Suchergebnisse

Abstract: "Islam, Merchants, and Capitalism" draws attention to the missing link between early and central medieval Islamic socioeconomic history (ca. 650–1250) and the history of capitalism. This intertext essay starts from reassessing the work of French Marxist Islamicist Maxime Rodinson, who first made a programmatic attempt to forge such a link in his seminal 1966 Islam and Capitalism . It then proceeds to lay bare the reasons why Rodinson's call went largely unheard in the following decades, identifying the persistence of a pervasive decline paradigm within medieval Islamic socioeconomic history as the key obstacle preventing advances in the field and foreclosing avenues for theoretical discussion. Regrettably this paradigm, while outdated and no longer tenable, still remains authoritative and is frequently invoked by modern theorists of "underdevelopment." The essay then discusses some examples of recent groundbreaking scholarship that deploy new archaeological and documentary sources to decidedly move away from decline, showing the way forward out of this historiographical impasse. Finally, the essay returns to the question of capitalism, and of the forms in which this ambiguous term can, or cannot, be applied to early and central medieval Islamic societies, calling for a recentering of the Islamic Middle Ages in a longue-durée global history of capitalism.

This volume investigates the use of mortgages in the European countryside between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. A mortgage allowed a loan to be secured with land or other property, and the practice has been linked to the transformation of the agrarian economy that paved the way for modern economic growth. Historians have viewed the mortgage both positively and negatively: on the one hand, it provided borrowers with opportunities for investment in agriculture; but equally, it exposed them to the risk of losing their mortgaged property. The case studies presented in this volume reveal the variety of forms that the mortgage took, and show how an intricate balance was struck between the interests of the borrower looking for funds, and those of the lender looking for security. It is argued that the character of mortgage law, and the nature of rights in land in operation in any given the place and period, determined the degree to which mortgages were employed. Over time, developments in these factors allowed increasing numbers of peasants to use mortgages more freely, and with a decreasing risk of expropriation. This volume will be appealing to academics and researchers interested in financial history, credit and debt

Introduction : segregation, zoning, and assimilation in medieval towns / Derek Keene -- Various ethnic and religious groups in medieval German towns : some evidence and reflections / Felicitas Schmieder -- Russians in Livonian towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries / Anti Selart -- "Propter disparitatem linguae et religionis pares non esse" : "minority" communities in medieval and early modern Lviv / Olha Kozubska-Andrusiv -- Foreign ethnic groups in the towns of southern Hungary in the Middle Ages / István Petrovics -- Buda : the multi-ethnic capital of medieval Hungary / András Végh -- Late medieval ethnic structures in the inland towns of present-day Slovenia / Boris Golec -- Gradation of differences : ethnic and religious minorities in medieval Dubrovnik / Zdenka Janeković-Römer -- Minorities and foreigners in Bulgarian medieval towns in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries : literary and archaeological fragments / Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Rossina Kostova -- Nobiles, cives, et popolari : four towns under the rule of Carlo I Tocco (c. 1375-1429) / Nada Zečević -- The towns of medieval Hungary in the reports of contemporary travellers / Balázs Nagy -- Crown, gown, and town : zones of royal, ecclesiastical, and civic interaction in medieval Buda and Visegrád / József Laszlovszky -- Integration through language : the multilingual character of late medieval Hungarian towns / Katalin Szende -- The visual image of the "other" in medieval urban space : patterns and construction / Gerhard Jaritz

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences