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).

The following is a broad reflection on medieval travel and the ways in which western Christians encountered and imagined non-Christians and non-Europeans. It is interdisciplinary and multivalent, and it considers a variety of sources, both historical and literary, from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. An especial emphasis is placed upon the ways in which these sources—including material objects—were disseminated, “read,” and interpreted. In addition to presenting an overview of who travelled and why, where they went, and how they conveyed themselves, the principle aim of this essay is to demonstrate the wide variety of medieval responses to cross-cultural encounters. Medieval people were neither simplistic nor one-sided, and they often changed their minds, not only as the result of real-life interactions with foreign peoples, but also sometimes as the result of hearing or reading about them. Included are observations about the ways in which people at all levels of medieval society, including the illiterate and untraveled, perceived the “other.”

This essay reviews two recent contributions to the history of indigenous writing systems in Mesoamerica and the Andes: Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots and Mary Miller and Barbara Mundy’s Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City .

Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād , which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim .

This pedagogical article discusses sources and methods for teaching the history of imperial science and medicine in the Nahua world from 1400 to 1600, a period that ranges from the spectacular growth of the Aztec Empire through the conquest to the creation of New Spain. By providing students tools to explore non-European ontologies and world-building, this article presents several exercises in which students act as archival researchers and themselves puzzle out the complexities of information transfer in the archive of sixteenth-century Latin America. Combining European paleography workshops, linguistic tools pioneered by the IDIEZ Nahuatl program, the study of Mesoamerican archeological objects, and an engagement with Mexican medicinal plants to recreate early modern remedies, students gain access to a world of New Spanish knowledge-creation.

Drawing on recent technical analyses of an exquisite embroidered French alms purse that now resides at the Musée des Tissus et Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, this article argues that the purse, which was probably embroidered in Paris in the early 1340s, represents the culmination of the efforts of dozens of men and women on three different continents. Some of the women who worked in the fields where the flax was grown were simple day laborers, but many of the other men and women—both rural peasants and urban artisans—possessed specific technical knowledge and manual skills that could take years to perfect. Indeed, it took a global village of many talented individuals to create a fourteenth-century luxury alms purse from Paris. The article also explores the ecological impact of the extraction and processing of some of the raw materials that were employed in the purse.