The just-released book ‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330–1500 CE, by Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs is available for free download until May 28th.
Published by Cambridge University Press under its Elements in the Global Middle Ages series, the book offers an introduction to the regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the 4th to the 15th century. Many historians will be interested in this short book as our understanding of this area of northeastern Africa has rapidly evolved in recent years.
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Krebs, a Professor at Ruhr-University Bochum, explains how the book came about: “My co-author Yonatan, whose training is in religious studies and (late) antiquity, was approached by the Series Editors (Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes, at that point) about writing such a book for their “Global Middle Ages” Series. My first book had just come out, and he contacted me, seeing that I work on later periods and that we’d compliment each other well, training and time-specialisation-wise, about whether I’d be interested in co-authoring the book together with him. And I was like, this is great, because I’d been asked by interested people outside the immediate field to recommend them an accessible and up-to-date short introduction, and come up short in the past.
“So much incredible, paradigm-shifting research had happened in the last decade (and mainly only been published in French, Italian, German, which made it harder to access for a lot of people interested in staying up-to-date on the topic), that I thought, together with Yonatan, we should strive to write a book that we could then recommend to nonspecialists and those who want to see what the field is right now. Because what we know now — through new excavations, new text finds, new research projects that really re-examined long-held scholarly “truths” for their basis in the sources — is world apart from what we knew twenty, or even just ten years ago.”
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Binyam, an Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies at the University of California – Berkley, authored the first part of the book, which details the Aksumite Empire during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Krebs wrote the second half of the book, covering how the region saw a variety of kingdoms and realms which brought about increasing connections with the wider medieval world.
“I hope it’ll be a useful and helpful text,” Krebs adds. “A text that will make the real sea change that we’ve seen in the field these last few years readily and easily accessible and available to an English-speaking lay audience for the first time. And I also hope that they’ll see that the idea of “Ethiopia” as an isolated (Christian) island largely unconnected to the world that many people still hold in their heads (inherited from offhand remarks by 18th-century British historians like Edward Gibbon) has very little basis in both sources and scholarship these days.”
The just-released book ‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330–1500 CE, by Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs is available for free download until May 28th.
Published by Cambridge University Press under its Elements in the Global Middle Ages series, the book offers an introduction to the regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the 4th to the 15th century. Many historians will be interested in this short book as our understanding of this area of northeastern Africa has rapidly evolved in recent years.
Krebs, a Professor at Ruhr-University Bochum, explains how the book came about: “My co-author Yonatan, whose training is in religious studies and (late) antiquity, was approached by the Series Editors (Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes, at that point) about writing such a book for their “Global Middle Ages” Series. My first book had just come out, and he contacted me, seeing that I work on later periods and that we’d compliment each other well, training and time-specialisation-wise, about whether I’d be interested in co-authoring the book together with him. And I was like, this is great, because I’d been asked by interested people outside the immediate field to recommend them an accessible and up-to-date short introduction, and come up short in the past.
“So much incredible, paradigm-shifting research had happened in the last decade (and mainly only been published in French, Italian, German, which made it harder to access for a lot of people interested in staying up-to-date on the topic), that I thought, together with Yonatan, we should strive to write a book that we could then recommend to nonspecialists and those who want to see what the field is right now. Because what we know now — through new excavations, new text finds, new research projects that really re-examined long-held scholarly “truths” for their basis in the sources — is world apart from what we knew twenty, or even just ten years ago.”
Binyam, an Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies at the University of California – Berkley, authored the first part of the book, which details the Aksumite Empire during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Krebs wrote the second half of the book, covering how the region saw a variety of kingdoms and realms which brought about increasing connections with the wider medieval world.
“I hope it’ll be a useful and helpful text,” Krebs adds. “A text that will make the real sea change that we’ve seen in the field these last few years readily and easily accessible and available to an English-speaking lay audience for the first time. And I also hope that they’ll see that the idea of “Ethiopia” as an isolated (Christian) island largely unconnected to the world that many people still hold in their heads (inherited from offhand remarks by 18th-century British historians like Edward Gibbon) has very little basis in both sources and scholarship these days.”
You can download the PDF version of ‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330–1500 CE for free from Cambridge University Press.
To learn more about the authors, please visit the websites for Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs.
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