The Black Death in the Maghreb is severely understudied. There is little scholarship on the Maghrebi experience of the second pandemic in general. That which exists bases its conclusions on Al-Andalusi and Middle Eastern sources and does not incorporate the paleoscientific data which has shed light on plague outbreaks for which there is less traditional evidence. As a result, little is known about the Maghrebi Black Death, and this ignorance is detrimental to our understanding of the Black Death in adjacent regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper surveys the existing scholarship on plague in fourteenth-century North Africa and argues that the field both needs and deserves further attention. It then suggests directions for further study grounded in an interdisciplinary approach incorporating paleoscience, plague ecology, archaeology, and a reexamination of Maghrebi primary texts.

The medieval Mediterranean has emerged in recent years as a laboratory for studying intercultural relations. Historians have moved away for the most part from the binary oppositions that so often served as the analytical context for communications across and throughout the Middle Sea. As the Mediterranean has become almost synonymous with intercultural contact, numerous studies have centered on those who facilitated contact between members of the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. Dragomans played an essential role in binding this world together: finding and connecting merchants, witnessing transactions, translating letters, and negotiating differences. I argue that dragomans relied on a kind of trust capital similar to that which bound commercial relations in far-flung business networks. As actors who operated in the interstitial spaces of the medieval Mediterranean, dragomans used language, cultural knowledge, and their own reputations as tools in facilitating the international language of commerce.

This essay traces the conception of love and desire ( ʿishq ) in a Persian verse romance by the Indo-Persian poet Ḥasan Dihlavī, known as ʿIshqnāma (composed in 1301). ʿIshqnāma narrates a tragic and unconsummated love affair between a young Hindu couple. When the two protagonists immolate themselves in what is at once a reworking of the Indic custom of widow burning ( sati ) and an allusion to the deaths of the famed lovers Laylī and Majnūn, the poet offers an innovative account of the temporality of desire. In transforming the Persian master narrative of love, Ḥasan anticipates Freud’s account of the death drive in relation to the pleasure principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921). This article initiates a dialogue between Freud and Ḥasan Dihlavī in order to suggest that desire for another may be the self’s only means of reckoning with its contingency.

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, in his seminal work The King’s Two Bodies , argues that a sovereign has two bodies: one mortal, physical body subject to illness and death, and another immortal, dynastic body equivalent to the administrative mechanism. Notably, it is the king who has two bodies, not the queen. The king’s dynastic body is his administrative persona, but the queen’s official body depends on her maternity for the continuation of the dynasty. This essay argues that a queen can have two bodies and explores female rulers’ ways of claiming the rhetorical doubling of a sovereign body independent of maternity. It also proposes a comparative approach. This essay reads the mythological representation of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) in Marie de France’s Arthurian tale Lanval against Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (624–705)’s self-mythologization as the avatar of the Goddess of Pure Radiance in the Commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra . It illustrates how female rulers wielded political symbolism through a reshuffling of symbolic orders, which provides a window into the roles of Celtic myths in a medieval French Christian society and Buddhism in a medieval Chinese Confucian society.

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.