Global Middle Ages

The thousand-year period often known as the Middle Ages (roughly 500-1500 C.E.) was a period of vibrant life and sometimes violent change. In diverse societies, people worked to understand their place in the world, and how they might best live in it. Many questions medieval people asked--for instance, how religious belief should relate to social order--are questions we are still asking and answering today. Through lectures, readings, and most of all through class discussion, we will explore topics in political, religious, social, economic, and gender history. Because our learning is a shared endeavor, you will be expected to attend and participate in class regularly.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity.

Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages.

Essays by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Sussan Babaie, Roland Betancourt, Jerry Brotton, Jill Caskey, Kristen Collins, Morgan Conger, Michelle Craig, Mark Cruse, James Cuno, Eyob Derillo, Soren Edgren, Elizabeth Eisenberg, Tushara Bindu Gude, Sylvie L. Merian, Byron Hamann, Melanie Holcomb, Kaiqi Hua, Alexandra Kaczenski, Bryan C. Keene, Rheagan Eric Martin, Asa Simon Mittman, Megan O’Neil, Alka Patel, Pamela A. Patton, Alexander West.

Featuring 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Global Medieval Contexts 500–1500: Connections and Comparisons provides a unique wide-lens introduction to world history during this period. Designed for students new to the subject, this textbook explores vital networks and relationships among geographies and cultures that shaped medieval societies. The expert author team aims to advance a global view of the period and introduce the reader to histories and narratives beyond an exclusively European context.

Key Features:

Divided into chronological sections, chapters are organized by four key themes: Religion, Economics, Politics, and Society. This framework enables students to connect wider ideas and debates across 500 to 1500.
Individual chapters address current theoretical discussions, including issues around gender, migration, and sustainable environments.
The authors’ combined teaching experience and subject specialties ensure an engaging and accessible overview for students of history, literature, and those undertaking general studies courses.
Theory boxes and end-of-chapter questions provide a basis for group discussion and research. Full-color maps and images illustrate chapter content and support understanding.
As a result, this text is essential reading for all those interested in learning more about the histories and cultures of the period, as well as their relevance to our own contemporary experiences and perspectives.

This textbook is supported by a companion website providing core resources for students and lecturers.

The Arabic word majūs, while initially used as an exonym for Zoroastrians in the Middle East, was used in al-Andalus, medieval Muslim Spain, for a variety of people. It became best known, however, as the appellation used by Andalusis for the Viking parties attacking the Iberian Peninsula in the 9th and 10th centuries. Previous attempts at explaining the use of majūs for Scandinavians produced varied conclusions. Mikel de Epalza deems it to be legal jargon, while Omeljan Pritsak touted a Celtic origin for the word. The theory that has garnered most recognition is Arne Melvinger’s, who suggests that it was given to Scandinavians due to a perceived similarity between their cremation ceremonies and Zoroastrian cults of fire. The word retained a firm connection to Zoroastrians in the Middle East. Zoroastrians, while accepted as a protected people, ahl al-dhimma, alongside Christians and Jews, and thus allowed to practice their religion within Islamic lands, were still regarded as ‘second-class’ dhimmīs (members of ahl al-dhimma) due to their perceived polytheism, idolatry and lack of holy scripture. The negative view of Zoroastrians gave majūs a negative connotation and was used as a term of abuse against peoples, religions or other Islamic sects, comparing them to Zoroastrians. In al-Andalus, the connection to Zoroastrianism was largely lost, and majūs underwent a semantic widening to mean ‘pagan.’ Scandinavians, then, were only one of the myriad groups Andalusis called majūs. This pejoration has a parallel in Greek and Latin literature, where mágos/magus underwent a similar process, whereby its use for Persian priests transformed into a variety of sorcerers and magical practitioners. The hybrid culture of al-Andalus, where Arabic-, Latin/Romance- and Hebrew-speaking populations coexisted and exchanged ideas and vocabulary allowed majūs, already carrying connotations of idolatry, to widen its semantic range. The dual meaning of the term has caused some confusion for both medieval authors as well as modern scholars. The attribution of fire-worship and incest Ibn Diḥya gave to Scandinavians in his story of al-Ghazāl, a source Melvinger used to justify his theory on fire-worship, is a case of an erroneous transfer of Zoroastrian tropes to them on the merits of the common term used for both. The Castilian author/s of the Primera Crónica General also struggled with interpreting majūs in the Arabic sources; rendering it as almuiuces, they combined multiple uses of the word. In modern times, Évariste Lévi-Provençal misinterpreted the use of majūs for Zoroastrians in an Andalusi legal manual that forbade the consumption of Zoroastrian-produced cheese, leading to a conclusion that some of the Vikings harrying in Seville settled there and produced cheese.

Syllabus for my Introduction to Medieval Art survey at the University of Chicago. This course was a 3-week intensive summer session class, which included UChicago undergrads, students from other universities, and pre-college students. Because of COVID-19, this course was taught remotely.

Together with Em. Prof. Dr Kenneth J. Pennington I have edited a volume on democracy in the Middle Ages for a new series, entitled "A Cultural History of Democracy",  under the general editorship of Prof. Dr Eugenio F. Biagini. It brings together the work of 70+ specialists over the past five years. The series has been published on 6 May 2021. For more details, please visit: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/a-cultural-history-of-democracy-9781350042933/.

This Cambridge Element inaugurates the Cambridge Elements series in the Global Middle Ages: 40 titles over 5 years, with an open-ended remit, edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes.  The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction discusses how, when, and why I conceptualized a "Global Middle Ages," explains and analyses the terms deployed in studying, teaching, and researching a Global Middle Ages, and critically reflects on the issues that arise in the establishment of this relatively new field of academic endeavor. 

It considers key issues of vocabulary, chronology, and themes central to the conceptualization and theorization of the global in premodernity; treats the relationship of global premodernity to global modernity; and surveys a variety of approaches to the global in earlier and emergent scholarship.  This Element compares our current moment’s study of the global with preceding as well as ongoing programmatic studies such as world-systems theories and the teaching of world history and world literature in higher education today.

This introductory Element brings into focus the sustained importance of critical reflection and critical analysis, and promulgates a critical---not an additive---version of early global studies.

Antiquarian Displays of Spolia and Roman Identity. San Marco, Merbaka, and the Seljuk Caravanserais-In the thirteenth century, spolia on façades in Venice, the Seljuk lands, and the Argolid drew on the Roman past of the Eastern Mediterranean to express a cultural identity rooted in romanitas. In order to understand this visual idiom, it is important to take seriously the self-identification of the Byzantines as Romans and to study these examples of spolia display in conjunction with each other. By doing so, this article problematizes three widely cited scholarly theories for explaining the use of spolia: single protagonist decisions, triumphalism, and apotropaia. When studied as part of a larger phenomenon, it becomes clear that Roman cultural identity was built on the perception of a shared past that was not parsed along ethnic or national lines. Finally, the publicly displayed spolia show that the concept of Roman identity was not an elite project in Byzantium but was accessible and even addressed to a non-elite public.

This public talk, "On the Edge of a Pandemic World: The Later Medieval Western Mediterranean within Afro-Eurasian Disease Networks," is part of a series organized at New York University entitled *Spanish Flus: Pandemic Disease in the Iberian World from the Middle Ages through the Present*. Information for this and all the lectures in the series can be found at this link: https://www.kjcc.org/news/spring-2022-lecture-series-spanish-flus-pandemic-disease-in-the-iberian-world-from-the-middle-ages-through-the-present/.

Background information on the diseases discussed in my lecture can be found in these two essays (both open-access):
Monica H. Green, "Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia" (2018), https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-6
Monica H. Green, "The Great Dying: The Epidemiological and Medical Implications of Old and New World Encounters in the Pre- and Post-Contact Eras", https://isiscb.org/special-issue-on-pandemics/essay.html?essayID=25

Nos últimos anos presenciamos o florescer de novas pesquisas sob o prisma da História Global. No que diz respeito aos estudos medievais, a abordagem ainda possui poucos trabalhos quando comparados com outras épocas da História. Esta dissertação busca, assim, contribuir com os novos estudos sobre História Global acerca da Idade Média, analisando especialmente as ditas incursões vikings ocorridas entre os séculos VIII e X. Pretende-se identificar no conjunto documental, tanto escrito quanto material, as estruturas mais evidentes manifestas pelas diversas incursões no globo, ou seja, sem pretender adentrar as especificidades de cada região. Nesse sentido, as incursões são abordadas como compondo um sistema estrutura, cuja manifestação exibiu diversas similitudes que geralmente são pouco referendadas pela historiografia em detrimento das especificidades regionais. A abordagem global aqui utilizada pretende demonstrar como as incursões foram determinantes na integração dos grupos vikings e da Escandinávia aos locais atingidos pelas expedições, sendo importantes no processo de construção e redefinição das identidades e etnicidades durante o Período Viking.

The study of the global past in deep time sets in the foreground many questions which also bedevil literary theory today. 

That convergence—between how to study the global past, and how to read literary texts—drives this essay’s critical examination of salient methods, concepts, and objectives, and of the politics of endeavor. 

As examples, the essay analyzes historiographies of the global current today, asking what is at stake in reading global premodernity, and reading literary texts, at a historical moment when universities from Texas to Minnesota, Oxford to Illinois, North Carolina to California are beginning to study early globalities, a Global Middle Ages, or a “Medieval Globe.”

This new and exclusive major reference work commissioned by Arc Humanities Press takes an inclusive approach to the history of the middle ages. It includes overviews based on specific regional areas as well as thematic overviews of key concepts within their global contexts. Case study articles provide deep dives into how these broader themes can be explored through specific, global examples and, in future platform updates, the encyclopedia will be expanded to include object case studies. The encyclopedia aims to provide readers with scholarly articles by global contributors and specialists in all things medieval, to bring the medieval world alive and present how, as today, diversity and connection competed with isolation and conflict during a significant era in global history.

This lecture is based on my new book, which explores seminal moments in the biography of a contested medieval monument between ca. 500 C.E. and 1600 C.E.  Justinian's triumphal column was the tallest, free-standing column of the pre-modern world, was crowned by the largest metal, equestrian sculpture created anywhere in the world before 1699.  The Byzantine empire's bronze horseman towered over the heart of Constantinople, assumed new identities, spawned conflicting narratives, and acquired widespread international acclaim.  Because all traces of Justinian's column were erased from the urban fabric of Istanbul in the sixteenth century, scholars have underappreciated its astonishing agency and remarkable longevity.  Its impact in visual and verbal culture was arguably among the most extensive of any Mediterranean monument. Its agency can be recovered from Byzantine, Islamic, Slavic, Crusader, and Renaissance historical accounts, medieval pilgrimages, geographic, apocalyptic and apocryphal narratives, vernacular poetry, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Italian, French, Latin, and Ottoman illustrated manuscripts, Florentine wedding chests, Venetian paintings, and Russian icons. This lecture discusses some of the evidence analyzed in the book.

This course covers the history of the human species from its origins on the African continent up to the new interconnections of human populations initiated by the Voyages of Discovery around the year 1500. "Global" implies history at its most encompassing, but we will meet the challenge of these vast temporal and geographical expanses of history by taking a thematic approach. We will look at the evidence for human evolution and the development of particular cultural features that moved Homo sapiens beyond the sociability exhibited by other primates to the intensely complex modes of language, food production, habitation, and travel that have helped make humans the only truly global species. In this way, we can examine human societies of all types, in both the Old World and the New, whether they remained hunter-gatherers or organized into empires, including the largest land empire in human history, that of the Mongols in the 13 th century.

The goals of the course are to develop a sense of the deep roots of modern culture: the roles of migration and settlement, trade and empire, language and religion, which have acted to unite (and divide) peoples for the last hundred millennia. You will be asked to do small individual and group investigations into such questions as the cultivation of certain food products, textile production, writing and other modes of communication, the histories of certain world cities. Most importantly, you will learn how to think historically and appreciate the value of doing so: you will come to understand how we can understand the surface landscape of present-day society by looking deep into its historical roots.

Early medieval legends reported that one of the three kings who paid homage to the newborn Christ Child in Bethlehem was from Africa. But it would be nearly one thousand years before artists began representing Balthazar, the youngest of the magi, as a Black African. This exhibition explores the juxtaposition of a seemingly positive image with the painful histories of Afro-European contact, particularly the brutal enslavement of African peoples.

Join the conversation on our blog or @ #BalthazarLA

Abstract: Those who detract and those who extol the Middle Ages agree that it is a phase in Europe’s past. The purpose of this article is to move beyond this perspective, linking the Global Middle Ages to the Teaching of History. For this, some concepts such as integration, connection, and interaction will be used to understand an experience of globality. We will follow the trajectory of Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), Majorcan philosopher whose extensive and multi-faceted body of work has been increasingly translated and researched in Brazil. However, teachers of History rarely use Llull’s trajectory and ideas in their teaching. Aiming to offer paths and possibilities, we will analyze the potential of some comics about the philosopher and of some children’s and youth adaptations of the Lullian corpus, indicating teaching approaches and creating teaching materials.

This syllabus was last used in Fall 2017 for ENL 4210, an upper-division seminar for English majors at FIU. It emphasizes visually-oriented design for greater accessibility, specifications-based grading, and a diverse, geographically-expansive Middle Ages. Feel welcome to use or adapt any aspect of it; if you do, please send me feedback on how it worked--I'm always interested in improving my teaching!

This companion introduces the connections between early medieval societies that have previously been studied in isolation. By bringing together nineteen experts on different regions across the globe, from Oceania to Europe and beyond, it transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries and synthesizes parallel historiographical narratives.

The period 600-900 CE witnessed important historical developments, such as the establishment of a Southeast Asian thalassocracy by the Shailendra dynasty and the expansion of the Frankish polity under Charlemagne on the far ends of Eurasia and the consolidation of the Abbasid and Tang empires in between. A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages integrates these contemporaneous processes and presents new insights into a neglected phase of world history

Il tema sviluppato nel presente intervento è il rapporto tra narrazione e (ri)costruzione storica. Si prenderà in esame l’accezione di narrativa correntemente utilizzata nel mondo storiografico facendola dialogare con il paradigma dei global middle ages, espressione coniata nel 2018 dalle storiche Catherine Holmes e Naomi Standen. Per meglio mettere in risalto tali dinamiche un caso di studio sarà offerto dalla vicenda di Federico II, con particolare enfasi alla costruzione biografica e dei miti nel rapporto con le culture altre. Il fine sarà di superare le due tradizionali macro interpretazioni dell’idea di Medioevo, analizzate da Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri e David Matthews: Medioevo arretrato regno di oscurità e Medioevo vagheggiato come luce del mattino, all’origine di molte identità politiche contemporanee – non ultima quella dell’Unione Europea.

This paper examines the strategies of regime-building used by the Seljuk Turks in West Asia and the Normans in England and Sicily in the eleventh century. These two great expansionist peoples, both famed for their ferocity and martial prowess at the time, acted contemporaneously to each other, and ended up converging on the Holy Lands at the time of the First Crusade, an event that both their conquests had done much to catalyse in the first place, but for many reasons they have largely evaded comparison up until this point. This paper argues that in spite of obvious differences in geography, social and political structures, culture, religion and ideology, we can find many similarities in the strategies of regime-building pursued by the Normans and Seljuks in their conquered territories, which can help us find some common ground for writing Eurasian political history in the Central Middle Ages.

This Esri Story Map uses satellite imagery, maps, and photographs to illustrate and complement annotated translations from Yelu Chucai's (1190-1244) "Record of a Journey to the West" (Xiyou lu, 1228 CE) and Liu Qi's (1203-1250) "Account of a Mission to the North" (Beishi ji, ca. 1222 CE). Yelu Chucai was a participant in Chinggis Khan's conquest of the Khwarazm empire in 1219-1221 and later wrote a geographic-ethnographic description of Central Asia in Chinese. Liu Qi, a Chinese writer, recorded a description of Central Asia by Wugusun Zhongduan (d. 1233), who passed through Central Asia shortly after the Mongol conquest as an ambassador from the Jin dynasty to Chinggis Khan. These texts capture a moment when, as a result of the Mongol conquests, the Chinese and Central Asian worlds began to interact again after four centuries of effective separation.

[Click on this link to access the Story Map:
https://denisongis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=e0fe47ae592c4cab8930bbb37ce41269
Suggestions or corrections are very welcome. Please send them via message or via e-mail to yangs@denison.edu.]

Published in: Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, ed. by A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız, all at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ashgate 2015 (http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9781472448637&lang=cy-gb)

The ports and coastal zones constituted the most important points of interaction between the interior of Anatolia and the Mediterranean world; only along the 600 km long coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, for instance, medieval sources list almost 100 ports and landing places.  With the (anew) advance of the Seljuks towards the coast (conquest of Attaleia/Antalya in 1207, conquest of Sinope in 1214) and the increasing presence of Italian merchants in the harbours of the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Levant, maritime Asia Minor became a zone of intensive contacts between Byzantines (after 1204 in the exile realms of Nicaea and Trebizond), Armenians (in the Kingdom of Cilicia), Turks, Persians and Arabs (in the Sultanate of Konya) and “Latins” respectively “Franks”, thus also between Orthodox, Oriental and Western Churches as well as Islam (in its various denominations). With the fragmentation of Seljuk central power after the defeat against the Mongols in 1243 into various Emirates and their expansion especially into Western Asia Minor towards the Aegean and the establishment of Italian colonies (including “Catholic” bishoprics) in coastal towns and offshore islands (e. g. the Genoese on Chios and in Phokaia/Foça) and of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, the number of zones of interaction, but also conflict increased (relocation of crusading efforts towards the Aegean in the 14th century, for instance). At the same time, Venetians and Genoese integrated all these locations and regions as hubs and nodes into their commercial networks and into the late medieval “World System”.  With the Ottoman Expansion, these territories were absorbed into one imperial framework once more (as it has existed under Byzantine rule until the 11th century), which finally also included the remaining western colonies (Rhodes in 1522/1523, Chios in 1566, Cyprus in 1571). During this period, “no other region of Europe or the Mediterranean became a cynosure of so many ethnicities in such a small place”.
Some of these aspects, such as the intensive trade between Venetian Crete and the Emirates in South-western Anatolia or the Genoese and the Turks in the 14th and 15th century , the military conflict between Crusaders and Turks in the Aegean  or the establishment of Latin monastic communities and bishoprics in the region  have already been analysed in greater detail. The same is true for aspects of religious transformations (especially conversions to Islam) in the region in the early modern period  as well as in late medieval centuries, but less so for maritime aspects of the organisation, identity and dynamics of various religious groups.  A view from the sea towards the coasts of Anatolia also opens a new perspective away from a “continental” overlapping of competing territorial claims towards a sum of potential nodal points within the late medieval network of socioeconomic interactions, which often modified or even overcame lines of religious, ethnic or political differentiation.
As we demonstrate in this paper, there existed various and manifold channels of encounters across religious border in maritime Asia Minor; their systematic survey and mapping contributes to a further embedding of the processes of political, economic and religious transformation in Anatolia in these centuries within the late medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world, complementary to already existing projects just as “The Islamisation of Anatolia” (https://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk/).

This thesis will examine the moral discipline and culture of chivalry (defined here as the shared values and ethos of the martial aristocracy of Latin Europe) as they existed in Western Europe, with a focus primarily on France and England, in the long 14th century. A long tradition of scholarship has viewed the 14th century as a period of degeneration and decline for chivalry in Western Europe, with images of court decadence, Courtrai, Crecy and failed crusades looming large. Though recent scholarship has complicated this picture, moving away from the opposing extremes of romanticism and sceptical empiricism that together generated it towards a more critically nuanced, flexible and dynamic understanding of chivalry, it still has not received much by way of direct challenge. Here, I will argue that chivalry, which was never a clear-cut prescriptive code nor mere empty ceremonial, did not experience decline during the long 14th century but rather saw a range of dynamic and innovative responses, largely generated from within, to moral and pathological problems, more often old than new in origin, and that many aspects of it remained as vital as ever, such as the culture of crusading. This will be accomplished by studying an array of sources that enable 14th century chivalry to be reconstructed on its own terms, including chivalric manuals like that of Geoffroi de Charny, biographies of knights like Boucicaut, the religious devotional texts that began to be written by knights themselves in this period and some works of vernacular literature.

The global turn in European medieval studies has attempted to present connections and comparisons that cover all corners of the Earth. Many of these histories rely on textual and material evidence for moments of encounter and exchange. This essay presents teaching strategies that center various approaches to mapping that look beyond the pages of books to include other oral and visual traditions. One approach is to engage with Indigenous ways of naming land, water, and region, and to meet with local Native communities especially for medievalists working in the Americas. Another is to model interdisciplinarity by looking to the history of science, conservation, climate, disease, and more to demonstrate how scholars can learn from other specializations. A final example involves mapping global pathways through museum collections and displays, with an example of finding premodern Africa in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.