Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700-c.1500: A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres
Edited by Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen and Björn Weiler
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 978-1-009-01113-6
A comparison of three regions of the medieval world – Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Middle East – in how governments and politics operated. It looks to explain the question of who were the political elites from these areas and how they maintained power.
Excerpt:
The main anchor to this volume is ‘political culture’. We have chosen to frame our shared concern with the theory and practice of power in this way, conscious that ‘political culture’ is itself a contested notion. Aware of the challenges, we have chosen a pragmatic approach, recognising that any concept used to examine medieval theories and practices of power is open to debate. ‘Political culture’ is adopted here as an umbrella term for the many different dimensions of elite power relations in the three spheres. It is a formulation that offers some very basic interpretative space within which the three spheres can be discussed in parallel – a space broad enough to allow us to overcome, or at least accommodate, different conceptualisations of power among medieval contemporaries in those spheres and among modern scholars who work on them.
Who is this book for?
This is an excellent book for medieval political junkies and comes with a lot of information and analysis. Those who do comparative history and graduate students in the field of medieval studies will want a copy, while other historians should consider reading at least the sections focusing on their own regions of interest.
The editors
Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen and Björn Weiler rank among the top experts in their fields. They also wrote or co-wrote most of the sixteen articles in this book.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website
You can also buy this book from Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700-c.1500: A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres
Edited by Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen and Björn Weiler
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 978-1-009-01113-6
A comparison of three regions of the medieval world – Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Middle East – in how governments and politics operated. It looks to explain the question of who were the political elites from these areas and how they maintained power.
Excerpt:
The main anchor to this volume is ‘political culture’. We have chosen to frame our shared concern with the theory and practice of power in this way, conscious that ‘political culture’ is itself a contested notion. Aware of the challenges, we have chosen a pragmatic approach, recognising that any concept used to examine medieval theories and practices of power is open to debate. ‘Political culture’ is adopted here as an umbrella term for the many different dimensions of elite power relations in the three spheres. It is a formulation that offers some very basic interpretative space within which the three spheres can be discussed in parallel – a space broad enough to allow us to overcome, or at least accommodate, different conceptualisations of power among medieval contemporaries in those spheres and among modern scholars who work on them.
Who is this book for?
This is an excellent book for medieval political junkies and comes with a lot of information and analysis. Those who do comparative history and graduate students in the field of medieval studies will want a copy, while other historians should consider reading at least the sections focusing on their own regions of interest.
The editors
Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen and Björn Weiler rank among the top experts in their fields. They also wrote or co-wrote most of the sixteen articles in this book.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website
You can also buy this book from Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
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