The cross-fertilisation in written and material culture across borders in the medieval world.

This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

This book is a study of architecture and urban design across the Mediterranean Sea from the 12th to the 14th Century, a time when there was no single, hegemonic power dominating the area. The focus of the study--four cities on the Italian peninsula, and four in Syria and Egypt--is the interconnectedness of the design and use of urban structures, streets and open space. Each chapter offers an historical analysis of the buildings and spaces used for trade, education, political display and public action. The work includes historical and social analyses of the mercantile, social, political and educational cultures of the eight cities, highlighting similarities and differences between Christian and Islamic practices. Sixteen new maps drawn specifically for this book are based on the writings of medieval travelers.

An exploration of the thought of Gilles Deleuze and its relevance to theology.

This volume presents evidence of the extent and effects of intercultural contacts across Europe and the Mediterranean rim, opening up a new understanding of early medieval civilisation and its continuing influence in both Western and Eastern cultures today. From the perspectives of textual transmission, cultural memory, religion, art and cultural traditions, this work explores the central question of how ideas travelled in the medieval world, challenging the conventional notion of insular communities in the Middle Ages. Despite the schism between East and West that took hold after the thirteenth century this volume reveals a rich and extensive cultural exchange and demonstrates that transmission of ideas and culture across borders began much earlier than the Crusades. It contributes to new perspectives on medieval cities, Christian Europe's history with the Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean, the landscape of power and the power-plays of the medieval Church, and the way in which cross-cultural transmission affected all of these areas.

The essays in this volume engage a variety of inter- and intra-religious conflicts, ranging from the first to eighth centuries CE. Given the political and religious tensions in the world today, this volume is well positioned to find relevance and meaning in societies still grappling with the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Contemporary criticism focuses on contested issues at the borders and in the interstices of cultures. Medieval and Early Modern European culture, previously conceived as monolithic, is now being reconceived as heterogeneous, a site of tensions, contest, accommodation, and subversion.The essays in this volume describe a Europe that is multicultural in fact, and trace the exchanges between cultural groups, subcultures and dominant cultures, and between individuals and the cultures that they inhabit. The critical works in this volume are drawn from a variety of disciplines: art history, literary studies, history and historiography, and cultural studies. A number are interdisciplinary, examining topics of cultural studies as diverse as fashion, rhetorical self-fashioning, and the history of architecture, all in the context of their surrounding contexts. A special strength of this volume is the visual impact of its three illustrated monographs.These essays will appeal to all who see the importance of reconceiving European history in terms of contemporary multicultural perspectives, as well as to those who are specially interested in medieval architecture, the history of fashion, French and English Renaissance literature, Hebraic studies, and medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean history.