The fifteenth-century travel regimen entitled al-Isfār ʿan ḥikam al-asfār (‘The unveiling of the wisdoms of the books’) written by the Cairene jurist-physician Ibn al-Amshāṭī (d. 1496) is an interesting example of the postclassical medical literature. It includes, besides a travel regimen (written likely as a health guide for the pilgrimage to Mecca), a short pharmacopoeia of single and compound remedies deemed useful for the traveller. The work was composed for Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bārizī (d. 1452), the head of the Mamluk Chancery. The Arabic edition, English translation, and commentary of this text are framed by a detailed introductory study of the Arabic-language tradition of travel regimens and various medico-pharmacological glossaries.

This collection of Sonja Brentjes's articles deals with travels, encounters and the exchange of knowledge in the Mediterranean and Western Asia during the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing on three historiographical concerns. The first is how we should understand the relationship between Christian and Muslim societies, in the period between the translations from Arabic into Latin (10th - 13th centuries) and before the Napoleonic invasion of Ottoman Egypt (1798). The second concern is the "Western" discourse about the decline or even disappearance of the sciences in late medieval and early modern Islamic societies and, third, the construction of Western Asian natures and cultures in Catholic and Protestant books, maps and pictures. The articles discuss institutional and personal relationships, describe how Catholic or Protestant travellers learned about and accessed Muslim scholarly literature, and uncover contradictory modes of reporting, evaluating or eradicating the visited cultures and their knowledge.

Ibn al-Amshāṭī's (d. 1496) travel regimen, written likely as a health guide for the pilgrimage to Mecca, furthers our understanding of postclassical medicine, the history of travel medicine, and pharmacology, with an English translation making the text widely accessible.

In Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam Housni Alkhateeb Shehada offers the first comprehensive study of veterinary medicine, its practitioners and its patients in the medieval Islamic world, with special emphasis on the Mamluk period (1250-1517).

The first monograph on Islamic hospitals, this volume examines their origins, development, architecture, social roles, and connections to non-Islamic institutions.

Offering insights and analysis in a field that has only recently come into existence, this book explores the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies—from the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. to the present day—have confronted poverty and the poor. By introducing new sources and presenting familiar ones with new questions, the contributors examine ideas about poverty and the poor, ideals and practices of charity, and state and private initiatives of poor relief over this extensive time span. They avoid easy generalizations about Islam and the Middle East as they seek to set the ideals and practices in comparative perspective.

Yaron Ayalon explores the Ottoman Empire's history of natural disasters and its responses on a state, communal, and individual level.

Specialists in other languages offer perspectives on the widespread use of French in a range of contexts, from German courtly narratives to biblical exegesis in Hebrew. French came into contact with many other languages in the Middle Ages: not just English, Italian and Latin, but also Arabic, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Occitan, Sicilian, Spanish and Welsh. Its movement was impelled by trade, pilgrimage, crusade, migration, colonisation and conquest, and its contact zones included Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, among others. Writers in these contact zones often expressed themselves and their worlds in French; but other languages and cultural settings could also challenge, reframe or even ignore French-users' prestige and self-understanding. The essays collected here offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the use of French in the medieval world, moving away from canonical texts, well-known controversies and conventional framings. Whether considering theories of the vernacular in Outremer, Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages, or the literary patronage of aristocrats and urban patricians, their interlocutions throw new light on connected and contested literary cultures in Europe and beyond.

The authors provide a new insight to the practice of medical care in the medieval world. They examine the medicinal prescriptions and references to materia medica of the Cairo Genizah by combining the approaches of ethnobotany and history of medicine.

In this volume, twelve essays by leading scholars of Mamluk history provide an informative reading and insightful analysis of the political, social and economic systems of Egypt and Syria under Mamluk rule (125-1517).