Dieser Band bietet mit Stephan von Gumpenberg Ansichten des Heiligen Landes um 1417/18, gewährt mit Roland von Waldenburg Einblicke in das Italien des 16. Jahrhunderts, läßt das Japan des 17. Jahrhunderts mit den Augen Engelbert Kaempfers sehen und das Ägypten des Jahres 1994 mit denen Salzburger Studierender. Der Leser durchleidet die Qualen eines polnischen Landadligen auf der Meerfahrt von Danzig nach Lübeck und die Schiffbrüche des Alvar Núñez als Bericht über eine gescheiterte Expedition nach Florida. Er besucht mit Sigmund von Herberstein das Moskowitische Rußland im 16. Jahrhundert und erfährt im Gegenzug allerlei Unterhaltsames über Europa aus der Sicht der russischen Reisenden Nikolaj Karamzin und Fedor M. Dostojevskij. Und das sind nur einige Themen dieses faszinierenden Gießener Symposionsbandes, der nach Untersuchungen mythischer Strukturen im Reisebericht und zur Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit in mittelalterlichen Weltkarten eine Reise durch Länder, Zeiten und Kulturen beginnt: er macht den Leser mit byzantinischen, hebräischen sowie arabischen Reisenden des 11./12. und 17. Jahrhunderts und ihren Berichten vertraut, zeigt die Sicht europäischer Adliger des Spätmittelalters auf die Fremde und “besingt” die Reiselieder Oswalds von Wolkenstein. Der Band endet mit einem Blick auf den Traum von der Insel des Glücks. Dazwischen spannt sich der Bogen der Untersuchungen von Nahreisen in die Landschaften Koreas im vormodernen koreanischen Reisebericht, in die Bergwelt Chinas in den chinesischen Bergmonographien oder in die Mark Brandenburg Fontanes über die Reisen des Fürsten von Pückler-Muskau in Franken, Europa und Nordafrika bis hin zu den großen Fernreisen eines Amerigo Vespucci in die Neue Welt und des Odorico da Pordenone nach Asien (mit einer Edition der Aufzeichnungen nach dem mündlichen Bericht des Reisenden). Asien ist auch das Thema der Autorin Sir Galahad und der Filmemacherin Ulrike Ottinger, denen ein weiterer Beitrag gewidmet ist. Den Band beschließt ein umfangreiches Namen- und Werktitelregister, das die Fülle der gebotenen Informationen aufschlüsselt.

Bernhard Varenius’ books influenced the history of science in such a way that Isaac Newton, Alexander von Humboldt and Tsar Peter the Great all referred to him. Varenius wrote the first comprehensive description of Japan (Descriptio regni Japoniae, 1649) from a European perspective, exclusively based on a diversity of sources. But the impact of his Geographia generalis (1650) explains his ranking among the founding fathers of geography as a science. He called ‘general’ geography a branch of (applied) mathematics which does not deal with regional specifics. The contributions in this book focus on his multi-faceted work, the influence of his books and the tragically short life of this young polymath from Germany who benefited from the intellectually stimulating milieu of Leiden and Amsterdam. Contributors include: Horst Walter Blanke, Reinhard Düchting, Klaus Lehmann, Robert Mayhew, Sandra Rebok, Folker Reichert, Frank Richter, Margret Schuchard, Denis J.B. Shaw, Ulrich Staffhorst, Johann Anselm Steiger, Rienk H. Vermij, and Ernst-Christian Volkmann.

The contributions to this volume have been selected from the papers delivered at the 34th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Birmingham, in April 2000. Travellers to and in the Byzantine world have long been a subject of interest but travel and communications in the medieval period have more recently attracted scholarly attention. This book is the first to bring together these two lines of enquiry. Four aspects of travel in the Byzantine world, from the sixth to the fifteenth century, are examined here: technicalities of travel on land and sea, purposes of travel, foreign visitors' perceptions of Constantinople, and the representation of the travel experience in images and in written accounts. Sources used to illuminate these four aspects include descriptions of journeys, pilot books, bilingual word lists, shipwrecks, monastic documents, but as the opening paper shows the range of such sources can be far wider than generally supposed. The contributors highlight road and travel conditions for horses and humans, types of ships and speed of sea journeys, the nature of trade in the Mediterranean, the continuity of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attitudes toward travel. Patterns of communication in the Mediterranean are revealed through distribution of ceramic finds, letter collections, and the spread of the plague. Together, these papers make a notable contribution to our understanding both of the evidence for travel, and of the realities and perceptions of communications in the Byzantine world. Travel in the Byzantine World is volume 10 in the series published by Ashgate/Variorum on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

The notion of adab is at the heart of Arab-Islamic culture. Born in the crucible of the Arabic and Persian civilization, nourished by Greek and Indian influences, this polysemic notion could cover a variegated range of meanings: good behavior, knowledge of manners, etiquette, rules and belles-lettres and finally, literature. This collection of articles tries to explore how the formulations and reformulations of adab during the first centuries of Islam engage with the crucial period of the first great spiritual masters, exploring the importance of normativity, but also of transgression, in order to define the rules themselves. Assuming that adab is ethics, the articles analyse the genres of Sufi adab, including manuals and hagiographical accounts, from the formative period of Sufism until the modernity. Contributors are: Alberto F. Ambrosio, Nelly Amri, Francesco Chiabotti, Rachida Chih, Ralf Elger, Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, Maria Chiara Giorda, Denis Gril, Paul L. Heck, Nathan Hofer, Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Annabel Keeler, Pierre Lory, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Erik S. Ohlander, Samuela Pagani, Luca Patrizi, Michele Petrone, Stefan Reichmuth, Lloyd Ridgeon, Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Florian Sobieroj, Renaud Soler, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Mikko Viitamäki.

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

The margravial court astronomer Simon Marius, was involved in all of the new observations made with the recently invented telescope in the early part of the seventeenth century. He also discovered the Moons of Jupiter in January 1610, but lost the priority dispute with Galileo Galilei, because he missed to publish his findings in a timely manner. The history of astronomy neglected Marius for a long time, finding only the apologists for the Copernican system worthy of attention. In contrast the papers presented on the occasion of the Simon Marius Anniversary Conference 2014, and collected in this volume, demonstrate that it is just this struggle to find the correct astronomical system that makes him particularly interesting. His research into comets, sunspots, the Moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus led him to abandon the Ptolemaic system and adopt the Tychonic one. He could not take the final step to heliocentricity but his rejection was based on empirical arguments of his time. This volume presents a translation of the main work of Marius and shows the current state of historical research on Marius.

Gerhard Mercator (1512–1594) was the most important cartographer and globemaker of the 16th century. He is particularly remembered for his publication Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (1595), and for his specific cylindrical map projection (1569), which is still used widely today. This book brings together the latest research on Mercator with a view to his sources and his relationships with other scientific disciplines and cartographers of his time, as well as his role in the wider worlds of Renaissance cartography and Humanism.