An updated, comprehensive guide to the orchids of Europe and the Mediterranean region.

Field Guide to the Orchids of Europe and the Mediterranean: Second Edition is a comprehensive photographic guide to the orchids of the region written by leading experts, who between them have decades of orchid field and research experience. The book covers orchids from Europe and the Mediterranean, extending to Turkey and the immediate near east of North Africa and Macaronesia.

Many guides to orchids of this region exist, but in this completely revised second edition, the authors have drawn on the latest scientific research to bring clarity to orchid identification and names, with an emphasis on the natural variability that exists in many wild species. This edition incorporates the latest updates in taxonomy. With over 2000 color photographs and new images, the book provides the reader with an accessible and easy-to-use identification guide to the natural variability seen in these orchids.

The book covers thirty genera and their species including Ophrys, Cypripedium, Orchis, Dactylorhiza, Epipactis, and Serapias, as well as seventy natural hybrids. Much of the confusion over identification is due to the morphological variation a species can have within a habitat and across its distribution, and therefore to simplify identification, several images accompany each species to illustrate this diversity, along with notes on distinguishing features and distribution maps. Each species is also accompanied by common names and important synonyms, as well as notes on habitat, flowering times, and distinguishing features.
 

This collaborative volume focuses on imagined geography and the relationships among power, knowledge, and space. A sequel to Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Imagined Geographies in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Beyond shares with its predecessor a strong focus on the role of empire and ideas of space viewed in inter-regional and interdisciplinary terms.

Both volumes bring together specialists on history, art history, literature, and theater studies, but the present volume covers an even wider geography than the first. In addition to the core provinces of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, it also includes connections between these regions and others further away—notably Iran, Inner Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The essays collected here suggest that the phenomenon of imagined geographies is essentially discursive in nature, since Self and Other may only be defined relative to one another.

“An important new book…offers a powerful call for historians of the ancient Mediterranean to consider their implicit biases in writing ancient history and it provides an example of how more inclusive histories may be written.”
—Denise Demetriou, New England Classical Journal

“With a light touch and a masterful command of the literature, López-Ruiz replaces old ideas with a subtle and more accurate account of the extensive cross-cultural exchange patterns and economy driven by the Phoenician trade networks that ‘re-wired’ the Mediterranean world. A must read.”
—J. G. Manning, author of The Open Sea

“[A] substantial and important contribution…to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. López-Ruiz’s work does justice to the Phoenicians’ role in shaping Mediterranean culture by providing rational and factual argumentation and by setting the record straight.”
—Hélène Sader, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes.

Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography.

Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.

“How could I allow my soldiers to sail on this disloyal and cruel sea?” These words, attributed to the most powerful caliph of medieval Islam, Umar Ibn al-Khattab (634–644), have led to a misunderstanding in the West about the importance of the Mediterranean to early Islam. This body of water, known in Late Antiquity as the Sea of the Romans, was critical to establishing the kingdom of the caliphs and for introducing the new religion to Europe and Africa. Over time, it also became a pathway to commercial and political dominion, indispensable to the prosperity and influence of the Islamic world. Sea of the Caliphs returns Muslim sailors to their place of prominence in the history of the Islamic caliphate.

As early as the seventh century, Muslim sailors competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of this far-flung route of passage. Christophe Picard recreates these adventures as they were communicated to admiring Muslims by their rulers. After the Arab conquest of southern Europe and North Africa, Muslims began to speak of the Mediterranean in their strategic visions, business practices, and notions of nature and the state. Jurists and ideologues conceived of the sea as a conduit for jihad, even as Muslims’ maritime trade with Latin, Byzantine, and Berber societies increased.

In the thirteenth century, Christian powers took over Mediterranean trade routes, but by that time a Muslim identity that operated both within and in opposition to Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.

Seachanges brings together original essays examining human and cultural mobility from a musical perspective. Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. But hearing past musicking that took place in diaspora and foreign lands requires new methodologies designed to center unsettled lives and ephemeral practices in history.

Employing interpretive strategies from musicology, ethnomusicology, historical performance practice, sociolinguistics, and cultural history, the contributors intentionally complicate national and regional accounts of music from 1550 to 1800. Repertorial subjects include Spanish guitar music in Italy, Italian songs in Bohemia, Turkish songs in France, Jewish rituals on Corfu, Jesuit hymns in the Greek Archipelago, and Ottoman court music; further chapters recover the experiences of Indigenous musicians in colonial Latin America, the diaspora of Neapolitan singers, fictional cartographies of Baroque opera, and the careers of enslaved Black musicians in Venice and pre-revolutionary Haiti. They promote a new theoretical vocabulary that coalesces around orality, voice, performers, and performance as matters to foreground in mobility studies.

Seachanges illustrates how musical microhistories can address mobility at the macro level of Mediterranean and Atlantic Studies while respecting the tempo of individual human lives and musical timeframes.