This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic negotiations, preserved in a variety of material media: potsherds, papyrus, paper, administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. Each contribution focuses on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Together, they represent the textual conventions and innovations of learned and vernacular epistolary traditions from many regions of North Africa and Eurasia, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE.

Petra M. Sijpesteijn (PhD Princeton) is Professor of Arabic at Leiden University and the founding president of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology. Her research focuses on the experiences of those living under Islamicate rule, including Jews and Christians.

List of Illustrations
"Introduction," by Birte Kristiansen and Petra M. Sijpesteijn
“'The Caliph Calls You to the Book of God': Writing to Rebels in the Early Islamic Period," by Hannah-Lena Hagemann
"'Maintaining Friendship and Commercial Relations in Eighth-Century Egypt': Three Letters from Abū Yūsuf to Abū Yazīd," by Petra M. Sijpesteijn
"Between Practical Petitioning and Divine Intervention: Entreaties to the Shiʿi Imams in the Ninth Century CE," by Edmund Hayes
"Forging Historical and Diplomatic Ties in the Islamic West: The Letter of a Berber Emir to the Umayyad Caliph, 317 AH (929 CE)," by Aurélien Montel
"Asking for a Friend: Travel Requests and Social Relations in Umayyad Egypt," by Cecilia Palombo and Eline Scheerlink
"Gender and the Art of Asking: Letters of Request to Distinguished Women Preserved in the Cairo Geniza," by Oded Zinger
"Hidden Private Entreaties behind Two Public Steles from the Mid-Tang Dynasty," by Jialong Liu
"Ghostwriting and Patronage-Seeking Letters in Song Dynasty China, 960–1279," by Beverly Bossler
"Beyond Epistolary Standards? The Language of Entreaty in Political and Diplomatic Communications from Thirteenth-Century Iberia," by Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo
"Supplication, Authority, Militancy: Request Strategies in Late Medieval Princely Women’s Letters from Burgundy," by Margreet Brandsma