversions provoked a crisis of conscience. Two sources from western France illustrate the impact of the campaign on individual consciences. The first, a memoir by the Protestant schoolmaster Jean Migault, reveals the tortured conscience of a forced convert. The second, the personal confession of Bishop Henri de Barillon, demonstrates how a prelate reconciled conversion and coercion. Together they show that neither side thought of conscience as free. Royal policy and confessional competition ensured that consciences were constrained to conform.

Conversion to Christianity in African History before Colonial Modernity: Power, Intermediaries and Texts

Ruther, K. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

This article examines different paradigms of conversions to Christianity in regions of Africa prior to the advent of colonial modernity. Religious change, in general, connected converts and various intermediaries to resources and power within specific settings. Even though African cultures were oral, conversions generated the production of texts which became important print media and were at least partly responsible for prompting conversions elsewhere in the world. The first case study explains how mission initiatives along the so-called West African slave coast almost always resulted in failure between 1450 and 1850, but how these failed efforts figure as important halfway options which reveal fundamental mechanisms of conversion. The dynamics of interaction were different in the African Kingdom of Kongo, where conversions became intimately entwined in the consolidation of political power and where, subsequent to the adoption of Christianity, new understandings of power evolved. Last but not least, in South Africa, again, another paradigm of conversion developed within the nexus of conflict and settler violence. Contested narratives of Christianity and conversion emerged as settlers tried to keep Christianity as a religious resource to be shared among whites only.

Christian Conversion in Late Ming China: Niccolo Longobardo and Shandong

Hsia, R. P.-c. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

Using letters written by the Italian Jesuit missionary Niccolo Longobardo, this article explores in depth the encounter between the Christian mission and different strata of early seventeenth century Chinese society in Shangdong province. It follows Longobardo’s evangelical activities among Ming feudatory princes, Muslim mullahs, Confucian literati and leaders of secret popular religious sects. By using Jesuit records and Chinese documents of the late Ming, this article tries to analyse the attractions of Christianity for different segments of late Ming society, one that experienced a profound social, political and economic crisis. Both, the reasons for conversions and arguments against Christianity are presented in the specific social context of early seventeenth century Chinese society.

Conversion Historiography in South Asia: Alternative Indian Christian Counter-histories in Eighteenth Century Goa

Zupanov, I. G. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

Conversion as a historical process is discussed in South Asian post-independence historiography mostly following the demands of the political present. In the present article, I first try to trace a fragmentary and in-complete history of what I will call conversion historiography in and about South Asia, referring mostly to conversion to Christianity from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Then, I discuss a particular case of religious and cultural conversion, in which the descendants of the early converts to Christianity in Goa re-appropriated conversion histories as an analytical and historiographical tool in order to reconfigure their relation with the past and the present and thus, shore up their cultural authority. In the process, they created their own communal history and historiography that fed directly into Portuguese and Catholic Orientalism. This particular historical example should help us see to what extent the act of conversion is a self-transforming work in progress, a communicational project without teleological guarantees, capable of empowering alternative historical readings.

Catholic-Lutheran-Catholic: Strategies of Justification and Conceptions of the Self in the Conversion Narratives of Johannes Ferdinand Franz Weinberger (1687-90)

Carl, G. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two conversion narratives of Johannes Ferdinand Franz Weinberger, who converted in 1687 from Catholicism to Lutheranism and returned to the Catholic church one year later. After his reconversion, Weinberger found himself confronted by those who doubted his credibility and was consequently under considerable pressure to justify the path he had taken. At the same time, he felt impelled to explain his behaviour to himself, to come to terms with his own conscience. In such a situation, it was necessary for him to adhere closely to the contents, the form and the leitmotifs of his first conversion narrative, changing at the same time his concept of self and interpreting his con-version to Lutheranism in a different mould.

Fatima Hatun nee Beatrice Michiel: Renegade Women in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Dursteler, E. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Beatrice Michiel fled an unhappy marriage in Venice for Constantinople. She converted to Islam, taking the name of Fatima, remarried, and because of her access to the imperial harem, played a significant role in Veneto-Ottoman relations in this troubled period. Beatrice/Fatima’s experience provides a suggestive window into the often ignored experience of renegade women on the Mediterranean frontier. While women’s religiosity is usually viewed as more unwavering than men’s, this case study suggests that while their motivations may have differed from those of men, women too might convert without compulsion. This story also provides a window onto ways in which women were able to subordinate societal and cultural mentalities and structures through utilising the political, religious and cultural frontiers of the Mediterranean as a means to prise themselves free from familial and economic circumstances in which they normally had limited power to act.

Returning to Judaism: The Reconversion of 'New Christians' to Their Ancestral Jewish Faith in the Ottoman Empire during the Sixteenth Century

Ginio, A. M. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

The last century of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula (1391–1492) was marked by continuous persecutions leading to the conversion of a large number of Jews to Christianity. Known as ‘New Christians’, they escaped from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ottoman Empire, where—under Muslim dominion—they could return to their ancestral creed, reconverting to Judaism. This article examines the three waves of migration that took place during the last decade of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth century. The legal status of the newcomers with regard to the Jewish religion was to be settled by rabbinical decisions. Contemporary Jewish rabbanim were aware of the conflicting factors that had motivated migration from Portugal and their attitudes towards the newcomers reflected suspicions about the latter’s ability to integrate within the existing Jewish congregations.

The Materiality of Difference: Converted Jews and Their Descendants in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Naples

Scheller, B. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

The article seeks to retrace the processes by which Jewish converts and their descendants in the late medieval Kingdom of Naples were included into and/or excluded from Christian society. It focuses on a case study of the Apulian seaport of Trani. Following a systems theoretical perspective, it conceives exclusion as a multidimensional process of (re-)production of differences in social practices that affect the position and action of an individual in different fields of society. It then attempts to explain the success and failure of the inclusion of converted Jews and their descendants into Christian society by analysing the reproduction of difference as an interplay of cultural and material factors.

The Christianisation of Latin Europe as Seen by Medieval Arab-Islamic Historiographers

Konig, D. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:36:18 PST

The article aims at defining what Arab Muslims of the crusading period knew about the conversion of Latin Europe to Christianity through an analysis of Arabic-Islamic sources written up to the fourteenth century. Whereas Christianity seems to have interested the first generations of Muslims mainly as a theological phenomenon, the emergence of more comprehensive forms of Muslim historiography led to the creation of Arabic texts dealing with the formation of Christianity. The latter’s primary focus lay on the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. However, the premises that set the stage for the emergence of Latin–Christian Europe (Roman hegemony in the West, ‘period of migrations’, Romano-Germanic successor states) do not seem to have been fully understood until translated Latin sources were diffused in the Arabic-Islamic world. Hence, most references to the Christianisation of the post-Roman peoples of Western Europe are short and out of chronological context. Continuity is only fully acknowledged in the case of the papacy.

The Genesis of Islam in the Light of History: The First MHJ Annual Lecture Delivered in New Delhi on 27 November 2008

Al-Azmeh, A. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

Faced with the choice between two themes that I suggested I might address this evening, the organisers of this event preferred me to speak as an historians' historian, rather than to opt for a topic of more general or current interest, and I have agreed to do so. Yet I should nevertheless be dissatisfied if those among you who do not particularly wish to be lectured to by historians were to be irked by an academic disquisition on some arcane matter. I shall therefore do my very best to ensure that those of you who are not historians, or who are not engaged professionally in the academic trade, shall leave this hall with somewhat more than the fleeting impression of an event. And I shall do so not least by suggesting that genesis, even the genesis of Islam, has more to do with Charles Darwin than with the Bible or the glorious associations of the Greek language, and that the reference to light in the title of my talk has more to do with reflective de-liberation than with exquisite colouration.

The Invention of Dancing Mania: Frankish Christianity, Platonic Cosmology and Bodily Expressions in Sacred Space

Rohmann, G. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

Medieval ‘dancing mania’ has until recently remained an enigma in medical and religious history. This is because scholars tend to view it as an invariable medical syndrome instead of examining it as an example of the historicity of illness as semantic network. Taking the latter approach allows for grasping the phenomenon as a form of insanity specific to the Rhine basin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though one whose roots can be traced to the early medieval reception of platonic cosmology and ‘theurgy’. This paper examines the legend of the Kölbigk dancers in the above perspective and establishes that its chief motif goes back to Sulpicius Severus’ reception of ‘Iamblichus’ ‘de mysteriis’. Thus, dancing mania appears to have been a form of insanity, indeed, but one constructed through religious narratives.

Revisioning the Conquest of Mexico: Image and Text in the Florentine Codex (1578-80)

Brochler, A. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

When the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) compiled the famous encyclopaedic history of Nahua culture generally known as the Florentine Codex (1578/79–80), he relied heavily on Nahua aides. Educated in the western humanist tradition and knowledgeable about their own world, these native collaborators were crucial to Sahagún's project. This article focuses in particular on the drawings of the Florentine Codex, analysing the close relationship between text and image in Book Twelve, which tells the story of the conquest of Mexico (1519–21). The drawings have received little scholarly attention as they lack the artistic features of what was regarded as ‘classic’ indigenous pictographic writing. This article argues that the tlacuiloque, the writers/painters of Book Twelve, did not merely sprinkle some elements of indigenous pictographic writing in more European style pictures, but created a new idiom to transmit their own way of visualising intertwined histories of conquest.

The Royal Chapel in Iberia: Models, Contacts, and Influences

Costa-Gomes, R. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

This article analyses the main aspects of the activities of the late medieval royal chapel, comparing several Iberian Christian monarchies. Three definitions of the chapel were proposed since medieval times: the chapel as a collection of liturgical objects, as the human group devoted to the king's service by performing the Christian cult, and as a specific space inside royal residences. All three were put to use for the reproduction of the specific position of kings in Christian societies, as it was expressed in liturgical activities and in devotional practices. Common patterns and mutual influences are analysed, and the example of two ceremonial practices shows that these were more current than it has been argued by historians of the early modern period.

Visualising the Incarnation in Medieval Christianity: Universal Botanical Metaphors and Local Cult Practices

Khan, S. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

Within Christian iconography and in medieval Christian cult practices, floral depictions play a major role. The genesis of such floral pictorial signs has not been addressed in art historical writing. This article attempts to trace the origins of the Christian floral iconography, investigates the perceptions and usages of such motifs in cult practices and proceeds to demonstrate the extent to which Christian sources shared a common under-standing with world religions such as Buddhism. Buddhist and Christian sources appear to have taken recourse to similar iconographic formulae in order to make abstract, invisible deities perceptible to the believer. Floral iconography in Christian cult practices was an effective medium to communicate Christ's birth through the Virgin Mary and the story of his unique Passion. By transcending common allusions to Incarnations, it is even able to transport meanings which help the believer to find consolation in his quest of the Christian afterlife.

Book Reviews

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:10 PDT

The Tale of Lady Tan: Negotiating Place between Central and Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

Gerritsen, A. — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:52:41 PDT

This paper explores the story of Lady Tan across genres from biographical record to temple inscription and marvellous tale, highlighting different representations of ‘the local’ in these stories: the loss of local belonging for some, inscribing the morals of a local community for others. Focusing on this tale, this essay argues that locality and belonging were contested constructs, especially during the Song-Yuan-Ming transitional period. Ex-ploring how literati understood themselves in relation to their localities contributes to our understanding of literati identities and the meaning of ‘the local’, in a period with ‘weak central government’, or as a repeating pattern of centralisation and localisation. It reveals the complexities in-volved in giving meaning to locality and negotiating belonging. In Ji'an prefecture, the centralising policies of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors were felt locally and affected how literati positioned themselves between central government and local community. This focus on literati writings from a single prefecture suggests that a close reading of the negotiations that form part of constructing locality and belonging in Ji'an can reveal the potential for a complex interplay between central government and local communities throughout China.

Technology of Indian Sea Navigation (c. 1200-c. 1800)

B., A. — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:52:41 PDT

India has a rich and hoary tradition of maritime ventures over millennia. Since the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Indian seafarers have voy–aged across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal and even beyond for trade, religious and cultural objectives. Through experience and inheri–tance over generations, these seamen acquired maritime craft skills and wisdom that formed the bedrock of a total navigational package that stood the test of time and survived till an instrumented modern technology took over.

Agricultural Technology in Early Medieval India (c. A.D. 500-1300)

Chakravarti, R. — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:52:41 PDT

The article discusses the spread of agriculture to an unprecedented degree in the period from c. A.D. 500 to 1300 (early medieval times) on the basis of both epigraphic and textual materials that also speak of considerable diversity of crops, including what may be considered as cash crops. The author pays attention to the role of metal—especially iron—technology in the development of agriculture during this period. It also argues for betterment in manuring. Inseparably associated with the expansion of agriculture—as an impact of the issuance of profuse number of land grants—are better irrigation technologies. The diversity of irrigation tech-niques and hydraulic projects, local and supra local, had intimate linkages with the variability of access to precious water resources in disparate areas of the subcontinent. In this connection, the article also offers early Indian perceptions of the monsoons; it also seeks to underline the meteor-ologists’ observations of the correlation between the flood-level in the Nile catchment area (by the use of the Nilometer) and the pattern of rainfall in the subcontinent on a long chronological range.

Asceticism, Gallantry, or Polygamy? Alexander's Relationship with Women as a Topos in Medieval Romance Traditions

Muller, S. — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:52:41 PDT

Historisches Seminar, Leibniz University, Hannover. E-mail: sabine.mueller@hist.uni-hannover.de The legend of the ancient Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great was infused with new life in the Middle Ages. Medieval literature cast him as a popular subject, a moral exemplum and a model to be emulated by the nobility. One important aspect of this legend was his relationship with women that can be read as a marker of the different representations of the Alexander figure and their cultural contexts. This study examines the Alexander legend as it was reinvented in three major medieval texts, writ-ten by the French cleric Gautier de Châtillon, the German writer Johann Hartlieb and the Persian poet Nizami. While Christian literary representa-tions reinvent Alexander as an ascetic, chaste figure, exalting fidelity to one woman, his wife Roxane and alternatively as an ideal of gallantry and courtliness, the Persian romance tradition portrayed him as an en-ergetic, polygamous lover. In each case, his attitude towards women is deployed as a symbol of his political attributes.

Book Reviews

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:52:41 PDT

On the Date and Contents of a Portuguese Medieval Technical Book on Illumination: O livro de como se fazem as cores

Cruz, A. J., Afonso, L. U. — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:16:41 PDT

The book this article discusses is a late medieval Portuguese technical text on illumination written with Hebraic characters. It belongs to a miscellaneous manuscript at Parma's Biblioteca Palatina. Discovered in 1803, it was attributed to Abraham ben Judah Ibn Hayyim and dated to 1262. Soon some authors assigned it to the fifteenth century. The paper's water-marks, recently observed, confirmed the fifteenth century date. Yet, the possibility that this text could be a copy of an older original remains. However, the discussion of the historical context and the content also suggests that the original dates more probably from the fifteenth than the thirteenth century. In terms of structure and content this text should not be considered a treatise but a heterogeneous compilation which, besides the Hebraic marks, presents significantly alchemic, Castilian and Arabic influences.

Alliance, Genealogy and Political Power: The Cudasamas of Junagadh and the Sultans of Gujarat

Sheikh, S. — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:16:41 PDT

In 1472, the Cudasama ruler of Junagadh in Saurashtra (peninsular western Gujarat) was finally defeated, after a long struggle, by the armies of Mahmud, the sultan of Ahmadabad, a turning point in the history of Gujarat. The Cudasamas, hitherto dominant rulers, were reduced to the status of minor landholders. For the sultanate, it marked the abandonment of an administration based largely on tribute and alliance with local chieftains in favour of more direct rule. The transition in their government from military garrison-based rule to a more settled, bureaucratic sovereignty marked a significant shift away from the former system of politics in Gujarat. In spite of this history of violent antagonism between the Cudasamas and the sultans, this article hopes to show how both groups belonged to a common, transforming arena of politics in which alliance-making, genealogy and patronage were markers of status, a form of politics which may still be recovered from texts, genealogies and the accounts of professional record-keeping groups.

Agricultural Technology in Kashmir (A.D. 1600 to 1900)

Hangloo, R.L. — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:16:41 PDT

This article seeks to locate and analyse the ecological and socio-political conditions specific to hill agriculture within Kashmir in a medieval context. It draws upon a range of sources—texts, travel accounts and personal observation, as also interaction with farmers—to put the story together.

On the Relationship between Interpretations of the Confucian Classics and Political Power in East Asia: An Inquiry Focusing upon the Analects and Mencius

Huang, C.-c. — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:16:41 PDT

This article focuses on the complex relationship existing between the interpretation of Confucian classics and political power in China, Japan and Korea. A wide range of materials is contained for discussion, namely East Asian scholars’ commentaries on the Analects and Mencius, questions extracted from the Book of Mencius in the civil service examinations in the Ming (1368–1644) China, reminders which a Tokugawa Japanese scholar marked on Mencius against imperial reading, and quotations from Confucian classics appearing in the dialogues between emperors and courtiers in the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) dynasties. It is pointed out that the dual roles played by the interpreters—as Confucian scholars and as administrators—had closely connected the interpretation of classics to political power. Briefly speaking, three forms of relationship are observed: inseparability, competition, and the balance to be struck between the interpretation of the classics and political power. To sum up, the East Asian Confucians read and understood the classics through their own ‘existential structures’, at the same time endowing the classics with new strategic content; they were not just playing ‘intellectual games’

Book Reviews

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:16:41 PDT