Medieval Mediterranean on Webinar Monday 19 February

Dear All,

We’re pleased to let you know that the next webinar of the Medieval Mediterranean series (organised by the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, in collaboration with the Woolf Institute (Cambridge), the Medieval Studies Research Group at Lincoln, the IMF-CSIC Barcelona and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the Universities of Exeter and Edinburgh) will host the Al-Masāq 2023 Prize winners and will be held on Monday 19 February, 17.00.

The Al-Masāq Prize is awarded biennially for the best article to appear in Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean. In this webinar, the 2023 prize winner, Alice Croq, and runner-up, Angela Isoldi, will introduce their research.

Please register here to receive the Zoom link: http://tinyurl.com/38n3wemx

WINNER: Alice Croq, Syrians in Cairo, copts in Damascus: The Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras as Seen from Christian Manuscripts and Islamic Documents

During the 12th to 14th centuries, several cultural, economic, and social factors brought Syriac Christians to Egypt, whereas others led Copts to Damascus. My current research focuses on these (apparently) counterintuitive phenomena by bringing together different types of little-studied and hitherto unknown sources. The corpus mainly consists of scribal notes in Syriac and Christian Arabic manuscripts. To deal efficiently with the rich historical material in the manuscripts, I developed a database, SAMAD (The Syriac and Arabic Manuscript Database). My ongoing project is to cross-check the data thus obtained with newly discovered Islamic legal documents kept at the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem.

RUNNER-UP: Angela Isoldi, Tales of a traveling handbook: Authorship, structure and contents of a 15th-century medical manual for travellers

What if you had to leave for a long, dangerous trip through a vast land, and you had no one around with any medical skills? The answer comes from a fifteenth-century physician from Cairo, Ibn al-Amshāṭī (1409-1496), who wrote a short yet hacks-packed medical manual for a Vizir embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and gave it the title of al-Isfār ʿan ḥukm al-asfār (“Revealing the regime of travels”). This fascinating manual, which has survived in its manuscript form, was meant to accompany its bearer through the journey and to provide them with all the necessary advice to prevent and cure physical damages caused by the harsh environment. In this talk, we will explore how the contents of al-Isfār were selected and organized in order to fulfil this goal.

We hope to see many of you there and please, feel free to share this information widely!

Best wishes,

Antonella

Story submitted by Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo
aliuzzoscorpo@lincoln.ac.uk