Can We Talk Mediterranean

This book provides a systematic framework for the emerging field of Mediterranean studies, collecting essays from scholars of history, literature, religion, and art history that seek a more fluid understanding of “Mediterranean.” It emphasizes the interdependence of Mediterranean regions and the rich interaction (both peaceful and bellicose, at sea and on land) between them. It avoids applying the national, cultural and ethnic categories that developed with the post-Enlightenment domination of northwestern Europe over the academy, working instead towards a dynamic and thoroughly interdisciplinary picture of the Mediterranean. Including an extensive bibliography and a conversation between leading scholars in the field, Can We Talk Mediterranean? lays the groundwork for a new critical and conceptual approach to the region.

A selection of essays examining the significance of what Jewish history and Mediterranean studies contribute to our knowledge of the other. Jews and the Mediterranean considers the historical potency and uniqueness of what happens when Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Jews meet in the Mediterranean region. By focusing on the specificity of the Jewish experience, the essays gathered in this volume emphasize human agency and culture over the length of Mediterranean history. This collection draws attention to what made Jewish people distinctive and warns against facile notions of Mediterranean connectivity, diversity, fluidity, and hybridity, presenting a new assessment of the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean.

Recounts a Jewish-born Catholic priest's effort to prove he was Catholic to anyone who doubted him, including himself.

Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis. In this context, Critically Mediterranean asks how the theories and methodologies of Mediterranean studies may be brought to bear upon the modern and contemporary periods. Contributors explore how the Mediterranean informs philosophy, phenomenology, the poetics of time and space, and literary theory. Ranging from some of the earliest twentieth-century material on the Mediterranean to Edmond Amran El Maleh, Christoforos Savva, Orhan Pamuk, and Etel Adnan, the essays ask how modern and contemporary Mediterraneans may be deployed in political, cultural, artistic, and literary practice. The critical Mediterranean that emerges is plural and performative—a medium through which subjects may negotiate imagined relations with the world around them. Vibrant and deeply interdisciplinary, Critically Mediterranean offers timely interventions for a sea in crisis.

"Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean Genoese Merchants and the Spanish Crown. This book examines the alliance between the Spanish Crown and Genoese merchant bankers in southern Italy throughout the early modern era, when Spain and Genoa developed a symbiotic economic relationship, undergirded by a cultural and spiritual alliance. Analyzing early modern imperialism, migration, and trade, this book shows that the spiritual entente between the two nations was mainly informed by the religiousdivision of the Mediterranean Sea. The Turkish threat in the Mediterranean reinforced the commitment of both the Spanish Crown and the Genoese merchants to Christianity. Spain's imperial strategy was reinforced by its willingness to acculturate to southern Italy through organized beneficence, representation at civic ceremonies, and spiritual guidance during religious holidays. Celine Dauverd is Assistant Professor of History and a board member of the Mediterranean Studies Group at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on sociocultural relations between Spain and Italy during the early modern era (1450-1650). She has published articles in the Sixteenth Century Journal, the Journal of World History, Mediterranean Studies, and the Journalof Levantine Studies"--

Queering the Medieval Mediterranean analyzes the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses. It highlights the importance of queerness and sexuality developed on the Mediterranean trade routes.

By exploring the transcultural nature of Mediterranean crime fiction, Barbara Pezzotti advocates for a regional 'reading' of the genre.

Reading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interactions between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.