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Baca-Winters, Keenan. "From Rome to Iran| Identity and Xusro II." Thesis, University of California, Irvine, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3717048.
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<p> The Roman-Sasanian War of the seventh century CE was the last conflict of late antiquity. <i>Šahanšah</i> Xusrō II nearly conquered the Roman Empire. James Howard-Johnston has studied the war extensively. Walter Kaegi has produced a biography of Xusrō II's opponent, Heraclius, while Geoffrey Greatrex and Touraj Daryaee have written articles focusing on Xusrō II. Scholars, however, have not attempted a major study of him. This dissertation seeks not only to understand how different authors depicted Xusrō II but to understand the man's personality. </p><p> Roman authors who witnessed the war sought to highlight only the negative aspects of Xusrō II. He was, according to the Romans, an enemy of God. Fear of Xusrō II was the basis for these depictions. Pseudo-Sebēos, an Armenian historian, depicted Xusrō II as an arrogant, blasphemous ruler. Pseudo-Sebēos, however, did not write anything positive about the Romans, either, because both the Romans and Sasanians wanted to control Armenia. </p><p> Christians living under Xusrō II's rulership also seemed to despise him. They portray Xusrō II as wicked because, in an attempt to punish them, he did not let allow them to elect a ruler. A careful reading of these sources, however, suggests these authors were aware of how Xusrō II took care of Christians in his realm. Finally, Arab and Persian sources differ in their portrayals of Xusrō II because both groups, although both Muslim, were competing for legitimacy in the post-Islamic conquest of Iran, due to ethnic tensions. Arab authors emphasized Xusrō II's faults. Persian authors, on the other hand, presented his good qualities. </p><p> Ultimately, all of these different depictions of Xusrō II demonstrate that he possessed a fierce will and embraced a vision of how to rule. Xusrō II wanted to conquer the Romans and extend his domain and be remembered forever. Xusrō II's drive might have made him seem arrogant to the authors studied in this dissertation, and they depicted him accordingly. We should not, however, lose sight of the man he truly was: a man who dared to dream.</p>
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Kettle, Louise. "Learning from history in British overseas security : case studies from intervention in the Middle East." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2015. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30575/.
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Recent problematic military interventions, as part of the Global War on Terror, have led to widespread criticism that British policy-makers have failed to learn lessons from history. At the same time as the accusations of not learning, the British government has repeatedly claimed that lessons have been learned, particularly from the disastrous war in Iraq. This thesis investigates these contradicting claims by analysing learning from the past in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and the Intelligence Community across four case studies of British military intervention in the Middle East; 1958 in Jordan, 1961 in Kuwait, the 1990-1991 Gulf War and 2003-2009 Iraq War. It provides a fresh analysis of these highly significant events, using previously undisclosed documents, offers an assessment of learning processes and concludes by recommending practical suggestions for the improvement of learning from history in the future.
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Milwright, Marcus. "Trade and patronage in Middle Islamic Jordan : the ceramics from Karak castle." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.285037.
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Anderson, Charles W. "From Petition to Confrontation| The Palestinian National Movement and the Rise of Mass Politics, 1929-1939." Thesis, New York University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3602635.
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<p> This dissertation provides a history from below of Palestinian national movement and Arab society during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. It argues that the influence and authority of the small group of factionalized and disunited notable politicians that are conventionally understood to have monopolized the leadership of the national struggle during the era of British Mandatory rule has been greatly overstated. This is especially so for the restive and rebellious middle period of the Mandate (1929-1939), during which the movement turned from a conciliatory and quietist strategy of gentlemanly diplomacy preferred by elite politicians to confrontation, mass mobilization and armed struggle, culminating in "the Great Revolt" (1936-1939), a prolonged anti-colonial rebellion against both British rule and the Zionist project it sponsored. By examining the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of "youth" and peasants, the dissertation explicates the eclipse of elite preeminence within the national movement and the rise of the new, horizontally-organized social forces that reshaped and radicalized Palestinian politics in the 1930s. </p><p> The dissertation first explores the proliferation of youth associations in the early 1930s and illuminates how the rise of youth as an assertive, ambitious, and politically frustrated element had profound ramifications for the tactics, strategy, and trajectory of the national movement. The narrative then turns to track the decomposition of the Arab rural order from the late Ottoman era to 1936, paying particular attention to the crisis of the countryside under the British, who fecklessly intensified pre-existing tendencies towards peasant destitution, bankruptcy, and dispossession, thereby helping to create a disaffected class of uprooted ex-peasants. The final section analyzes the Great Revolt, focusing on the critical roles of youth, peasants, and workers in initiating and propelling it and on the popular and revolutionary institutions that organized and sustained it against great odds for over three years. This section also interrogates British counterinsurgency, highlighting the role of specific forms of colonial violence, especially collective punishments, in ending the rebellion, and with it the ascent of popular forces within the national movement.</p>
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Ahmed, Hussam Eldin. "From Nahda to exile: a story of the Shawam in Egypt in the early twentieth century." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=104839.
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After important intellectual contributions to the Arab Nahda, the Syro-Lebanese of Egypt (the Shawam) underwent a far-reaching process of French acculturation. This process culminated in their cultural alienation from mainstream Egyptian society, and became a major reason for their departure from Nasserite Egypt in the sixties. Unlike previous narratives dealing with the history of the Shawam in Egypt, which underscored static identitarian choices as the driving force behind their cultural alienation, my thesis situates their adoption of French language and culture in the wider context of the Egyptian francophonie. This relatively unknown francophonie thrived in pre-revolutionary Egypt and was fully embraced by Egypt's urban cosmopolitan society. Despite the British occupation, French was the language of culture, finance, the press, justice and administration until the regime change. Using a more context-based approach, this thesis explores details of daily practices and experiences to discern the conditions in which the Shawam made their choices. I turn to their educational policies and appropriation of Egypt's prestigious French schools to assess the role played by these schools in their deep French acculturation. I also examine the vibrant francophone literary circles and salons, which flourished in Cairo during the interwar period, where they were particularly visible. Shawam intellectuals had not disappeared from Egyptian intellectual life, but had limited their activity to the much smaller, and much more powerful, francophone one. I contend that their cultural alienation was not the result of an innate separateness between Egyptians and them, but was contingent on historical factors, pertaining both to the community and its land of adoption.<br>Après leur collaboration précieuse au projet de la Nahda arabe, les Syro-Libanais d'Egypte (les chawâms) se sont tournés de plus en plus vers la langue et la culture françaises. Cette adoption démesurée de la langue française au détriment de la langue arabe a engendré leur éloignement culturel de la grande majorité de la société égyptienne. Elle devient même une raison principale de leur exode de l'Egypte dans les années 1960. Si la plupart des récits historiques ayant abordé le sujet des chawâms d'Egypte trouvent dans l'identité de ceux-ci (différents de par leur origine et leur religion) l'explication ultime de ce phénomène, je constate que cette hypothèse demande d'être nuancée. Je propose de mettre leur aliénation dans le plus grand cadre de la francophonie égyptienne, mal connue même aujourd'hui. Pendant un siècle et demi et malgré l'occupation britannique, le français demeurait la langue de la culture, les finances, la presse, la justice et l'administration, jusque' au changement de régime et la crise de Suez. Pour ce faire, j'étudie en grand détail les expériences et les pratiques de tous les jours pour mieux discerner les circonstances dans lesquelles les chawâms ont fait leurs choix culturels. J'examine leurs politiques de scolarisation et leur appropriation des écoles françaises prestigieuses ayant joué un rôle principal dans cette acculturation. De surcroit, ce mémoire analyse de très près les cercles et les salons littéraires francophones du Caire durant l'entre-deux-guerres, où les chawâms étaient actifs et pleinement visibles. Loin d'avoir disparu de la vie intellectuelle égyptienne, ils avaient approprié la scène francophone, plus restreinte mais très puissante. Je soutiens que plusieurs agents historiques, liés à la fois à l'Egypte et aux chawâms, ont contribué à cette aliénation culturelle.
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Davis, Nathaniel Alexander. "HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941." OpenSIUC, 2017. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1351.
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The project of American economic imperialism in China during the first half of the twentieth century was first and foremost an imagined enterprise. This dissertation examines the role of the Student Interpreters Corps (SIC) in this endeavor. Studying language-trained intermediaries, this treatment is a first step towards studying history with an approach that is neither top-down nor bottom-up but rather middle-outward. Examining hitherto neglected personnel records and State Department correspondence, this study reveals the SIC as part of an imagined but unsuccessful program of economic imperialism. Although effective in garnering American business interest and support for Foreign Service reform and expansion, efforts to entice American merchants and companies to enter Asian markets (particularly in China) failed to yield a coherent, successful trade empire. However, the largely unstated goal of increased American power was achieved as the result of a bureaucratic imperative for specialization, professionalization, and institutional expansion set in motion during the establishment of the SIC. Examining the evolving roles and views of SIC-trained intermediaries, this dissertation finds that while the imagined trade empire failed to materialize, the SIC contributed to a developing American perception of China that envisioned increasingly greater American intervention in East Asia. In this millieu, a “Peking” order emerged by the mid-1920s that became influential in American East Asia policy towards the eve of Word War II that saw China as vital to American interests. Established as precursor of American economic empire in China, the SIC was instrumental in shifting discourse away from economic empire towards an interventionist American Orientalism. Trade expansion rhetoric waned and Orientalist language solidified as Japanese aggression became more blatant and the ascendance of Communism in China ever more certain. Highlighting the bureaucratic intermediaries as new method of studying history, this study indicates that the project of American economic imperialism was largely imagined, but one that transformed to accommodate evolving visions of expanding American power in East Asia. These conclusions offer new challenges to and opportunities for scholars of American foreign relations.
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Maxson, Brian Jeffrey. "Book Review of Merchant Writers: Florentine memoirs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2681.
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Bays, Jonathan. "From fire-proof house to middle power : narrative, identity and Canadian foreign policy, 1939-1956." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.312625.
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Mitter, Sreemati. "A History of Money in Palestine: From the 1900s to the Present." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11308.
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Schriwer, Charlotte. ""From water every living thing" : water mills, irrigation and agriculture in the Bilād al-Shām : perspectives on history, architecture, landscape and society, 1100-1850 AD." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7080.
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This work explores the role of the watermill in the history and society of Jordan, Syria and Cyprus from the 12th to the 19th century. Previous studies in this area have been limited, and have usually assumed the watermills in the Levant to date from the Ottoman period. This work aims to suggest that many of the mills still extant today in fact date from an earlier period. A review of the historical documentation and archaeological material is the main background of this study, while an examination of the watermills themselves aims to provide a permanent record of these before they disappear due to rural and urban development. A review of available reference material regarding the role of the mill in Levantine economy and society from the medieval to late Ottoman periods emphasises the importance of the watermill in rural and urban areas of the Levant in a historical period of fluctuating economic stability. The reference material consists mainly of historical accounts by travellers and chroniclers, legal documents such as treaties, charters and waqf documents, as well as archaeological, environmental and socioeconomic studies of the Levant from the medieval to the early modem period. The broad nature of this study aims to form a basis for future research with a more detailed focus in these disciplines.
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Du, Toit Jaqueline Susann. "The organization and use of documentary deposits in the near east from ancient to medieval times : libraries, archives, book collections and genizas." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38480.
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A multidisciplinary approach is utilized to assess the organization and use of ancient and medieval Near Eastern textual deposits. An elaborate survey of the published material in ancient Near Eastern studies and library and archival studies indicates a general and pervasive insensitivity to and misuse of key terminological constructs. The indistinct portrayal of the nature of ancient libraries and archives is identified as of particular concern; as well as a widespread disregard for the recognition of textual collections older than the famed Library of Alexandria. This dissertation endeavours to indicate the presence of distinct textual collective units in the ancient Near Eastern context on equal footing with their much later counterparts and more broadly defined than the traditional library and archive, to include entities such as the geniza, building and foundation deposits, and so forth. Furthermore, the ancient temple library, as a restricted and well-regulated collective entity, is suggested as representative of literary standardization in the Near East, and the canonization process of the Hebrew Bible, in particular. Ancient archives are attested as equally prevalent textual units, clearly distinguishable from adjunct textual deposits, often loosely, but incorrectly, termed "archives" in modern scholarly discourse. In conclusion, this dissertation reconsiders the status of the two traditionally most valued ancient textual entities, the Library of Assurbanipal and the Library of Alexandria, and concludes that these entities are atypical examples of ancient textual collections. As closest claimants to the improbable and often religiously imbued ideal of universal collection of information, these libraries erroneously became the impossible standards by which all ancient collections were measured and found wanting. As alternate, the applicability of the theoretical constructs proposed in the earlier part of this dissertation, such as the introduction of an in
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Frotscher, Antje G. "The war of the words : a history of flyting from antiquity to the Later Middle Ages." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.401258.
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Steppenbacker, James. "The Palestine Communist Party from 1919-1939: A study of the subaltern centers of power in Mandate Palestine." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1253563737.
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Clark, Bill. "Students in Transition: Introducing English Language Learners from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to U.S. History." ScholarWorks @ UVM, 2018. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/881.
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This two-year action research project discusses the transitions that English Language Learners (ELLs) experience in moving from remedial second language learning to content-area courses. Two cohorts of twenty-seven ELL students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—fifteen students in 2015-16 and twelve in 2016-17— participated in a U.S. History course while attending the pseudonymous West Ackerly High School.
Absent a pedagogical bridge connecting ELL instruction with social studies practice, I created a curriculum that emphasized the democratic principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—concepts that general education students have known almost from birth—as an entry point for ELL students who lacked any knowledge about these documents. I followed this introduction with thematic choices about immigration, imperialism, Westward Expansion, the Civil War, Reconstruction, civil rights, and current events. We examined the social construct of race, and how it weaves through American society.
My combined roles of practitioner and researcher created a unique awareness of the principles of second language instruction, especially best practices and co-teaching strategies that merged language learning and content instruction. I then evaluated students’ critical thinking and teachers’ methods of working with ELL students, experienced the value associated with co-teaching, and developed practical techniques to bring content knowledge into the ELL curriculum as a way to aid students in their transitions.
In two journal articles (Chapters Three and Four), I combine “scholarship and story,” reminiscent of Ladson-Billings’ The Dreamkeepers (2009), in a personal scholarly narrative about co-teaching U.S. History. Both Ladson-Billings’ narrative and the stories about the West Ackerly immigrant students describe the struggle that children of color experience. My reflections about co-teaching revealed innovative ideas that emerged from our practice, helped us better understand the backgrounds of our students, explored best practices for ELL instruction, and showed how an adapted mainstream U.S. History curriculum could work for second language learners.
The second article describes Socratic Seminar techniques that contribute to students’ learning and discourse development, with scaffolded instruction that incorporates the application of Common Core principles based on the work of Zwiers, O’Hara, and Pritchard (2014). I describe a thematic approach to U.S. History instruction that avoids “covering” all the material while highlighting what students need to know in order to function in American society.
Hopefully, this work will bring greater awareness of the struggles experienced by ELL students in their academic and cultural transitions. In the end, I hope secondary teachers and administrators will understand that ELL students require extensive skill development around reading, writing, and research in order to transition into—and then successfully navigate—content-area classes.
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Kohlstedt, Matthew August. "From artifacts to people facts| archaeologists, world war ii, and the origins of middle east area studies." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3673917.
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<p>This dissertation traces the complex factors that influenced the World War II-era transition of some archaeologists and physical anthropologists who studied the ancient Middle East into roles that impacted U.S. policy towards the Middle East. The first chapter focuses on the archaeological expeditions and disciplinary practices that first exposed these social scientists to the inhabitants of the region that came to be known as the Middle East. Their experiences during the 1920s and 1930s influenced the opinions they formed and would later put to political use. The second chapter traces the various roles they took on in service of the U.S. government during the Second World War. Although many academics performed a variety of duties during the war, they were all united by a common belief: that academic knowledge of foreign peoples was going to be necessary in the postwar world. The third chapter analyzes two attempts, at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, to institutionalize the teaching of knowledge about the modern Middle East. Both efforts failed to fully implement the visions of their founding scholars, who each attempted to modulate the impact of some of the negative practices they had witnessed during their wartime government work. The fourth chapter argues that one archaeologist who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War exemplifies the cozy manner in which scholars and the U.S. government collaborated during the postwar period. That chapter analyzes the modifications the scholar made to his published work on Iran, changes that were made in light of his government activities there.
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Altinoz, Vuslat Devrim. "The Ottoman Women's Movement: Women's Press, Journals, Magazines and Newspapers from 1875 to 1923." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2003. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?miami1060799831.
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Oppel, Catherine Nesbitt 1971. "A theology of tears : from Augustine to the early thirteenth century." Monash University, School of Historical Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/7823.
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Buchberger, Erica. "From Romans to Goths and Franks : ethnic identities in sixth- and seventh-century Spain and Gaul." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1c70a75a-9556-4642-93ea-220b877155c6.
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Within a few centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the descendants of Romans who had envisioned the world in terms of moral, civilized Romans and the savage barbarian ‘other’ had come to identify with those very barbarians. This thesis explores this shift from ‘Roman’ to ‘Gothic’ and ‘Frankish’ identities in sixth- and seventh-century Spain and Gaul through an examination of the ways ethnonyms were used in contemporary sources. Within the first section on Visigothic Spain, chapter one discusses the ‘Romans’ of the East—that is, the Byzantines—as portrayed by Isidore of Seville and John of Biclar. Chapter two covers ‘Romans’ of the West—the Hispano-Romans—who appear in John of Biclar’s Chronicle, a hagiographical Life, and civil and canon law. Chapter three discusses the use of ‘Goth’ as an ethnic descriptor, a religious identifier, and a political term. Chapter four begins the Gaul section with an examination of Gregory of Tours’ writings, showing that he wrote with a Roman mindset. Chapter five illustrates that Gregory’s contemporary, Venantius Fortunatus, selected ethnic labels like ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’ in his poems as rhetorical tools to allude and flatter. Chapter six shows how Fredegar, in the seventh century, employed ‘Frank’ as a political term more than his predecessors had, suggesting a change in mindset. Chapter seven confirms this change in hagiographical texts across the two centuries. Chapter eight examines the contemporary expectation that separate law codes should be written for each ethnic group and concludes that, while this encouraged ethnic diversity, it did not prevent individuals from identifying with the Franks politically. By distinguishing among different modes of identification these ethnonyms represented, we see that changes in political language facilitated changes in more traditionally ethnic language, and the shift from ‘Roman’ to other ethnic identities.
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Averbuch, Bryan Douglas. "From Siraf to Sumatra: Seafaring and Spices in the Islamicate Indo-Pacific, Ninth-Eleventh Centuries C.E." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10805.
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This dissertation is a study of early Islamicate commerce in natural luxuries of the tropical Indian Ocean and Western Pacific Rim, such as spices, ambergris and pearls, between the ninth and eleventh centuries C.E. I approach this topic by looking at a wide array of textual sources, from geographies, anecdotes, travel narratives, inscriptions, and the records of embassies, to materia medica and the oldest surviving Islamicate cookbook. I analyze these sources alongside material culture, archeological evidence from ports in Iran, Oman, and Southeast Asia, and newly-discovered shipwrecks from the Java Sea. Adapting the work of environmental scientists to the thesis, I locate this early Islamicate commerce within a bio-geographical space, the tropical "Indo-Pacific." I argue that desires for the tropical luxuries of the environmentally-distinct Indo-Pacific helped to define the cosmopolitan culture of early Islamicate societies, from Iran and Iraq to Egypt and Spain. These desires promoted an expanding Islamicate maritime commerce across the Indo-Pacific, which led to the flourishing of port-cities in southern Iran and Oman. This maritime trade expanded Islamicate geographical horizons, as reflected in the evolving "wonders" and geographical literature of the era. It also led to early contacts between the Islamic world and the peoples of the tropical Pacific Rim, a phenomenon that contributed, in time, to the formation of Islamicate societies in maritime Southeast Asia.<br>Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Rezk, Dina. "Anglo-American political and intelligence assessments of Egypt and the Middle East from 1957-1977." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608033.
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Hoornstra, Mike. "They were not silent the history of how monastic leaders spread Christ from the Middle Ages through the Counter-reformation /." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN) Access this title online, 2005. http://www.tren.com.
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Weisz, Talia M. "Voices from Israel/Palestine: A Documentary Video Exhibition." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1274903253.
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Davoudi, Leonardo. "Persian petroleum and the British Empire : from the D'Arcy concession to the First World War." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:07db3f79-9ab3-482c-8265-7074fff20c9a.
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This thesis has used public and private archives, as well as newly discovered private papers, to provide new interpretations and new analytical insights regarding the early history of a British investment in Persia. This has given rise to broad questions regarding the interaction of economic and political power within the British empire and the interaction of foreign economic forces with domestic political forces in Persia. Within those overarching themes, the role of intermediation, the Anglo-Russian rivalry over Persia, British naval developments, differing legal cultures and Persian political developments have been examined in detail. Investigating the extent of official British intervention in the venture's affairs and the effects of the Persian Constitutional Revolution, in particular, have advanced the current understanding of the company's early history. In-depth archival research has thus allowed this thesis to demonstrate the shortcomings of the existing literature and provide the most complete account of the Persian oil venture's early developments to date.
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Curk, Joshua M. "From Jew to Gentile : Jewish converts and conversion to Christianity in medieval England, 1066-1290." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:996a375b-43ac-42fc-a9f5-0edfa519d249.
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The subject of this thesis is Jewish conversion to Christianity in medieval England. The majority of the material covered dates between 1066 and c.1290. The overall argument of the thesis contends that converts to Christianity in England remained essentially Jews. Following a discussion of the relevant secondary literature, which examines the existing discussion of converts and conversion, the principal arguments contained in the chapters of the thesis include the assertion that the increasing restrictiveness of the laws and rules regulating the Jewish community in England created a push factor towards conversion, and that converts to Christianity inhabited a legal grey area, neither under the jurisdiction of the Exchequer of the Jews, nor completely outside of it. Numerous questions are asked (and answered) about the variety of convert experience, in order to argue that there was a distinction between leaving Judaism and joining Christianity. Two convert biographies are presented. The first shows how the liminality that was a part of the conversion process affected the post-conversion life of a convert, and the second shows how a convert might successfully integrate into Christian society. The analysis of converts and conversion focusses on answering a number of questions. These relate to, among other things, pre-conversion relationships with royal family members, the reaction to corrody requests for converts, motives for conversion, forced or coerced conversions, the idea that a convert could be neither Christian nor Jew, converts re-joining Judaism, converts who carried the names of royal functionaries, the domus conversorum, convert instruction, and converting minors. The appendix to the thesis contains a complete catalogue of Jewish converts in medieval England. Among other things noted therein are inter-convert relationships, and extant source material. Each convert also has a biography.
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Meek, Philippa Juliet. "Growth, and Development of Care for Leprosy Sufferers Provided by Religious Institutions from the First Century AD to the Middle Ages." Scholar Commons, 2016. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6321.
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This thesis aims to outline the causes, symptoms, and treatments related to leprosy, and how it can be diagnosed in patients and identified in human remains. The thesis also aims to demonstrate the ways in which care for leprosy sufferers developed as the disease became more prevalent and more commonly, and correctly identified. It analyses the social stigmas inflicted upon sufferers, and the medical care and attention provided for them by religious institutions when other groups or organisations shunned those suffering from leprosy. The rationale for this study is to identify trends surrounding the social stigmas attached to leprosy and care from the first identifiable case of strain three of Mycobacterium leprae in the 1st century AD to the late Middle Ages when the number of cases of leprosy appears to begin to decline.
Using archaeological evidence, historical records, and the published research of experts in the field, this thesis demonstrates that as leprosy spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, religious organisations often took on the role as care givers for leprosy sufferers through the ideal of religious, often Christian, charity; to look after the poor, sick, and needy. As the trends presented in this study have yet to be published elsewhere in this way, this thesis aims to contribute via an interdisciplinary approach to the fields of religious archaeology, anthropology and bioarchaeology.
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Crumplin, Sally. "Rewriting history in the cult of St Cuthbert from the ninth to the twelfth centuries." Thesis, St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/406.
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Livermore, Christian. "Revenants from the Church to literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7914.
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Factual accounts of revenants – the risen dead – seized the medieval imagination in the early eleventh century, and were recorded by serious historians and ecclesiastics as true. They then began to appear in secular imaginative literature and art, growing progressively more elaborate and frightening throughout the Middle Ages whilst retaining many of the religious overtones expressed overtly in the ecclesiastic tales. By the early modern and modern period, the tales were removed from any overt religious context and were told as purely imaginative literature. The academic half of this thesis explores the influence on the tales of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cult of the body of Christ and of the saints, then traces the migration of those tales into imaginative literature from the Middle Ages to the present. It identifies key motifs from the medieval chronicles and imaginative literature that continue to appear in modern stories, and explores the extent to which Christian eschatology altered perceptions of the dead and why, in an increasingly secular context, fascination with such tales continued into modern literature, what part fear of death played throughout this period, and how that fear was expressed, first in an ecclesiastical context, then in imaginative literature through horror stories. The creative half of my thesis is a literary fiction novel updating a medieval revenant tale, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, to twenty-first century New England.
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Kamani, Solinda. "Neglected architectural decoration from the late antique Mediterranean city : public porticoes, small baths, shops/workshops, and 'middle class' houses." Thesis, University of Kent, 2014. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47906/.
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This thesis examines the neglected architectural decoration from the late antique Mediterranean city (ca. 300-650 A.D.). It aims to address the omission in scholarly literature of any discussion about the decoration of non-monumental secular buildings, namely porticoes flanking streets, agorai, macella and ornamental plazas, small public baths, shops/workshops and ‘middle class’ houses. The decoration of non-monumental secular buildings has been overlooked at the expense of more lofty buildings and remains thus far one of the least known aspects of the late antique city. Considering that public porticoes and their associated structures (shops and workshops), along with small public baths and ‘middle class’ houses were crucial elements and accounted for the large part of any urban built environment starting from the Hellenistic period, the examination of their architectural decoration in this thesis represents the first attempt to redress this imbalance. Drawing upon an array of archaeological evidence, written sources, and depictions this thesis attempts to reconstruct how public porticoes, small public baths, shops/workshops, and ‘middle class’ houses might have looked on a daily basis. The geographical area entailed in this study presents more challenges than when focusing on a single site or province. Such a cross-regional approach of the topic allows to consider the decoration of public these structures as both as part of the history of individual cities and as part of Mediterranean-wide trends, guiding as such toward a more reliable visualisation of the late antique built environment. The picture conveyed in the Mediterranean cities is inevitably not the same. It is argued that as much as they shared similarities on the decoration of these structures, so did they also vary. The topic of this thesis is broad and definite answers cannot be given, nevertheless, it is hoped that a preliminary synthesis can be offered as a basis for future work.
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Brookman, Helen Elizabeth. "From the margins : scholarly women and the translation and editing of medieval English literature in the nineteenth century." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609521.
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Blyth, Robert J. "The empire of the Raj : conflict and co-operation with Britain over the shape and function of the Indian sphere in Eastern Africa and Middle East from the 1850s to the 1930s." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.387801.
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The western sphere of the Raj consisted of a region of Indian interest, influence and formal involvement from the Indo-Persian border to the East African coast. From the 1850s onwards, India's position was challenged by the increasing intrusion of metropolitan concerns. Despite occasional efforts by India to develop the scope of her activities, the relative importance of Imperial factors at various stations of Indian responsibility grew until, after often protracted diplomatic, bureaucratic, and fiscal negotiations, full control was assumed by Whitehall. During the nineteenth century, this process was gradual. Although Zanzibar and Somaliland had been transferred to the Foreign Office, much of the Indian sphere was still intact in 1914. Indeed, the Great War allowed India to contemplate the expansion of the sphere into Mesopotamia and East Africa. But, more generally, the conflict acted as a powerful catalyst to the advancing metropole and by 1917 no corner of the sphere was exclusively Indian in outlook. In addition, India's international status became more anomalous as a result of her membership of the Imperial Conference and the League of Nations. And, furthermore, constitutional reforms within India brought new internal considerations as Indians became involved in the process of government. After the war, the demands for greater Imperial control continued and London had, by the mid-1930s, determined to take over all the external commitments of the Raj around the western Indian Ocean. Each challenge to the external sphere of India presented by the growth of Imperial interests forced the Indian authorities to reassess their particular function with regard to the station or region in question. The crises faced by the Raj helped both to define the function of the Indian connection and to delineate the shape of the sphere throughout the period under examination. India's role in the sphere was determined, therefore, through her reaction to Imperial, international, and internal pressures.
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Grover, Caroline. "Reflections on state nationalism in Chinese historical pedagogy : accounts of the Second Opium War in Chinese middle-school history textbooks from 1912 and 2007." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14839.
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Scholars tend to assume the link between Chinese education and nationalism, without looking at the specific ways in which the connection is made. An assessment of the way in which the Second Opium War (1856-1860) is depicted in two Chinese middle-school history textbooks, one from 1912 and the other from 2007, illustrates how the historic event may be used to conjure nationalist responses to an event that brought China into a new world order of sovereign nation-states. Based on the research presented in this paper, it can be shown that since the founding of a public education system in 1902, the Chinese government — whether late imperial, nationalist, or communist — has used history textbooks to express a specifically “national” history that brings the Chinese together behind a strong state that portrays itself as the guardian of a nation’s sovereignty and cultural identity. This paper first assesses the importance of state legitimacy and the role of promoting a specific national narrative that supports the state’s authority in the creation of state-endorsed nationalism, then considers the role of the state in the establishment of a national education system and the production of history textbooks, and finishes with a comparison of passages about the Second Opium War in a textbook from 1912 and one from 2007. Whereas the 1912 passage reinforces the new Republic of China’s claim to legitimacy by focusing on the imperial government’s ineptitude at handling foreign incursion during the Second Opium War, completely overlooking the role of Western interests and aggression in China, the 2007 passage condenses the whole war to the looting and burning of the Yuanming Yuan in order to create a shared memory of humiliation that reminds students of the Chinese Communist Party’s historic victory over imperialism and that may impel Chinese youth to redress the problem of China’s inequality on the world stage. An analysis of the passages about the Second Opium War in these two textbooks demonstrates in a concrete way the role of teaching the country’s “imagined” past in inculcating a contemporary national identity that can then be used to legitimize those in power.
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Shabangu, Mohammad. "In search of the comprador: self-exoticisation in selected texts from the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1017770.
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This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.
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Montagno-Leahy, Lisa. "Private tomb reliefs of the late period from Lower Egypt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3b3699de-8498-4021-bf5f-b35fcf1cf33c.
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This study considers the relief decoration of private tombs in Lower Egypt in the period 664-332 BC. The basis for analysis is a chronologically arranged descriptive catalogue, which includes both isolated blocks in museum collections and tombs whose location is known. The present condition of the relief and its content are described in detail there. Texts are considered where they provide infotmation on provenance and dating, and hand-copies are provided. Each piece is illustrated in the plate volume. Enough of the material can be dated by textual evidence to provide a solid framework for stylistic ordering of the remainder. The resulting chronology has important implications, dividing the period into two major phases, covering the seventh and sixth centuries, and the fourth century, separated by a hiatus in production of tomb reliefs. The chronology proposed eliminates the possibility that either Greeks or Persians exercised any significant influence on Egyptian art before the very end of the period. Instead, native tradition emerges as the primary inspiration for Late Period artists. Two sources stand out. The first is the Old-Middle Kingdom tomb repertory (archaism), the second is the New Kingdom tradition carried on in the minor arts, a source largely-ignored hitherto. These were not slavishly copied, but adapted and "modernized" to suit the taste of the time. The independence and creativity of Late Period artists is emphasized. A discussion of stylistic development in light of the dating system is given, and several themes are analyzed in detail as illustrations of the larger issues raised.
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Klein, Konstantin Matthias. "Building the city of God : imperial patronage and local influence in Jerusalem from Throdosius I to Justinian (379-565 AD)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d7c9c052-9975-4cd6-939f-af3028894751.
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This thesis offers a fresh study of the sources on the history of the city of Jerusalem in the period between the reigns of the Roman emperors Theodosius the Great and Justinian I. In the Holy Land, this period roughly coincides with the arrival of St Jerome in 385 and the completion of Jerusalem's last major church building before the Persian and Muslim conquests, the Nea church, dedicated in 543. One of the main aims of this thesis is to investigate the role of imperial patronage in the city and contrast it with the growing influence of local actors, i.e. bishops, monks, and rich pilgrims who settled there. My reading of the sources makes clear that Jerusalem and the imperial court were more closely connected than previously assumed. This manifested itself not only in imperial building projects, but also in the exchange of theological concepts and ideas. One of my key findings about this traffic is that the cult of saints was introduced to Jerusalem from Constantinople, while, in contrast, the veneration of the Virgin Mary originated in the holy city and reached the capital from there. The thesis offers a new interpretation of patriarchal politics in the times of the Christological controversies following the Council of Chalcedon (451) and of the political self-perception of Jerusalem from the beginning of the sixth century onwards, when the city with its loca sancta entered into a new form of relationship with the emperor Justinian, who bestowed his favour on Jerusalem in the form of imperial donations in return for the support of his ecclesiastical policies by the clergy and monks of Jerusalem.
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Aljared, Rawya. "Fueling Petroculture: Contemporary Art from the Arabian Gulf." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1523025656392709.
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Whang, Mikyoung. "Nelly Don’s 1916 pink gingham apron frock: an illustration of the middle-class American housewife’s shifting role from producer to consumer." Diss., Kansas State University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/8621.
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Doctor of Philosophy<br>Department of Apparel, Textiles, and Interior Design<br>Sherry Haar<br>Nell Donnelly created a stylish, practical, affordable pink gingham apron frock in 1916, selling out her first order of 216 dresses the first morning at $1 apiece at Peck’s Dry Goods Company in Kansas City. This study investigates the forces behind the success of her dress, and finds that during the early 20th century, woman’s role became modernized, shifting from that of producer to consumer, and that clothing—in particular, the housedress—was a visible reflection of this shift. Specific attributes contributed to the success of the apron frock in design and social perspective. First, her housedress incorporated current design elements including kimono sleeves, empire waistline, waist yoke, asymmetrical front closure, and ruffle trimmings sensibly. Socially, mass advertising and mass media articles promoted fashion consciousness in women to look as pretty as those in the ad or article. As a result, integrating trendy design elements into an affordable housedress along with the growing demand for a stylish, yet practical housedress guaranteed the success of Nelly Don’s pink gingham apron frock. As such, the availability and value of the apron frock provide a vivid illustration of woman’s shifting role: its popularity as an alternative to old-fashioned Mother Hubbard housedresses demonstrates both women’s new consumer awareness as well as their growing involvement in the public sphere.
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Kerr, Berenice M. "Religious life for women from the twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth century with special reference to the English foundations of the Order of Fontevraud." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d6a5d818-bc4a-4dad-91d4-36717aa7db37.
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The Order of Fontevraud, founded in 1100 by the hermit/preacher Robert of Arbrisssel was the only twelfth-century women's order incorporating into its structure a group of chaplains and lay brothers whose specific role was to serve the nuns. This thesis examines the origins of the order and demonstrates that the English foundations were a stage in its development, closely linked to its Angevin connections. Each of the two houses established in England c.l 150 was founded and patronised by supporters of Henry Plantagenet. Westwood, founded by the de Say family, lesser barons from Herefordshire, received a modest endowment. Nuneaton, founded by the magnate Robert, earl of Leicester, was richly endowed. Twenty years later Henry II expelled the Benedictine community from Amesbury replacing it with a group from Fontevraud, thus founding the third house. A fourth, Grovebury, is not treated; it was never a foundation for women. I have studied the process of endowment and shown that the wealth and status of the founder in no small measure determined the future prosperity of the foundation. The internal organisation of the Fontevraud houses has been explored, in particular the balance between local autonomy and dependence on the mother house. As well, I have examined recruitment and shown that this, too, reflected on the circumstances of foundation. My main focus has been on the economy of these three houses, their income and expenditure and the exploitation of their assets. The nuns are seen as a group of women who were dynamic and creative in managing their affairs. This has not precluded an investigation into the spiritual, and in particular, the liturgical dimension of life in the English foundations. Fundamentally the Order of Fontevraud is presented as an opportunity for noble women of England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to live religious life in a new order, one renowned for its strict interpretation of the Rule of St Benedict and for the prayerfumess of its members, and one in which women were manifestly in control of their own destinies.
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Slefinger, John T. "Refashioning Allegorical Imagery: From Langland to Spenser." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu150048449869678.
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Wright, Elizabeth. "The history of the European aurochs (Bos primigenius) from the Middle Pleistocene to its extinction : an archaeological investigation of its evolution, morphological variability and response to human exploitation." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2013. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6572/.
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The aurochs (Bos primigenius) was an important animal to humans, during prehistory when it was widely hunted, and in some areas also during historical periods. It is generally agreed to be the wild ancestor of domestic cattle (Bos taurus) and therefore an in-depth knowledge of this animal is key to research exploring human-cattle interactions, and the origins and spread of cattle domestication. Domestic cattle are smaller than their wild ancestors, but there is also a degree of overlap between the two species, which means that distinguishing them can be problematic. However, previous analyses of aurochs morphology have generally been patchy, and do not provide a picture of aurochs variation across Europe according to environment, climate and geography. We also do not have a good chronological overview for any specific area of Europe. As a consequence, zooarchaeologists often refer to comparative biometrical data from geographical areas and time periods which may not be suitable for identifying remains from their study area. This thesis provides the widest ranging review of aurochs material in Europe to date, bringing together aurochs bone and tooth biometrical information from a number of European geographical areas and time periods, in order to gain a better understanding of the morphological variation of this animal, and provide a data resource which can be used in future for more geographically and temporally relevant identifications. A number of patterns of body size and shape variation were identified including a south-north cline in body size during the Pleistocene and Early Holocene, and hints of a west-east cline during later periods. An increase in the body size of the aurochs during the Chalcolithic period in Iberia is particularly intriguing as it fits with similar patterns previously identified for other animals. A general slendering of certain postcranial bones over time has also been identified; this begins during the Pleistocene and therefore cannot be solely linked with domestication. Possible interpretations of these findings, and others, are discussed.
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Saracoglu, Mehmet Safa. "Letters from Vidin a study of Ottoman governmentality and politics of local administration, 1864-1877 /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1186601853.
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Herlich, Jessica Marie. "Shellfishing, Ceramics, and Gender: Shell Midden Ceramics from the Kiskiak Site." W&M ScholarWorks, 2011. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626649.
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Senturk, Suleyman. "Moving Away from The West or Taking Independent Positions: A Structural Analysis for The New Turkish Foreign Policy." Scholar Commons, 2019. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7934.
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This paper focuses on understanding and explaining the change of Turkish foreign policy,particularly in the last decade. Many observers have expressed a suspicion that Turkey is abandoning its Western-centric alignment and gradually shifting its axis. The thesis argues that rather than a shift, Turkey is taking an independent position. It maintains that the end of the Cold War and the change in the international structure from bipolarity to unipolarity has provided incentives for countries with some degree of material capabilities to pursue independence from the U.S. policy preferences. This study analyses structural effects on the behavior of Turkey.
Later it associates the observed change in Turkey’s foreign policy as the outcomes of taking an independent position to maximize its objectives. Finally, it presents empirical research to prove the argument.
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Malone, Chad Allen. "A Socio-Historical Analysis of U.S. State Terrorism from 1948 to 2008." University of Toledo / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1216592463.
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Naziri, Micah B. D. C. "Persistence of Jewish-Muslim Reconciliatory Activism in the Face of Threats and “Terrorism” (Real and Perceived) From All Sides." Antioch University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=antioch158125273779039.
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Grimes, Jodi Elisabeth. "Rhetorical Transformations of Trees in Medieval England: From Material Culture to Literary Representation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2008. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12130/.
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Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as allegorical vehicles for the Church's didactic use. With the emergence of new social categories in the late Middle Ages, the rhetoric of trees moves beyond what it means to forge a Christian identity to consider the role of a ruler and his subjects, the relationship between humans and nature, and the place of women in society. Taking as its fundamental premise that people in wooded regions develop a deep-rooted connection to trees, this dissertation connects medieval culture and the physical world to consider the variety of ways in which Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman vernacular manuscripts depict trees. A personal identification with trees, a desire for harmony between society and the environment, and a sympathy for the work of trees lead to the narrator's transformation in the Dream of the Rood. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Junius 11 manuscript, illustrated in Genesis A, Genesis B, and manuscript images, scrutinizes the Anglo-Saxon Christian's relationship and responsibility to God in the aftermath of the Fall. As writers transform trees into allegories in works like Genesis B and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale, the symbolic representations retain their spontaneous, organic processes to offer readers a visual picture of the Christian interior-the heart. Whereas the Parson's Tale promotes personal and radical change through a horticultural narrative starring the Tree of Penitence and Tree of Vices, Chaucer's Knight's Tale appraises the role of autonomous subjects in a tyrannical system. Forest laws of the post-Norman period engender a bitter polemic about the extent of royal power to appropriate nature, and the royal grove of the Knight's Tale exposes the limitations of monarchical structures and masculine control and shapes a pragmatic response to human failures.
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Marklein, Kathryn Elaine Marklein. "Ave Imperii, mortui salutamus te: Redefining Roman Imperialism on the Limes through a Bioarchaeological Study of Human Remains from the Village of Oymaagac, Turkey." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524125046893495.
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Abdalla, Mohamad, and n/a. "The Fate of Islamic Science Between the Eleventh and Sixteenth Centuries: A Critical Study of Scholarship from Ibn Khaldun to the Present." Griffith University. School of Science, 2004. http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20040618.091027.
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The aim of this thesis is to comprehensively survey and evaluate scholarship, from Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) to the present, on the fate of Islamic science between the eleventh and sixteenth-centuries, and to outline a more adequate scholarly approach. The thesis also assesses the logic and empirical accuracy of the accepted decline theory, and other alternative views, regarding the fate of Islamic science, and investigates the procedural and social physiological factors that give rise to inadequacies in the scholarship under question. It also attempts to construct an intellectual model for the fate of Islamic science, one that examines the cultural environment, and the interactions among different cultural dynamics at work. Drawing upon Ibn Khaldun's theory and recent substantial evidence from the history of Islamic science, this thesis also entails justifying the claim that, contrary to common assumptions, different fates awaited Islamic science, in different areas, and at different times. For the period of Ibn Khaldun to the present, this thesis presents the first comprehensive review of both classical and contemporary scholarship, exclusively or partially, devoted to the fate of Islamic science for the period under study. Based on this review, the thesis demonstrates that, although the idea that Islamic science declined after the eleventh century has gained a wide currency, and may have been established as the preferred scholarly paradigm, there is no agreement amongst scholars regarding what actually happened. In fact, the lexicon of scholarship that describes the fate of Islamic science includes such terms as: "decline," "decadence," "stagnation," "fragmentation," "standstill," and that Islamic science "froze," to name just a few. More importantly, the study shows that six centuries ago, the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun provided a more sophisticated and complex theory regarding what happened to Islamic science, which was not utilised except in the work of two scholars. The thesis tests the adequacy of the different claims by applying them to four case studies from the history of Islamic science, and demonstrate that evidence for specified areas shows that different fates awaited Islamic science in different areas and times. In view of the fact that Ibn Khaldun's theory is six centuries old, and that evidence of original scientific activity beyond the eleventh century emerged in the 1950s, what would one expect the state of scholarship to be? One would expect that with the availability of such evidence the usage of "decline" and other single-faceted terms would begin to disappear from the lexicon of scholarship; scholars would show awareness, and criticism, of each other's work; and development of more and more sophisticated concepts would emerge that would explain the fate of Islamic science. The thesis demonstrates that this did not happen. It argues that the key problem is that, after Ibn Khaldun, there was a centuries-long gap, in which even excellent historians used simple, dismissive terms and concepts defined by a limited, but highly persistent, bundle of interpretative views with a dominant theme of decline. These persistent themes within the scholarship by which Islamic science is constructed and represented were deeply embedded in many scholarly works. In addition, many scholars failed to build on the work of others; they ignored major pieces of evidence; and, in most cases, they were not trying to discern what happened to Islamic science but were referring to the subject as part of another project. Thus, in this corpus of scholarship, one that contains the work of some of the 'best' scholars, the myth of the decline remains not only intact but also powerful. Convinced of its merit, scholars passed it on and vouched for it, failing to distinguish facts from decisions based on consensus, emotion, or tradition. There are very few noteworthy cases where Islamic science is being represented in ways that do not imply negativity. There are also some few narratives that present more complex descriptions; however, even Ibn Khaldun's complex theory, which is arguably the most adequate in the scholarship, is non-comprehensive. Some modern scholars, like Saliba and Sabra, present a challenge to the common argument that Islamic science suffered a uniform decline. However, in the absence of any significant challenges to the common claims of the fate of Islamic science, particularly that of decline, it is evident that, at the very least, the scholarship seems to offer support to the work of discourses that construct the fate of Islamic science in single-faceted, simplistic and reductive terms.
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Liu, Jing Lian. "A study of the judicature and legal system in the middle of the Qing Dynasty based on the legal cases from the Chinese documents in the National Archives of the Torre de Tombo." Thesis, University of Macau, 2000. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b1636586.
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Schwartzman, Lauren J. "Contest and community : wonder-working in Christian popular literature from the second to the fifth centuries CE." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a3de02f7-18a9-4363-8bbf-cea5a73eb223.
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In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.
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Rogozhina, Anna. "'And from his side came blood and milk' : the martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch in Coptic Egypt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:35b8fd5c-5c85-4b5f-81c8-77e0b66a165d.
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My thesis examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically - the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This thesis examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint. Another aim of this work is to stress the entertainment value of such texts. I explore the sources used by Coptic hagiographers for creating such entertaining stories, as well as the methods they used to re-work certain theological concepts and make them more accessible to the audience. The thesis begins with description of the manuscript tradition of Philotheus and a brief outline and comparison of its main versions. The second chapter discusses the place of the Martyrdom of Philotheus in Coptic hagiography and its connection to the so-called cycles. The next two chapters explore the motifs and topoi characteristic of Coptic martyr passions, especially the legend of Diocletian the Persecutor and the image of Antioch as the Holy City in Coptic hagiography, as these two motifs appear in one way or another in the majority of the martyr passions. Chapter 5 is dedicated to one of the focal points in the Martyrdom - the miracle of resurrection and the tour of hell – and its literary and theological background. Chapter 6 discusses representations of magic and paganism in Coptic hagiography and some of the concerns of Coptic hagiographers. In the last chapter I explore the geography of the cult, its iconographic and hymnographic dimensions and the transformation of the perception of the saint; the second part of this chapter discusses the questions of performance, authorship and audience.