Medieval Strategies of Entreaty from North Africa to Eurasia

Petra Sijpesteijn

• Publisher: Arc Humanities Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781802701999
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic negotiations, preserved in a variety of material media: potsherds, papyrus, paper, administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. Each contribution focuses on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Together, they represent the textual conventions and innovations of learned and vernacular epistolary traditions from many regions of North Africa and Eurasia, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE.

Table of contents

• COVER
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Birte Kristiansen and Petra M. Sijpesteijn – How to Ask in the Medieval World: An Introduction
• Hannah-Lena Hagemann – “The Caliph Calls You to the Book of God”
• Petra M. Sijpesteijn – Maintaining Friendship and Commercial Relations in Eighth-Century Egypt
• Edmund Hayes – Between Practical Petitioning and Divine Intervention
• Aurélien Montel – Forging Historical and Diplomatic Ties in the Islamic West
• Cecilia Palombo and Eline Scheerlinck – Asking for a Friend
• Oded Zinger – Gender and the Art of Asking
• Jialong Liu – Hidden Private Entreaties behind Two Public Steles in the Mid-Tang Dynasty
• Beverly Bossler – Ghostwriting and Patronage-Seeking Letters in Song Dynasty China, 960–1279
• Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo – Beyond Epistolary Standards?
• Margreet Brandsma – Supplication, Authority, Militancy
• Index