Suchergebnisse

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.

This volume contains twelve essays that describe the writing of history in medieval Western Europe. Each chapter examines a type of subject matter about which medieval historians wrote, and discusses both the texts and the modern approaches to these texts. The authors include both historians and literary scholars. There are four chapters on early medieval historiography (universal history, national/ethnic history, institutional history, and biography/hagiography) and eight on later medieval historiography (the same four, plus dynastic, urban, contemporary, and legendary history). This comprehensive one-volume survey, in English, of medieval historiography can serve both as an introduction for students and the interested layperson, and as a handbook for the scholar

This book is intended for the highly intelligent reader, who is interested in considering the difficulties, problems, and challenges of understanding and writing about the human past. It is popularly enough written, hopefully, to be a joy to read, and scholarly enough to be seriously instructive. The book has two major purposes, first, to give a reader an extensive, detailed overview of the field as it currently exists, and, second, to considerably enlarge the field itself, as it is the first book in the area to consider not only the epistemology of the field, but, in detail, its logic and sem

In this fresh appraisal of communism and anti-communism, with an emphasis on the American case, respected scholar Michael E. Brown examines the methods, controversies and difficulties involved in writing the history of communism. Arguing that one important way of understanding communism-other than as a concrete political or ideological force-is as an expression of an essentially reflexive aspect of society that typically manifests itself in social movements. In this regard, Brown understands the history of communism as part of the history of society. Examining works by E.P. Thompson, Kar.

Frontiers in the Middle Ages -- Medieval Latin metaphors -- Metaphors for religion life in the Middle Ages -- The abstraction of personal qualities in the Middle Ages -- L'idea di innovazione nel XII secolo -- The relation between the sun and the moon in Medieval thought (to 1200) -- The dislocation of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages -- The crow of St Vincent: on the continuity of a hagiographical motif -- The concept of princeps in Gratian's decretum -- Love and do what you will: the Medieval history of an Augustinian precept -- Monastic letter writing in the Middle Ages -- Communications between religious houses in the Middle Ages -- The future of Cluniac studies -- Religious history -- From church history to religion culture: the study of Medieval religion life and spirituality -- Introduction, Medieval scholarship -- The many Middle Ages: Medieval studies in Europe as seen from America.