Episodios
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Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward.
Bin Yang writes about these linkages between China, the Maldives and the Indian Ocean in his recent book Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c 1100-1620 (Columbia University Press: 2024)
Bin Yang is a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong. His books include Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Columbia University Press: 2008) and Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Columbia University Press: 2019).
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Discovered But Forgotten. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity.
In History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2024), Letizia Osti provides the first full-length English-language study devoted to al-Suli, illustrating how investigating the life, times and works of such a complex individual can serve as a fil rouge for tackling broader, contested concepts, such as biography, autobiography, court culture, and written culture. The result is an exploration of the ways in which the Abbasid court made sense of the past and, in general, of what 'historiography' means in a medieval Arabic context.
Letizia Osti is Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the University of Milan, where she has taught since 2007. She earned her PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of St. Andrews, and is a member of the School of Abbasid Studies and other scholarly societies. Her research has been published widely in journals such as the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures, and she is the co-author of the 2013 study Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court.
Samuel Thrope is Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. He is the translator of Iranian author Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s 1963 Israel travelogue The Israeli Republic (Restless Books, 2017) and, with Dr. Domenico Agostini, of the ancient Iranian Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation (Oxford University Press, 2021).
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Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, records about items including cowrie shells and ambergris, and much more, Bin Yang argues that the Maldives — and the Indian Ocean world — shaped the Chinese empire.
Discovered but Forgotten is a far-reaching and ambitious book that showcases both imperial China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean world and how to do maritime history and global history, even when that means working with incomplete records and fragments of porcelain. This book should interest readers curious about East Asian history and global history, as well as anyone who doesn't yet know how important ambergris was to maritime trade and Ming China (spoiler: the answer is very).
In addition to Discovered but Forgotten, interested listeners (and readers!) should also seek out Bin's previous books, especially Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019).
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Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2024) provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English.
The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.
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In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, unpacks the translation of this incredible text with Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a Senior Research Fellow at New York University in Abu Dhabi, the translator of this publication. Tim shares his story of how he first came across the original source text, his journey of translation, and even anecdotes on friendships and wonderful memories made along the way.
A Physician on the Nile (NYU Press, 2022) begins as a description of everyday life in Egypt at the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century, before becoming a harrowing account of famine and pestilence. Written by the polymath and physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and intended for the Abbasid caliph al-Nāṣir, the first part of the book offers detailed descriptions of Egypt’s geography, plants, animals, and local cuisine, including a recipe for a giant picnic pie made with three entire roast lambs and dozens of chickens. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s text is also a pioneering work of ancient Egyptology, with detailed observations of Pharaonic monuments, sculptures, and mummies. An early and ardent champion of archaeological conservation, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf condemns the vandalism wrought by tomb-robbers and notes with distaste that Egyptian grocers price their goods with labels written on recycled mummy-wrappings.
The book’s second half relates his horrific eyewitness account of the great famine that afflicted Egypt in the years 597–598/1200–1202. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a keen observer of humanity, and he offers vivid first-hand depictions of starvation, cannibalism, and a society in moral free-fall.
A Physician on the Nile contains great diversity in a small compass, distinguished by the acute, humane, and ever-curious mind of its author. It is rare to be able to hear the voice of such a man responding so directly to novelty, beauty, and tragedy.
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This book discusses hagiographic, historiographical, hymnological, and theological sources that contributed to the formation of the sacred picture of the physical as well as metaphysical Jerusalem in the literature of two Eastern Christian denominations, East and West Syrians.
Popa analyses the question of Syrian beliefs about the Holy City, their interaction with holy places, and how they travelled in the Holy Land. He also explores how they imagined and reflected the theology of this itinerary through literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, set alongside a well-defined local tradition that was at times at odds with Jerusalem. Even though the image of Jerusalem as a land of sacred spaces is unanimously accepted in the history of Christianity, there were also various competing positions and attitudes. This often promoted the attempt at mitigating and replacing Jerusalem’s sacred centrality to the Christian experience with local sacred heritage, which is also explored in this study. Popa argues that despite this rhetoric of artificial boundaries, the general picture epitomises a fluid and animated intersection of Syriac Christians with the Holy City especially in the medieval era and the subsequent period, through a standardised process of pilgrimage, well-integrated in the custom of advanced Christian life and monastic canon.
The Making of Syriac Jerusalem (Routledge, 2023) is suitable for students and scholars working on the history, literature, and theology of Syriac Christianity in the late antique and medieval periods.
Catalin-Stefan Popa is Research Professor in Church History at the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. He holds his Ph.D. from Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany (2016). In 2021 he received the venia legendi (habilitation) at Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria. He published articles, and edited volumes on Syriac and Oriental ecclesiastical history, exegesis, and literature, including the monograph Gīwargīs I. (660–680). Ostsyrische Christologie in frühislamischer Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016). He is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Syriac Annals of Romanian Academy (SARA).
New Books in Syriac Studies is presented by Kristian Heal.
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The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Dr. Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe.
The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Dr. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.”
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The people of early England (c. 450–1100 CE) enjoyed numerous kinds of entertainment, recreation and pleasure, but the scattered records of such things have made the larger picture challenging to assemble. Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Dr. Martha Bayless illuminates the merrier aspects of early English life, extending our understanding of the full range of early medieval English culture. It shows why entertainment and festivity were not merely trivial aspects of culture, but had important functions, in ritual, in community-building, in assuming power, and in resistance to power. Among the activities explored are child's play; drinking and feasting; music, dance, and performance; the pleasures of literature, festivals and celebrations; hunting and sport; and games.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Raja Aderdor, the host, delves deeper into this fascinating work with Jeremy Farrell, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Leiden University, who co-authored a translation of this novella. Jeremy shares his insights into the satire, the medical practices described, and how Ibn Buṭlān's critique resonates with today's debates on medicine and misinformation.
The Doctors' Dinner Party: A Satirical Novella by Ibn Buṭlān (NYU Press, 2023) is an eleventh-century work that presents a sharp critique of the medical profession. Set in a medical milieu, the story follows a young doctor invited to dinner with a group of older, supposedly more experienced physicians. As the conversation unfolds, their incompetence becomes obvious, and Ibn Buṭlān uses humor to expose the hypocrisy and pretensions of these quack doctors.
Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the novella not only satirizes the medical profession but also showcases the author’s deep technical knowledge of medicine, including practices like surgery, bloodletting, and medicines. He weaves in references to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, such as Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates, adding layers of depth to the text.
The novella is structured with a question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, while also incorporating verse and subtexts that hint at the older physicians' infatuation with their young guest. This balance of literary parody and social critique makes The Doctors' Dinner Party a rich and entertaining read.
A bilingual Arabic-English edition, The Doctors' Dinner Party remains a significant work that continues to offer both humor and sharp critique, making it relevant to modern readers in discussions around medicine, ethics, and social norms.
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Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium.
The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.
Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.
Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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In this episode Saeed Khan and Hizer Mir take a trip to Muslim Sicily, via a new book edited by Nuha Alshaar. They are also joined for this conversation by Shainool Jiwa, one of the authors whose work is featured in this edited volume. They discuss the period from around 800 CE to the mid-13th century, one characterised by a large Muslim presence which still exerts an important, though sometimes forgotten, influence on the present. This episode is one of our Forgotten Ummah episodes, where we discuss Muslimness in places not traditionally thought of as ‘Muslim’.
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This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue and rehousing of Christian slaves who, like Balthild herself, had been caught up in the human-trafficking practices of the mid-seventh century.
Implicated in the violent politics of the era, Balthild spent the remainder of her life in the convent of Chelles where a unique cache of surviving relics and personal items, including her hair, were protected and dispersed as relics over the following centuries. In the nineteenth century, Balthild's anti-slave trade policies were recalled for new audiences when she was adopted as an icon for the cause of the abolition of the slave trade and installed as one of the twenty illustrious women whose statues are situated in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
Although critical to her age, because of the remote time period and the specialized nature of the sources, Balthild is little known today. Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint (Oxford UP, 2024) will correct this oversight by shining a light on a fascinating and courageous figure whose legacy long outlived the era to which she belonged.
New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review
Isabel Moreira is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah
Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston
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Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern medium, there has hitherto been little scholarship devoted to them.
The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) explores the distinct nature of medievalism in digital games across a range of themes, from the portrayal of grotesque yet romantic conflict to conflicting depictions of the Church and religion. It likewise considers the distinctions between medievalist games and those of other periods, underlining their emphasis on fantasy, roleplay and hardcore elements, and their consequences for depictions of morality, race, gender and sexuality. Ultimately the book argues that while medievalist games are thoroughly influenced by medievalist and ludic tropes, they are nonetheless representative of a distinct new form of medievalism. It engages with the vast literature surrounding historical game studies, game design, and medievalism, and considers hundreds of games from across genres, from Assassin's Creed and Baldur's Gate to Crusader Kings and The Witcher series. In doing so, it provides a vital illustration of the state of the field and a cornerstone for future research and teaching.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.
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Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source–based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen’s chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the era and were sophisticated players who earned significant rewards. They had both family and personal interests to advance – through employment they linked kin and court, and through marriage they built bridges between families. Whether royal or aristocratic, ladies-in-waiting worked within gendered spaces, building female-dominated social networks, while also operating within a masculine milieu that offered courtiers of both sexes access to power. Working from a range of sources wider than the subjective anecdote, Dunn presents the first scholarly treatment of medieval English ladies-in-waiting.
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Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future.
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White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations.
The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Medieval women ruled over kingdoms, abbeys, and households; produced stunning works of art and craft; and did the hard work that kept ordinary families fed and clothed. Though women’s contributions were often diminished or completely ignored in written accounts, art tells a different story: women appear everywhere, from the margins of illuminated manuscripts to grand tapestries. In Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens (Abbeville Press, 2024), historian Gemma Hollman uses the visual as well as the written record to uncover the real lives of medieval European women.
Hollman traces the lives of women across society, dedicating chapters to nuns like Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, mystic, and polymath; courtiers like Christine de Pisan, author of pioneering works on women’s role in society; warriors like Joan of Arc; and the everyday women whose names are lost to history. Illustrated with nearly 200 varied and fascinating works of medieval art, Women in the Middle Ages offers a new perspective on the lives and contributions of medieval women and how they were portrayed. This book is a treasure for anyone interested in the Middle Ages or women’s history.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer’s life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came to be known not only as the father of English poetry but also as England’s “merry bard.”
Mary Flannery is the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, her publications include Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While generations of students know that Beowulf represents a confluence of Christianity and paganism, this version—informed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of language as the repository of myth—opens the hood to track the poem’s inner religious workings. It brings to light the essential Old English vocabulary, incorporating into the translation the divine titles used for God, specific names for evil and nonhuman creatures, and the precise language employed for providence and fate, along with terminology for kinship and heroism. Such features are not found in any other modern English translation, including Tolkien’s, whose text was never intended for publication. The Word-Hoard Beowulf draws upon Tolkien’s ideas and commentaries, however, to render a poem whose metaphysical vision takes front and center, delivering a richly restorative version of this early medieval masterpiece. The text is preceded by an introduction detailing the poem’s religious motivations and cultural context, and is accompanied by an expansive commentary. In short, this version allows readers to perceive precisely how in Beowulf (as Tolkien puts it) “the new Scripture and the old tradition touched and ignited” to produce the earliest English epic.
Peter Ramey is Associate Professor of English at Northern State University, where he teaches courses on medieval English literature, Latin, and linguistics. He has published articles on Beowulf and on Old and Middle English in Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and other scholarly journals, while also writing for a broader audience in his essays in Public Discourse and Front Porch Republic.
Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.
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From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages?
Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art.
The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History (Yale UP, 2024) brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.
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