Emilie Savage-Smith Livres

An up-to-date survey of medieval Islamic medicine offering new insights to the role of medicine and physicians in medieval Islamic culture.

About a millennium ago in Cairo, an unknown author completed a richly illustrated book that guided readers on a journey from the cosmos to Earth and its inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, remained unknown to modern scholars until a manuscript surfaced in 2000. The first general overview of this work, Lost Maps of the Caliphs, explores its unique insights into medieval Islamic thought. It begins with the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its acquisition by the Bodleian Library, using The Book of Curiosities to reassess the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in early Islamic history. The authors evaluate the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, revealing the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams and examining the palaces and walls in medieval Islamic town plans. Early astronomical maps illustrate the medieval understanding of the cosmos and the belief that celestial events influenced life on Earth. The book also reconsiders the history of global communication networks around the millennium, portraying the Fatimid Empire and Cairo as a maritime power with connections from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and East Africa. Ultimately, this work highlights The Book of Curiosities as a significant achievement in medieval mapmaking and a vital contribution to the narrative of Islamic civilization, offering a unique perspective on the medieval

Once upon a time, the universe was much simpler: before our modern understanding of an infinite formless space scattered with pulsating stars, revolving planets, and mysterious black holes, the universe was seen as a rigid hierarchical system with the earth and the human race at its center. Medieval Views of the Cosmos investigates this worldview shared by medieval societies, revealing how their modes of thought affect us even today.In the medieval world system—inherited by Christians and Muslims from the Greeks and Romans, and modified by their own religious tenets—spheres bearing the planets and stars wheeled around the earth, and at every level there was a moral lesson for humanity and a satisfying metaphor for the nature of God. The authors of this volume explain how the medieval view of the universe was harmonious on theological and practical levels, providing answers to the most puzzling of questions.Medieval Views of the Cosmos is an engaging and beautifully illustrated introduction to a world where every moment was a theater of human drama directed by the hand of God.