Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean. Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects (10th-20th centuries)

Hardback, 288 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:9 b/w, 24 col., 2 tables b/w., Language: English. ISBN 9782503610054. Summary In the last two decades, objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced, used, modified, preserved, and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings, thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However, they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought, gifted, bartered, and sold, borrowed or stolen, collected and dispersed, just as they can be modified, repaired, reshaped, repurposed, and destroyed in the process. The Mediterranean, as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities, and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural, political, economic, and social transformation, easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy, eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands, Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press, and the 'dead' bodies of holy women and men, this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the 'second-handedness' of displaced objects across the Mediterranean, the volume intersects different chronologies - from antiquity to the present-day - and varying scales, from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Rereading, Reshaping, Repurposing Objects in Motion across the Mediterranean Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (Re)using Byzantine Textiles: Adapting and Reinventing Material Identities through the Connected Mediterranean, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries Anna Kelley Travelling Doors: Medieval Bronze Doors in the Mediterranean Judith Utz Arabic Geography and Sixteenth-Century Cartography: Guillaume Postel and the History of Ab? al-Fid??'s Manuscript Maria Vittoria Comacchi From Africa to the Canary Islands: The Double Lives of Objects (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) Claudia Geremia Manuscripts from Western Europe, Printer from the Land of Israel: Movement between Cultural Spaces in Hebrew Printing in the Eighteenth Century Oded Cohen Dazzling Objects and Ottoman Enthusiasts: Travelling Luxuries Across the Mediterranean and Beyond T lay Artan 'A stone called pourcellaine': Chinese Porcelain and Early Modern Natural History Matthew Martin Life and Afterlife of Religious Bodies: From Organic Matters to Devotional Objects. Corpses on Display in Late Modern Italy (c. 1800-1950) Leonardo Rossi The Journey of Prehistoric Remains: Re-reading the Case of Scoglio del Tonno, Taranto (1899-1950s) Fedra Pizzato Index 0 g. …