East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9783110328783
• eBook ISBN: 9783110321517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

Table of contents

• Introduction. Encounters Between East and West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Many Untold Stories About Connections and Contacts, Understanding and Misunderstanding. Also an Introduction
• Chapter 1 Mirrors for Princes in Europe and the Middle East: A Case of Historiographical Incommensurability
• Chapter 2 Reframing the Monstrous: Visions of Desire and a Unified Christendom in the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East
• Chapter 3 Byzantium between East and West: Competing Hellenisms in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene and her Contemporaries
• Chapter 4 Franks and Indigenous Communities in Palestine and Syria (1099–1187): A Hierarchical Model of Social Interaction in the Principalities of Outremer
• Chapter 5 A Century of Communication and Acclimatization: Interpreters and Intermediaries in the Kingdom of Jerusalem
• Chapter 6 East Meets West and the Problem with Those Pictures
• Chapter 7 Walther von der Vogelweide and the Middle East: “Holy Land” and the Heathen
• Chapter 8 Wolfram’s Islam: The Beliefs of the Muslim Pagans in Parzival and Willehalm
• Chapter 9 Crusading against Barbarians: Muslims as Barbarians in Crusades Era Sources
• Chapter 10 The Encounter with the Foreign in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature: Fictionality as a Springboard for Non-Xenophobic Approaches in the Middle Ages. Herzog Ernst, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Konrad von Würzburg, Die Heidin, and Fortunatus
• Chapter 11 Rūmī’s Mathnawī and the Roman de la Rose: The Space of Narrative
• Chapter 12 The Moors in Thirteenth-Century Spain: “They are Us!”
• Chapter 13 The Reorientation of Roger Bacon: Muslims, Mongols, and the Man Who Knew Everything
• Chapter 14 The Exotic and Fabulous East in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: Understated Authenticity
• Chapter 15 Merveilles du Monde: Marco Millioni, Mirabilia, and the Medieval Imagination, or the Impact of Genre on European Curiositas
• Chapter 16 Embalming and Dissecting the Corpse between East and West: From Ar-Razi to Henry de Mondeville
• Chapter 17 West-östliche Dialoge in der Mörin Hermanns von Sachsenheim (1453)
• Chapter 18 La représentation de l’Orient dans les Essais de Montaigne
• Chapter 19 The Strange Journey of Christian Rosencreutz
• Chapter 20 Producing Yeni Dünya for an Ottoman Readership: The Travels of Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli in Colonial Latin America, 1675–1683
• Chapter 21 Orientalism in Early Modern Europe?
• Chapter 22 A Seventeenth-Century French Merchant in the Orient: The Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Les six voyages
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Index