Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe
Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge-multilingual and transregional ......
Exploring the significant influences of Turkish dress on French fashion While French fashion has historically set the bar across the Western world, the cultural influences that inspired it are often obscured. Dressing a la Turque examines the theatrical depictions of Ottoman costumes, or Turkish dress, and demonstrates the French fascination ......
First discovered in a Hungarian library in 1838, the Rohonc Codex keeps privileged company with some of the most famous unsolved writing systems in the world, notably the Voynich manuscript, the Phaistos Disk, and Linear A. Written entirely in cipher, this 400-year-old, 450-page-long, richly illustrated manuscript initially gained considerable ......
Explores the western European idea of the witches' sabbath, based on translations of five texts dating from the 1430s, and examines how these texts went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come.
The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627
In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to four hundred to sell into slavery in North Africa. Among those taken were the Lutheran minister Reverend Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur (born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei) wrote The Travels to chronicle his ......
"Allen offers important insights that are likely to inform the debate on the Indian Ocean slave trade for years...The volume's annotated tables alone speak to several years of painstaking research on a variety of sources ...a significant contribution that should find a place in the library of any scholar of the slave trade." - African Studies ......
Two of the world's leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagun's monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagun's Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished ......
As the wealthiest German merchant family of the sixteenth century, the Fuggers have attracted wide scholarly attention. In contrast to the other famous merchant family of the period, the Medici of Florence, however, no English-language work on them has been available until now. The Fuggers of Augsburg offers a concise and engaging overview that ......
The long conflict that culminated in the American Revolution and the founding of the U.S. Republic upended the lives of men and women throughout the colonies. In a time of upheaval and uncertainty, they reinvented their lives, their communities, and their vision of the world. Drawing from the pathbreaking scholarship published by the ......