Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod is a collection of studies on the portable arts, arts of the book, painting, photography, and architecture spanning the medieval and modern periods and across the historical Islamic lands. The essays reflect the wide-ranging interests and diverse methodologies of Renata Holod and attend to the physical, material, and aesthetic properties of their objects, offer nuanced explanations of complex relations between objects and historical contexts, and remain critically aware of the shape of the field of Islamic art and architecture, its canonical objects, approaches, and historiographies. Essential reading for scholars working on Islam and the Islamic world in the disciplines of history of art and architecture, history, literature, and anthropology. With contributions by María Judith Feliciano, Christiane Gruber, Leslee Katrina Michelsen, Nancy Micklewright, Stephennie Mulder, Johanna Olafsdotter, Yael Rice, Cynthia Robinson, David J. Roxburgh, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Alison Mackenzie Shah, and Pushkar Sohoni.

A collection of studies on the portable arts, arts of the book, painting, photography, and architecture spanning the medieval and modern periods and across the historical Islamic lands. The essays reflect the wide-ranging interests and diverse methodologies of Holod and attend to the physical, material, and aesthetic properties of their objects, offer nuanced explanations of complex relations between objects and historical contexts, and remain critically aware of the shape of the field of Islamic art and architecture, its canonical objects, approaches, and historiographies.

Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas, but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue. Contributors include: Charles Burnett, Jean-Charles Coulon, Maryam Ekhtiar, Noah Gardiner, Christiane Gruber, Bink Hallum, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Michael Noble, Rachel Parikh, Liana Saif, Maria Subtelny, Farouk Yahya, and Travis Zadeh.

Affect, Emotion and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires presents new approaches to Ottoman Safavid and Mughal art and culture. Taking artistic agency as a starting point, the authors consider the rise in status of architects, the self-fashioning of artists, the development of public spaces, as well as new literary genres that focus on the individual subject and his or her place in the world. They consider the issue of affect as performative and responsive to certain emotions and actions, thus allowing insights into the motivations behind the making and, in some cases, the destruction of works of art. The interconnected histories of Iran,Turkey and India thus highlight the urban and intellectual changes that defined the early modern period. Contributors are: Sussan Babaie, Chanchal Dadlani, Jamal Elias, Emine Fetvaci, Christiane Gruber, Sylvia Hougteling, Kishwar Rizvi, Sunil Sharma, and Marianna Shreve Simpson.

This splendidly illustrated book focuses on the botanical legacy of many parts of the former Ottoman Empire — including present-day Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, the Balkans, and the Arabian Peninsula — as seen and described by travellers both from within and from outside the region.

Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akın-Kıvanc explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akın-Kıvanc imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. This book provides the first analysis of the architecture of the Nizam Shahs. Pushkar Sohoni examines the critical relationship between architectural production, courtly practice and royal authority in a period when the aspirations and politics of the kingdom were articulated through architectural expression. Based on new primary research from key sites including the urban settlements of Ahmadnagar, Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Junnar and the port city of Chaul, Sohoni sheds light on broader Islamicate ideas of kingship and shows how this was embodied by material artefacts such as buildings and sites, paintings, gardens, guns and coins. As well as offering a vivid depiction of sixteenth-century South Asia, this book revises understanding of the cultural importance of the Nizam Shahs and their place in the Indian Ocean world. It will be a vital primary resource for scholars researching the history of the medieval and early modern Deccan and relevant for those working in Art History, Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies and Archaeology.

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, medieval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains, Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities. The contours of medieval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s medieval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital. Lushly illustrated and erudite, Marrakesh and the Mountains is a vital history of this storied Moroccan city. This is a must-have book for scholars specializing in the Almoravid and Almohad eras and a vital volume for students of medieval urbanism, Islamic architecture, and Mediterranean and African studies.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.

The most sacred site of Islam, the KaE ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.