The Gulf region during the “Middle Period,” from around 1000 - 1500 CE, faced what seemed to be two insurmountable challenges: the fall of the ‘Abbasids in Baghdad in 1258 CE as well as increased competition from the Red Sea. Despite these two threats to the prosperity of trade in the region, however, Gulf ports remained vibrant and important centers of trade and cosmopolitanism. The Gulf, with its merchant economy and its relatively tolerant port cities, did not march in lockstep with the fate and fortunes of metropolitan cities such as Baghdad. Instead of William McNeill’s webs of history with their orbiting points, medieval Gulf ports were spiders spinning silk in the wind, attaching to whatever space along the shore was most convenient. Gulf port polities were diffuse, detached from imperial centers and, for dogmatists, sometimes dangerous, as they do not fit usual religious paradigms. Marshall Hodgson rightly identified the Middle Period as the crucial period for the Islamicate world. The centuries between 1000–1500 CE were characterized by a remarkable unity that existed across the Medieval Islamic world despite political divisions. However, there was far more to the story of medieval Gulf culture, and possibly the whole medieval Middle East, than Hodgson’s narrative of the consolidation of Islam, which focuses on trade, religious thought, and cultural influences setting out from agrarian, urban centers. The remarkable independence of Gulf ports from agrarian political power mixed with a heavy dependence on international trade fostered a distinctive cosmopolitan ethos directed beyond Hodgson’s Islamicate world.

Today, the comparison of male homosexuality to bestiality is unfortunately too well-known from homophobic polemics. Yet this comparison has a history in the Anglophone world, and it emerged in the early European Middle Ages seemingly not in order to dehumanize men who had sex with men but in order to make bestiality appear serious by comparing it to male-male sexual acts. The eighth-century Paenitentiale Theodori —which collects the judgments of the Byzantine-born Archbishop Theodore—is the earliest extant English text to connect male-male sexual acts with bestiality. This comparison does not occur in the previous penitentials, but, after its appearance in the Paenitentiale , this comparison traveled throughout Western Europe. No scholarship to date examines the global origins of such a comparison. This paper argues that later medieval views of bestiality as perverse and as a serious sexual offense emerged from bestiality’s early comparison to same-sex acts (rather than vice-versa). Prior to the Paenitentiale Theodori , European theologians described bestiality as a minor sin akin to masturbation. Theodore borrowed the comparison of bestiality and male-male sex acts from a Latin mistranslation of the 314 Greek Council of Ancyra and from the Byzantine theologian St. Basil the Great. Since the early penitentials accorded male-male sexual acts some of the most serious penances, the comparison of bestiality to these acts elevated bestiality for the first time in Western Europe to the status of a serious and unnatural sin. Through connection to effeminizing male-male sexual acts, bestiality gained a reputation as a serious, boundary-violating sin in its own right.

The global turn in European medieval studies has attempted to present connections and comparisons that cover all corners of the Earth. Many of these histories rely on textual and material evidence for moments of encounter and exchange. This essay presents teaching strategies that center various approaches to mapping that look beyond the pages of books to include other oral and visual traditions. One approach is to engage with Indigenous ways of naming land, water, and region, and to meet with local Native communities especially for medievalists working in the Americas. Another is to model interdisciplinarity by looking to the history of science, conservation, climate, disease, and more to demonstrate how scholars can learn from other specializations. A final example involves mapping global pathways through museum collections and displays, with an example of finding premodern Africa in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This article offers a critical evaluation of a purported diplomatic mission from Genoa to the Marīnid sultan of Morocco, Abū Yaʿqūb Yusuf (r. 1286–1307 CE). Ibn Abī Zarʿ, author of a famous chronicle known as the Rawḍ al-qirṭās , or “Garden of Pages,” recorded the arrival of the Genoese along with their impressive gift: a golden or gilded tree with singing birds. His inclusion of the episode in a narrative otherwise devoted to the deeds of the dynasty and history of Fez raises several interesting questions. How did the Genoese construct or acquire the tree? Why was the nature of this gift important, and what might have been the goals of the Genoese embassy in bringing such a costly object along? I propose that we understand the embassy and its inclusion in the narrative as part of a Marīnid desire to promote the dynasty as legitimate heirs of previous Islamic rulers. This desire made use of symbols of pious and wise kingship, including the mechanical marvel represented by the tree, which bore an impressive ideological pedigree in Islamic and Christian literary and representational traditions. For their part, the Genoese may have been motivated by a desire to repair relations with Abū Yaʿqūb damaged by the activity of Benedetto Zaccaria in the straits of Gibraltar. Taken as a whole, this brief but under-studied event suggests both the Mediterranean scope of this symbol of kingship and its use by medieval diplomats to achieve practical ends.

In medieval China, talismans ( fu ) and sacred diagrams ( tu ) were ubiquitous elements in religious texts. Since they were composed of divine illegible esoteric patterns, meaning was not produced by the markings talismans and diagrams bore; it was, rather, displaced onto the objects themselves, whether they were two-dimensionally represented in scriptures and ritual manuals or externalized and materialized onto physical supports. In this respect, the objecthood and palpable materiality of talismans and diagrams made them shorthand tokens for direct access to the supernatural. Drawing on emblematic yet understudied scriptures of medieval Daoism and esoteric Buddhist, the present study considers talismans and diagrams as paratextual objects, bringing to light the fact that they not only passively frame the reading of a text but in many instances also constitute the primary and determining level of “text” that is read. In this way, sources in which talismans and diagrams featured prominently were approached first and foremost through their material aspects, namely paratexts. What is more, the talismans and diagrams that appeared in texts were often meant to be externalized and materialized, in some cases onto the bodies of adepts or visualized in their mind’s eye, thereby conflating paratextuality, materiality, and corporeality. In a pair of striking examples, practitioners are instructed to embody and become actual ritual objects, blurring the boundaries between text, object, and body in one single divine locus.

Silk cultivation in Italy started in the eleventh century CE. Initially, silkworms were cultivated using only indigenous black mulberry trees. For several centuries following, manufacturers in Italian towns manufactured luxury silk fabrics utilizing only imported foreign silk threads. In the fifteenth century, however, the practice of cultivating non-native white mulberry trees made its way from China to Italy. Due to the better quality of their leaves, this facilitated the production of domestic Italian silk threads for use in the manufacture of luxury products. Rural silk cultivation then expanded sharply.

This essay addresses the challenges of teaching the poetry of the Abbasid modernizers ( muḥdathūn ) in a global context. The historicist approach to Arabic poetry in general, and to pre-modern Arabic poetry in particular, makes it difficult to engage with the work of these revolutionary poets poetically. A creative and comparatist approach to translation and an insistence on foregrounding this poetry’s relevance beyond its historical moment are ways of overcoming the hegemony of the historical imperative and inviting students to connect with this body of literature rhetorically and creatively. My observations are grounded in readings of samples from the work of Abbasid poets Abū Nuwās (d. 815) and Abū Tammām (d.845).