New Book!

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press 2018, 493pp.

CONTENTS

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

·       Covers a wide range of groups in seven chapters, including Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and Romani; currently, books on premodern race only address Jews, Muslims, and blackness of skin

·       Women, children, and issues of sexuality are represented and discussed in each chapter making this a pertinent resource for feminist and gender studies, as well as race, medieval, and early modern studies

·       A genuinely interdisciplinary work that contains translations for all foreign and premodern languages discussed within the text

New publication!

Georgios Theotokis, Byzantine Military Tactics in Syria and Mesopotamia in the 10th Century. A Comparative Study, Edinburgh 2018, 360pp.

CONTENTS

This book examines the strategies and military tactics of the Byzantines and their enemies in Eastern Anatolia, Syria and in Upper Mesopotamia in the tenth century. This period of conflict is difficult to define: it was too inactive to be called a ‘war’ but too active to be called a ‘cold war’. Nevertheless, it was a ‘war’, even if it lacked the numerous pitched battles or protracted sieges that defined other periods or other operational theatres of war. This study examines the way the Byzantines innovated and adapted their strategies and tactics to those of their enemies in the East, giving a rich picture of tenth-century Byzantine warfare.

• Examines the major and most important pitched battles of this period and the Byzantine and Arab military manuals which show how armies were organized and deployed in the battlefield
• Looks at how the Byzantines adapted their strategies and tactics to those of their enemies in the 10th century Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia
• Shows the transmission of military knowledge through the ages by comparing the military treatises of the 10th century with those from the Roman and Ancient Greek periods

Conference!

Victors and Vanquished in the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War in the Middle Ages

18-20 October 2018

Universität Mainz

PROGRAMM

Conflicts significantly influenced medieval societies. The martial cultures which arose as a result developed not only in opposition to, but also under the influence of other cultures. Cultures of war are here understood as the norms, interpretations, attributions of meaning and reflections on war, as well as the forms and practices of war itself. The goal of this workshop is to analyze Euro-Mediterranean cultures of war and the importance of Byzantium for them in a comparative perspective on the basis of three concrete sets of topics: 

1) Remembering Victory and Defeat

2) Practices of Celebrating Victory and Triumphs

3) The Culture of Dealing with the Vanquished

Coping with victory and defeat in war touches upon questions of the legitimation of authority, for instance in historiography, panegyric, pictorial representations and architecture. The celebration of a triumph, by contrast, represents a means of direct communication between rulers, the army and the populace. In this context thanks is expressed to the army, generals, the ruler or another higher authority, and it is here that the embedding of the martial in each individual culture is expressed. The treatment of prisoners of war and the enemy dead likewise belongs to the frame of inquiry, yet is of greater importance for its praxis, as a similar treatment of one's own captives and possibly exchanges of prisoners would have been expected.

In order to facilitate a fruitful discussion and start a concise transcultural comparison, on the one hand, various regions are to be included, Latin Europe as well as the Slavic world, Byzantium or the Islamic-ruled Middle East. On the other hand, disciplines that principally work with texts as well as those that analyze material culture are to be called upon to produce a scholarly contribution.

A Conference of the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Mainz at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Organized by: Johannes Pahlitzsch and Jörg Rogge