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Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: Limits -- 1 The Measure of Production -- 2 The Power of Distribution -- 3 The Limits of Individual Access -- Part II: Disruptions -- 4 Two Shortages of Lesser Magnitude -- 5 The Famine of 1374-75 -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama's The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil's The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts. Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.

A theoretical-methodological reflection must be situated at the beginning of any historical approach, with the aim of individualizing the discipline of the history of everyday (medieval) life and differentiating it as an independent branch of research.* The most important aspects of the investigation consist in: a) formulating clear questions and b) defining the goals of knowledge/understanding, to eliminate the risk of ending up with a simple collection of anecdotes – which, while undeniably captivating, cannot be considered science, and, consequently, becomes part of literature. In its elementary form, daily life is a simple manipulation of certain constants – the environment, people and things, understood through the daily repetition of certain activities, which become habits and are then performed mechanically. It is often stated that the history of everyday life does not have its own method, and it follows the analysis grids of history, more precisely of its auxiliary disciplines. Moreover, the history of everyday life remains dependent on the help of other sciences. In this context, the research is interdisciplinary, involving most of the auxiliary or frontier sciences of history: history of law, archaeology, literature and philology, music and art history, historical geography and ethnography, etc. Research schedule and analysis grid. Based on the historiographic documentation, the theoretical-methodological excursion and the identification of the potential and the limits of the available sources, the perspective that this study proposes is that of a research program dedicated to the reconstruction of the history of everyday life in the late medieval Transylvanian urban centres. The proposed approach is organized into three distinct sections: a) that of the recomposing of frames and the dynamics of daily urban life; b) that of revealing the fundamental structures of everyday life in cities and c) that of identifying the challenges and solutions assumed by the day-to-day existence of individuals, groups and the urban community. The chosen methodological model has been adopted and modified according to the analysis-interpretation grid proposed by Gerhard Jaritz, Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit. Einführung in die Alltagsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Wien, Graz, Köln: Böhlau 1989), 15-26.
Keywords: History of Everyday Life, Urban History, Transylvanian Saxons, Late Medieval and Premodern Archaeology and Material Culture, Late Medieval and Premodern Transylvania

The study of the political publicity in El Salvador is a way to evaluate the images constituing the social representations of the Salvadoran state. In the following paper, the author analyses the images used in the electoral campaign of both the ARENA and FMLN parties in the electoral campaign of 2009.Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 120, 2009: 373-387 ; El estudio de la publicidad política en El Salvador es una forma de evaluar los imaginarios que construyen las representaciones sociales del Estado salvadoreño. En el presente artículo, se analizan las imágenes desplegadas en la campaña proselitista de ARENA y el FMLN en la campaña de 2009.Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 120, 2009: 373-387