Mastic Production in Medieval Chios: Economic Flows and Transitions in an Insular Setting

ABSTRACT

The Aegean island of Chios provides a special case of insularity during the Middle Ages, aspects of which are reflected in the production of a highly-valued product, mastic resin, which was sought after across the Mediterranean world for use in medicine, fragrances and flavourings. Produced only on the island, high-quality mastic became an iconic Chian product that highlighted the island’s uniqueness and significantly contributed to its economy. This article presents a diachronic view of mastic production in and circulation from Chios during the periods of Roman, Byzantine and Genoese rule. The widespread demand for its luxury commodity meant that the island was always active in the wider maritime networks in this period. The lens of mastic production makes these connections visible in textual, archaeological and architectural evidence that highlights the role local products played in the ways islands, like Chios, navigated the economic and political transitions of the medieval Mediterranean world.     

“Going to the Extremes”: The Balearics and Cyprus in the Early Medieval Byzantine Insular System

ABSTRACT

This contribution mainly focuses on Cyprus and the Balearics, islands located at opposite geographical extremes of the Byzantine Mediterranean, during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Historians have often regarded these islands as peripheral additions to the Byzantine heartland of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau; this article argues that, in fact, archaeological and material indicators (such as ceramics, lead seals and coins), paired with the scarce textual sources, point to a certain degree of economic prosperity in the abovementioned islands during the period under scrutiny, suggesting that they continued to play an important role in the political, administrative and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire. A resilient insular economy and continuity of local production of artefacts was ensured by the persistence of demand from local secular and religious elites and regular, if infrequent, contacts with other areas of the Byzantine heartland or the Muslim Mediterranean.     

Sicily: A Frontier in the Centre of the Sea?

ABSTRACT

As part of the Ancient Maritime Dynamics project, this study uses a new interpretive methodology to model the creation and use of maritime places in the western-Mediterranean basin. In turn, the results of this modelling suggest that the waters around the island of Sicily acted as a frontier, distinguishing a distinct zone of activity in the western Mediterranean as well as a western maritime community that segregated itself from other sailors and merchants elsewhere in the sea.     

The Island of Aegina: An Example of Modus Vivendi in the Medieval Mediterranean

The medieval Mediterranean has predominantly been considered to be a place of continuous conflict in matters of political and territorial ambitions, and, of course, religious dominance. The constant incursions on the islands of the Mediterranean have been considered by historians, legitimately in many instances, to be destructive of local communities, and to have caused turbulence in the economy, society, and culture. However, there is documentation which proves that such invasions were frequently followed by improvement in administration, and subsequently by production of art and a new type of culture that was an amalgam of Western and Eastern elements.

This article aims to illustrate certain positive side effects of this interaction in the Mediterranean through a specific example: the medieval city of Aegina in the Aegean Sea. During its history, the island passed through the hands of the Franks, the Venetians, the Catalans, and eventually the Ottomans. The architectural forms and artistic patterns that will be discussed support the argument that the medieval Mediterranean became a place for the exchange of ideas, and a canvas for multicultural activities.     

Nests of Pirates? “Islandness” in the Balearic Islands and La Garde-Freinet

ABSTRACT

The “World of Medieval Islands” project invites the questioning of the category of island from medieval evidence, and coincided with another project of the author’s that was undertaking a similar exercise with medieval frontiers. Combining these two research areas, this article investigates two island, or island-like, zones that were situated at the edges of early medieval polities, primarily (though variably) of Umayyad al-Andalus, and compares their situation so as to elucidate what about their geopolitical situation made them island-like and how steady that likeness was. Working through the historiographies of the Balearic Islands, which shifted from Byzantine to Islamic control through a variably evaluated transition period, and of the Muslim settlement at La Garde-Freinet, Provence, from inception to extermination, the article concludes that what was island-like or indeed frontier-like about both areas was not continuous, and that the category “island” is historically contingent and subjective, despite its apparent geographic concreteness.     

The Jews of Venetian Candia: The Challenges of External Influences and Internal Diversity as Reflected in Takkanot Kandiyah

Takkanot Kandiyah is a collection of Hebrew-written legislative texts regarding the leadership of the Jewish community of Candia, the capital of the Venetian colony of Crete, which were issued by successive generations of communal leaders between the early thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries. The detailed information it provides on many areas of the communal life makes Takkanot Kandiyah a valuable source for historical research into Jewish life in the medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Through a study of the texts contained in Takkanot Kandiyah, this article attempts to identify and analyse the ways in which the leadership of the Candiot community responded to the challenges of coexistence with the Greek inhabitants of Crete and the Venetian rulers of the island, as well as with the Jewish immigrants whom the currents of history brought to Crete from various corners of the Mediterranean, and thus to examine the importance of the “Mediterranean dimension” of the life of Cretan Jewry.     

Witchcraft in the Early Modern Isle of Man

ABSTRACT

This article examines evidence relating to witchcraft beliefs and official attitudes to witchcraft in the Isle of Man during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is based mainly on court records, and above all those of the Manx ecclesiastical courts. It demonstrates that there was a rich popular culture relating to witchcraft on the island, with a number of individualistic features. It places Manx witchcraft beliefs in relation to two other phenomena that were central to the island's popular culture: fairy beliefs and the belief in the efficacy of the curse. It also demonstrates that the island's authorities maintained a relatively low-keyed approach to witchcraft (only two people are known to have been executed as witches in the island), treating it as a sign of popular ignorance and a regrettable source of neighbourly disputes rather than as a satanic heresy.     

Geolocating popular memory: Recorded images of Hashima Island after Skyfall

ABSTRACT

This article examines efforts to document Japan’s Hashima Island following its appearance in the popular film Skyfall. It describes how the film’s commercial success led to an effort by Google to produce images of the island’s built environment using digital navigation technologies. It further describes how this effort led the Japanese government to include Hashima Island in a bid to gain Unesco heritage status for Meiji-era sites of industrialization. Drawing from visual studies, critical media studies, and from interdisciplinary approaches to collective memory, this article analyzes how the circulation of images depicting Hashima Island in popular culture affects continuing efforts to hold Japan accountable for injustices committed there in the past. By narrowing on the moment “after” Skyfall, the article concludes with an assessment of the island’s Google Street View archive in terms of its broader impact on the uses of navigation, spatial presence, and digital heritage.     

The Evidence of the Conversation Piece

ABSTRACT

The picture discussed apparently represents a ‘snapshot’ of eighteenth-century family life. However, it is argued in this article that it is problematic to approach such visual material as if it can render direct evidence of a past, historical reality. This is not simply because art may distort or misrepresent its subject matter. Such an approach is also in danger of ignoring the potential evidence embodied in the representation itself – in this case, both a highly self-conscious ‘display’ of modern life and an historically meaningful act of artistic prowess.     

The history of the unspeakable: Shimokawa Masaharu’s The forgotten history of evacuation

ABSTRACT

Histories of wartime Japan often focus on the Japanese home islands after Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on 15 August 1945. Japanese citizens living in Korea, Manchuria, and elsewhere in the far-flung Japanese Empire are usually left out of the historiographical record. In a new book about the evacuees—hikiagesha—from the defunct Empire, Shimokawa Masaharu presents a vivid, harrowing portrait of the suffering of those who had to make their way back to Japan after the end of the Greater East Asia War. In particular, Shimokawa focuses on Izumi Sei’ichi, who established a sanatorium and abortuary in Fukuoka for women who had been raped by enemy soldiers.     

The Andamans as a “sea of islands”: reconnecting old geographies through poaching

The rise of military and political tensions in the Indo-Pacific maritime zone has brought new attention to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. With this visibility has come a disturbing awareness in some quarters that this Indian archipelago is qualitatively different from the rest of the country. Whether defined in terms of unorthodox cultural practices or the unauthorized presence of other national bodies, the multicultural habitus of the Andamans is deeply unsettling from a geopolitical standpoint that imagines the islands as a natural extension of a homogeneous national-territorial space. This article argues that the persistence of cultural and other heterogeneities in the Andamans should be read as a trace of histories that are intimately tied to the location of this archipelago. Framing the archipelago as a “sea of islands” lying off the littoral of the Andaman Sea rather than as an extension of Indian national space permits unauthorized social relations to become visible again. Once we redraw island geographies, spectral presences begin to appear, taking the form of both foreign bodies as well as narrative contradictions. Currently, these specters are interpellated under the sign of “poaching,” a portmanteau of activities that joins indigenous, settlers, outsiders, and Nature in an illicit assemblage that is presumed to lie outside the law. Contradictions of the poaching discourse should be read as signs of recalcitrance: the complexity of the Andamans that cannot be erased by the violence of denial.     

Reading Irish Women's Lives in Photograph Albums

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide a new approach to photography in Ireland by shifting focus from ‘art’ photography to the processes and practices of snapshot photography. In employing a new methodological approach to photography, it also provides a new way to examine women's history, exploring photography as part of the tactics women used in order to resist or assimilate state- and Church-led discourses of womanhood, which have often been characterized as both oppressive and hegemonic. In order to explore these themes in detail, this article examines the photography collection of Dorothy Stokes, the largest twentieth century amateur collection held by the National Library of Ireland. I situate Stokes's photographs between two traditions – ethnographic photographs of Ireland and ‘snapshot’ images of holidays and family. Stokes self-consciously made use of these two genres, but also disrupted them. Taking photographs and the making of photograph albums became ways for her to comment on Irish society and her place in the nation and to represent and constitute an oppositional private life.     

Chekhov,Tolstoy and the Illustrated Press in the 1890S

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy addressed an expanded reading public with new interests in the 1890s. It focuses on Chekhov's serialized book-length study The Island of Sakhalin (1893–4) and Tolstoy's last big novel, Resurrection (1899), which was also serialized. To reach an expanding diverse audience Tolstoy simplified his vocabulary, used a mono-dimensional plot and avoided subplots, foreign words and subtle shifts that could deflect the reader's attention. Chekhov also adapted his literary practice, adopting a unique documentary style, putting himself in the text. Each author engaged in a conversation about nationality, ethnicity and empire, issues of fundamental import to their readers and their society more broadly. Speaking about life and death, sin and redemption, good and evil, and about the common humanity of the most downtrodden of Russian citizens, men and women, Chekhov and Tolstoy addressed their contemporaries with fresh and timely words about pressing issues.     

Building the urban commons in Singapore: the cemetery,red-light district and public housing estates as sites of contestation

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the state of informal social activism initiated by Singaporean youth via the creation of ground-up initiatives. Having witnessed state-civil society relations, where calibrated liberalisation, co-option and coercive measures are used as strategies of state control, these informal collectives seek new modalities and methodologies in their efforts to build the urban commons. By following three of such collectives, this paper seeks to explore the overlapping cultural and social realms they operate in, as well as the new modalities and methodologies they bring, such as participatory art and design. They negotiate constraints from both the state and market through (1) strategic positioning of legal statuses and (2) the formation of a network society, building social capital and a new vocabulary for future efforts in self-organisation.     

The Venetian Consul and the Cosmopolitan Mercantile Community of Alexandria at the Beginning of the Ninth/Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Three case studies (Veneto-Cretan shipping of Egyptian-Arab merchandise, Catalan-Venetian cooperation, and Venice acting on behalf of Latin pilgrims) around the activities of the Venetian consul inform an investigation of the cosmopolitan community formed by local groups and foreign nations, and the role of the Venetian consul in this wider community. It will be argued that the Venetian consul was not only a Venetian envoy but also a Mamlūk official and an informal head of the cosmopolitan business community in late medieval Alexandria.     

The Changing Faces of Manx Witchcraft

ABSTRACT

The nature of witchcraft beliefs and trials in the early modern Isle of Man has recently been the subject of some excellent research. The history of attitudes to witchcraft on the island is, however, also susceptible to a different approach: that of examining the manner in which they have developed and adapted over the time since the opening of the modern period. This longer perspective reveals, as did the close study of the early modern material, that Man both exhibited a number of individualistic features and acted as a microcosm of more general alterations in belief. As those alterations have, as yet, failed to attract any sustained interest from historians, the perspective shed upon them by the Manx material is all the more important. Man's abundant early modern archives and rich modern literary culture together provide ample evidence for such a case study, while the latter presents wider implications for the treatment of the subject in a broader context.     

Bring on the Dancing-Girls! (a Gadibus usque auroram)1

In Greece and Rome, Ionic rhythm appears to have been associated with erotic dances. A tune-type going with this rhythm is found in several of Alfonso's Cantigas (second half of the thirteenth century) and in folk music from around the Mediterranean, recorded from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Could these tune-types (and their associated ground-basses) go back as far as Martial's Dancing-girls of Cádiz – and indeed to Euripides and Aristophanes? There is also a possible link with the kharjas of the Andalusian muwashsha.(h)āt, and a substantial connexion with the dance known from later sources as the Canaries. Not only is there evidence of a rhythm and associated melodic motive stretching over more than two millennia, but we can discern, even hear, parts of an unwritten tradition of improvised instrumental music and discover a harmonic vocabulary which mostly emerges on the written page only in the Renaissance.     

In between home and homeland: Diaspora identity as a cultural hybrid in Mohsen Namjoo’s “Cielito Lindo”

ABSTRACT

Rather than resisting either new or old culture, Iranian musicians in the diaspora embrace both their new host environments and their native homeland, as they create a place between cultural assimilation and preservation, helping to shape new sounds of exile. This essay explores how Iranian musicians embrace the new and the familiar, the traditional and the popular, creating an original cultural hybrid. Questions of cultural identity and the politics of location and displacement are addressed using a theoretical cultural studies framework, incorporating themes of personal and collective nostalgia. This discussion is supplemented by documented narrative experiences from Iranian musicians and artists. Furthermore, the textual and musical analysis of singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo’s readaptation of the familiar Mexican ranchera song “Cielito Lindo” uncovers unique nuances and layers of meaning that not only shed light on one musician’s personal journey to exile, but also speak to a greater collective experience of Iranians today who continue to be torn between home and homeland.