Results by title

This book explores the spatial organization and vernacular architecture of the Early Neolithic village of Beidha in southern Jordan. This is a case study rigorously investigating changes in community organization associated with early sedentism and food production in Southwest Asia. Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk's extensive fieldwork at Beidha yielded a considerable occupation span, extensive horizontal exposure, numerous excavated buildings with well preserved architecture and features, and a relative abundance of in situ artefacts. These broad horizontal excavations revealed a moderately sized early farming community dating to the middle of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, primarily after 7000 BC. The first three chapters of the book place the early village of Beidha within the context of the origins of sedentism and food production; provide an overview of the site and the excavations; and present the analytical approach and the methods used in this study, as well as the final phasing model for the history of the settlement. The subsequent two chapters detail the stratigraphy and chronology of the early Neolithic village, and examine the built environment and architecture, focusing on the construction, remodeling, and use life of individual buildings. The next two chapters explore, by phase, architectural patterning, continuity and change, and then community organization and the utilization of space. The book concludes with a broader consideration of emerging organizational trends expressed in the remarkable built environment of early Neolithic settlements in Southwest Asia. The results reveal that the successful establishment of sedentary food-producing villages was marked by novel social and economic developments, and the autonomization of households and formalization of corporate bodies represented important trends during this transition. These two organizational trends then formed the foundation upon which later, more complex social constructions were built.

Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography.
 
In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.

In Emotion and Devotion Miri Rubin explores the craft of the historian through a series of studies of medieval religious cultures. In three original chapters she approaches the medieval figure of the Virgin Mary with the aim of unravelling meaning and experience. Hymns and miracle tales, altarpieces and sermons – a wide range of sources from many European regions – are made to reveal the creativity and richness which they elicited in medieval people, women and men, clergy and laity, people of status and riches as well as those of modest means.

Peter Linehan (+2020) followed his survey of original papal letters in Portugal, Portugalia pontifica 1198-1417 (2013) with the present volume, España Pontifica, that covers papal letters to Spanish recipients from Pope Innocent II (1198-1216) to Pope Boniface VIII (+1303). This volume will provide students of the medieval papacy and the Spanish church with an invaluable research tool to explore the relationship between Rome and Spain during the crucial period of the Spanish Reconquistà after the battles of Navas de Tolosa (1212) to the capture of Seville (1248). Linehan spent his career cataloguing papal letters from more than sixty Spanish repositories. For the past sixty years the Vatican has also been engaged in publishing surveys of original papal letters preserved from various European archives. However, this volume includes material that has not been included in these surveys.

A fresh perspective revealing how ethnographic thinking shaped the sociocultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean.
 
With this book, Philip A. Harland presents a large-scale rereading of social and cultural life in the eastern part of the ancient Mediterranean in particular, examining social interactions among peoples, from culturally dominant groups to minority populations. Harland assesses literary and archaeological evidence to yield fresh insights into the dynamics of ethnic relations in the region and to explore how the population navigated questions of identification, differentiation, categorization, stratification, criminalization, and population production.
 
Harland considers encounters between peoples as well as their representations of one another, reframing the social landscape of the ancient world by focusing on the influence and ubiquity of the ethnographic imagination between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE. Drawing insights from anthropology, sociology, and postcolonial studies, Harland offers close readings of papyri, inscriptions, monuments, sculptures, and other materials that reflect interactions between different populations at all levels of society. He gives careful attention to the perspectives of enslaved, immigrant, and subject peoples, including Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians, and Judeans under Persian, Hellenistic, or Roman rule.
 
Offering an innovative reading of social and cultural life from the ground up, this book reveals the extent to which ethnographic thinking structured the sociocultural landscape of the ancient world.
 

How people across society in medieval South Asia—including coppersmiths, merchants, bureaucrats, philosophers, and physicians—pioneered new vernacular sciences.

Starting in the eleventh century, South Asian scholars and artisans began to investigate and shape the world in a novel manner. Intellectuals translated Sanskrit texts into regional languages such as Kannada, situating knowledge in particular places. At the same time, architects and artisans began to assert their intellectual and literary presence, often claiming the title of “scholar” as they negotiated a space between classical textual erudition, professional expertise, and personal experience. Working within the perilous world of court politics, a new class of scholar-administrators began collecting recipes and composing texts about weather prediction, horticulture, mathematics, astrology, sexual life, and medicine.

Everyday Sciences traces this emergence of vernacular sciences by engaging with untapped archives and an array of sources in multiple languages. By exploring how historical actors resolved disputes about the physiology of vision, the use of meat and alcohol in medicine, and the management of information in elephant stables, Eric Moses Gurevitch unveils the complex textual and social orders that structured medieval society in India. He argues that a focus on everyday sciences in the non-modern non-West allows historians to reassess how places outside—and even inside—Europe are brought into narratives of a global history of science. Gurevitch articulates a “big-enough” history of science in South Asia, one open to little voices and unexpected connections that might not make their way through the fray in other histories.

Everyday Sciences demonstrates how practical, everyday activities were engines of profound intellectual innovation—and it shows the promise of revisiting the past without colonial hang-ups, and with fresh eyes.