Developing Perspectives in Mamluk History

This volume brings together seventeen papers that engage with diverse sets of issues that pertain to the social and cultural histories of late medieval Egypt and Syria. These range in overlapping ways from the study of structures of kinship, marriage and gender, over discussions of practices, institutions, representations and realities of social distinction and dominance, to engagements with environmental, textual, architectural and numismatic materialities. Most of these seventeen papers furthermore have a political orientation in common, trying to understand these issues as defined, or at least touched, by the politics of the so-called Mamluk sultanate of Cairo (13th–early 16th centuries CE), mostly conceptualising these politics as relationships of power emanating from above, though sometimes also leaving more room in the analyses for the particularity of local arrangements and for different agencies. In many ways, therefore, this volume presents in its diversity of subjects and approaches an interesting encounter with the state of a specific field of research that, since about the 1980s, has increasingly come to be identified as that of Mamluk studies. It nicely demonstrates the particular ways—methodological, conceptual and empirical— which have for a long time driven this expanding field of Islamic historical scholarship forward, and at the same time also how, in recent years, various social, cultural and material turns have slowly begun fundamentally to redefine it. One of the most important protagonists of this expanding and transforming field has been, and continues to be, Amalia Levanoni, emerita professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa (Israel). This volume of papers by both senior and junior scholars is actually a jubilee volume in her honour, and as such it also gives a good idea of the diversity of subjects and connections that make Amalia Levanoni’s contributions to the field stand out

Ancient history · Honor · Mamluk · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classics · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Religious studies