About the Book
This collection of essays studies the movement of texts in the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period from historical and philological perspectives. Rejecting the presumption that texts simply travel without changing, the contributors examine closely the nature of these writings, which are concerned with such topics as science and medicine, and how they changed over the course of their journeys.
Transit and transformation give texts new subtexts and contexts, providing windows through which to study how memory, encryption, oral communication, cultural and religious values, and knowledge traveled and were shared, transformed, and preserved. This volume broadens how we think about texts, communication, and knowledge in the medieval world.
Aside from the editors, the contributors are Mushegh Asatryan, Brian N. Becker, Leonardo Capezzone, Leigh Chipman, Ofer Elior, Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, B. Harun Küçük, Israel M. Sandman, and Tamás Visi.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison, “Introduction”
Robert Morrison, “The Role of Oral Transmission for Astronomy among Romaniot Jews”
Ofer Elior, “Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh on Ezekiel's ‘I Heard’: A Case Study in Byzantine Jews' Appropriation of Provencal-Jewish Philosophy and Science”
Tzvi Langermann, “Gradations of Light and Pairs of Opposites: Two Theories and their Role in Abraham Bar Hiyya's Scroll of the Revealer”
Leigh Chipman, “Cryptography in the Late Medieval Middle East: From Mosul to Venice?”
Leonardo Capezzone, “On Memory: From the Humanism of pseudo-Ibn Al-Muqaffa’ to the Science of pseudo-Jabir Ibn Hayyan”
Brian Becker, “Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Epistolae V commentatoriae de perditione Acconis, 1291 as Evidence of Multi-Faceted Textual Movement in the Eastern Mediterranean”
Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, “Narratives of the ‘Second Fall’ in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Sources”
Mushegh Asatryan, “Shi‘i Underground Literature between Iraq and Syria:
‘The Book of Shadows’ and the History of Early Ghulat”
Tamás Visi, “Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts: Transmission of Scientific Knowledge from Byzantium to Ashkenaz?”
Israel M. Sandman, “The Transmission of Sephardic Scientific Works in Italy”
Harun Küçük, “Medical Translations and the “Hikmet-i Tabiyye” Problematic in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul”
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Y. Tzvi Langermann is Professor of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University.
Robert G. Morrison is Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College.
Review :
“Texts in Transit is a pathbreaking collection of original studies, mostly in the history of science and medicine, that trace the transmission of written and oral texts around the Eastern Mediterranean basin in the Middle Ages. Each essay considers how the texts were shared, altered, and preserved as they moved between cultural milieus. Theoretically sophisticated, the studies represent cutting-edge research and offer original interpretations of the journeys taken by these texts.”
—Charles H. Manekin, editor of Medieval Jewish Philosophical Writings
“How did knowledge travel from one culture to another in the Middle Ages? Scholars increasingly appreciate that in parallel to the main vectors—texts, notably translations, transmitted in manuscripts—there were other, more elusive modes of transmission. This volume aims to draw attention to the phenomenon and identify some of these modes. The eleven studies by scholars from various specialties and countries shed new light on an important but underestimated cultural phenomenon.”
—Gad Freudenthal, author of Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions
“Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison are to be congratulated for bringing together this wide-ranging collection of essays relating to philosophical, religious, and scientific exchange in the Jewish-Musllim-Christian Mediterranean of the Middle Ages. The papers are rigorous and technical but the conclusions are far-reaching, and the volume will be of use to scholars in a variety of fields.”
—Brian A. Catlos, author of Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad
“While I would most readily recommend this title to those with a particular interest in the study of the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, the studies contained within, through a close and rigorous analysis of understudied texts, offer provocative lessons about the possibilities for the transit of medieval text, knowledge and culture, and should stimulate the thinking of any medievalist, cultural historian, or philologist.”
—Peter Phillip Jones Comitatus
