Cultural life flowered from the mid-fifteenth century in the Italian city-states, many of which profited from the new trading opportunities that growing world networks permitted. Contact among regions of the world expanded, bringing new ideas and prompting an appreciation of arts and letters-not only of the present but of the past. In Italy this cultural flowering was known at first as the renaissance of arts and letters, soon shortened to just "Renaissance" to accommodate cultural ingredients that came from beyond Europe. Italian and northern European cultural expansion benefited from similar retrieval of ancient knowledge in the Islamic world and East Asia. Like the Italians, the Chinese had grown even wealthier from the extensive links to global commerce provided by the Mongol Empire, but once thrown off, their cultural life flourished under the Ming. Cultural knowledge and the arts spread across Asia and into Europe. As part of state-building, the Ming nourished commerce but also rejected the cosmopolitan Buddhist legacy that arrived from central and south Asia. To strengthen dynastic Chinese rule, the Ming challenged Buddhism with a revival of age-old concern for the Confucian values that had languished under the Mongols. Foremost among these new Confucians was Wu Yube, so expert in his teachings that he attracted a wide coterie of disciples. In India, Nanak, an educated employee of an Afghan prince, sparked the founding of Sikhism. A similar search for reviving fundamental religious values occurred in Europe, where Martin Luther challenged the practices of the Catholic church, ushering in Protestantism. Religious reform and resistance to it were closely connected to the state-building efforts of enterprising monarchs such as Henry VIII of England. India likewise experienced a fervent movement to revive pure, ancient religious practices. Fourteenth and fifteenth century global trade and long-distance ventures such as those made by the Ming and then by the Portuguese further inspired and advanced these worldwide cultural and political developments. A brisk Indian Ocean trade flourished. Economic change ensued with the arrival of New World silver on the global market. The advance of printing not only furthered the cause of religious reform and state-building globally; it also helped globalize knowledge and intellectual experimentation. People of great power and those of more limited means came to live their lives differently because of this expanding web of shared knowledge and trade. Cities flourished, the enslavement of native Americans came to replace their use as human sacrifices, and diseases migrated at a more rapid pace and greater devastation than perhaps ever before.

This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

This groundbreaking book examines the complex relationships between individuals and communities in the profound transitions of the early modern period. Taking a global and comparative approach to historical issues, the distinguished contributors show that individual and community created and recreated one another in the major structures, interactions, and transitions of early modern times. Offering an important contribution to our understanding both of the early modern period and of its historiography, this volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars working in the fields of medieval, early modern, and modern history, and on the Renaissance and Reformation.

The game of chess was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, so much so that it became an important thought paradigm for thinkers and writers who utilized its vocabulary and imagery for commentaries on war, politics, love, and the social order. In this collection of essays, scholars investigate chess texts from numerous traditions – English, French, German, Latin, Persian, Spanish, Swedish, and Catalan – and argue that knowledge of chess is essential to understanding medieval culture. Such knowledge, however, cannot rely on the modern game, for today’s rules were not developed until the late fifteenth century. Only through familiarity with earlier incarnations of the game can one fully appreciate the full import of chess to medieval society. The careful scholarship contained in this volume provides not only insight into the significance of chess in medieval European culture but also opens up avenues of inquiry for future work in this rich field.