Book Recommendations from MEMOs: April 2021 (Part 11)
Here’s our monthly line-up of fascinating new and forthcoming books which relate to the wider research interests of our team here at MEMOs. If they’re interesting to you too, click on the links below to learn more:
Narrating Muslim Sicily, War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean by William Granara
In 902 the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily fell, and the island would remain under Muslim control until the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Drawing on a lifetime of translating and linguistic experience, William Granara here focuses on the various ways in which medieval Arab historians, geographers, jurists and philologists imagined and articulated their ever-changing identities in this turbulent period. All of these authors sought to make sense of the island's dramatic twists, including conquest and struggles over political sovereignty, and the painful decline of social and cultural life. Writing about Siqilliya involved drawing from memory, conjecture and then-current theories of why nations and people rose and fell. In so doing, Granara considers and translates, often for the first time, a vast range of primary sources - from the master chronicles of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khadun to biographical dictionaries, geographical works, legal treatises and poetry - and modern scholarship not available in English. He charts the shift from Sicily as 'warrior outpost' to vital and productive hub that would transform the medieval Islamic world, and indeed the entire Mediterranean.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/narrating-muslim-sicily-9780755638543/
Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe by Katherine Crawford
Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts.
These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today.
Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography, The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri by Ryan J. Lynch
Of the available sources for Islamic history between the seventh and eighth centuries CE, few are of greater importance than al-Baladhuri's Kitab Futu? al-buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands). Written in Arabic by a ninth-century Muslim scholar working at the court of the 'Abbasid caliphs, the Futu?'s content covers many important matters at the beginning of Islamic history. It informs its audience of the major events of the early Islamic conquests, the settlement of Muslims in the conquered territories and their experiences therein, and the origins and development of the early Islamic state. Questions over the text's construction, purpose, and reception, however, have largely been ignored in current scholarship. This is despite both the text's important historical material and its crucial early date of creation. It has become commonplace for researchers to turn to the Futu? for information on a specific location or topic, but to ignore the grander – and, in many ways, more straightforward – questions over the text's creation and limitations. This book looks to correct these gaps in knowledge by investigating the context, form, construction, content, and early reception history of al-Baladhuri's text.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/arab-conquests-and-early-islamic-historiography-9780755644681/
Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion By Penelope Geng
The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalisation of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning – resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalisation by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner’s inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance.
An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives – including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles – proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.
https://utorontopress.com/us/communal-justice-in-shakespeare-x2019-s-england-3
Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy Tudor and Stuart Black Legends by Victoria Muñoz
Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec México? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England's fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.
Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture by Elizabeth R. Williamson
A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book. Author Elizabeth R. Williamson argues that a new focus on the central activity of information gathering allows us to situate diplomacy in its natural context as one of several intertwined areas of crown service, and as one of the several sites of production of political information under Elizabeth I. Close attention to the material features of these letter-books elucidates the environment in which they were produced, copied, and kept, and exposes the shared skills and practices of diplomatic activity, domestic governance, and early modern archiving. This archaeological exploration of epistolary and archival culture establishes a métier of state actor that participates in – even defines – a notably early modern growth in administration and information management. Extending this discussion to our own conditions of access, a new parallel is drawn across two ages of information obsession as Williamson argues that the digital has a natural place in this textual history that we can no longer ignore.
This study makes significant contributions to epistolary culture, diplomatic history, and early modern studies more widely, by showing that understanding Elizabethan diplomacy takes us far beyond any single ambassador or agent defined as such: it is a way into an entire administrative landscape and political culture.
Curating Lived Islam in the Muslim World: British Scholars, Sojourners and Sleuths by Iftikhar H. Malik
Beginning with the medieval period, this book collates and reviews first-hand scholarship on Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, as noted down by eminent British travellers, sleuths and observers of lived Islam.The book foregrounds the pre-colonial and pre-Orientalist phase and locates the multi-disciplinarity of Britain’s relationship with Muslims over the last millennium to demonstrate a multi-layered interface. Fully sensitive to a gender balance, the book focuses on specially selected individuals and their transformative experiences while living and working among Muslims. Examining the writings of male and female authors including Adelard, Thomas Coryate, Mary Montagu and Fanny Parkes, the book analyses their understanding of Islam. Moreover, the author explores the works of a salient number of representative colonial British women to move away from the imperious wives stereotype and shed light on gender and Islam in Near East and South Asia by illustrating the status of women, tribal hierarchies, historic and architectural sites and regional politics.
Going beyond familiar views about colonialism, travel writings and memsahibs without losing sight of the complex relations between Britain and Asian Muslims, this book will be of interest to academics working on British history, Imperial history, the study of religions, Shi’i Islam, Islamic studies, Gender and the Empire and South Asian Studies.
Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism edited by Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal
The Indian Ocean interregional arena is a space of vital economic and strategic importance characterised by specialised flows of capital and labor, skills and services, and ideas and culture. Islam in particular and religiously informed universalism in general once signified cosmopolitanism across this wide realm. This historical reality is at variance with contemporary conceptions of Islam as an illiberal religion that breeds intolerance and terrorism. The future balance of global power will be determined in large measure by policies of key actors in the Indian Ocean and the lands that abut it rather than in the Atlantic or the Pacific. The interplay of multiple and competing universalisms in the Indian Ocean arena is in urgent need of better understanding.
Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism is a fresh contribution to Islamic and Indian Ocean studies alike, placing the history of modern South Asia in broader interregional and global contexts. It refines theories of universalism and cosmopolitanism while at the same time drawing on new empirical research. The essays in the volume bring the best academic scholarship on Islam in South Asia and across the Indian Ocean in the age of European empire to the readers.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/oceanic-islam-9789389812510/