Reading Revolutionaries: Texts,Acts, and Afterlives of Political Action in Late Colonial South Asia

This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the ‘revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary, we show that its genealogy reflects a wide range of political allegiances, ethical concerns, and aesthetic protocols. ‘Revolutionary’ not only suggests Marxist roots, but also reveals anarchistic, nationalistic, reformist, and socialist beliefs. Moreover, in our analysis, ‘revolutionary’ often escapes the grasp of the merely political: its use in popular discourse also suggests debates about violence, modernism, propaganda, cosmopolitanism, and utopianism. Consequently, we argue for the importance of historical context for understanding revolutionary thought, which is sensitive to an active rejection of rigid political categories or spectra.     

Outward Appearance of Children in Medieval Muslim Legal Texts: Modesty,Adornment and Gender

This article focuses on some aspects of boys' and girls' outward appearance in pre-modern Muslim societies according to medieval legal sources. These compendiums are analysed as the product of a continuing, two-way dialogue between law and reality, and as reflecting the desired norms side by side with existing customs. They were not created in a vacuum but are anchored in a local, socio-economic, cultural and political reality. Muslim jurists followed the physical and psychological changes of children, classified them, and concluded that these changes will be followed by changes in their outward appearance. They have constructed children's appropriate outward appearance according to age, gender distinctions, norms of modesty and manners of adornment. A careful examination of this legal discussion presents a case study of pre-modern traditional societies in which components of outward appearance reflect and construct at the same time norms of modesty, means of adornment and gendered socialisation of children's outward appearance.     

Wild Cattle: Red Deer in the Religious Texts,Iconography, and Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland

Humans use animals as a means of creating and manipulating relationships with other human beings. This process occurs both through the use of animals for food or raw materials and through the use of animals as literary and artistic symbols. Cervus elaphus is Irelands only indigenous deer species. It is also unique in being the only native Irish, wild animal to appear frequently in medieval texts, iconography, and archaeological deposits. This paper brings together diversesources of information to illuminate how early medieval monasteries used reddeer to establish an identity for themselves and to conceptualize socioeconomic relationships with others.     

Medieval Painted Pottery in South and Central Italy

DURING the 9th century unglazed pottery decorated with red or brown slip came into production along the middle Rhine. This pottery, known as Pingsdorf ware, was exported in large quantities to the North Sea region and even to the Baltic coast.² By the 12th century red-painted pottery, often imitating Pingsdorf ware, was made at a number of sites in the Low Countries and western France.³

It has long been known that painted pottery was manufactured throughout the medieval Islamic world, including north Africa, and isolated finds of painted ware have been published in Italy and Spain.⁴ Nevertheless, little attempt has been made to explore the possible connexions between painted pottery in the Mediterranean basin and western Europe,⁵ A serious obstacle to such an attempt is the inadequacy of most publications of Mediterranean finds. This paper offers an account of the painted wares in one area of the Mediterranean, peninsular Italy, and suggests that the pottery found there may indeed be related to the earliest painted wares north of the Alps. It must be emphasized, however, that the study of Italian medieval pottery is in its infancy and that the suggestions made here are of an entirely speculative nature.     

The Jewish Communities of Central Asia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

When the Jews first settled in Central Asia is uncertain, but circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that this happened at least two and a half thousand years ago. In the first millennium AD, the Jews lived only in cities no farther than 750?km east of the Caspian sea (in the eighth–eleventh centuries the sea was called Khazarian). Only later did they migrate to the central part of the region, to cities like Samarkand and Bukhara. It is possible that Jews from Khazaria joined them, since they already had tight trade connections with Central Asia and China. There is no trace of evidence regarding the existence of Jews in the entirety of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. At the very end of the sixteenth century Bukhara became the new ethnoreligious center of the Jews in that region. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to European travelers visiting Central Asia at that time, the term “Bukharan Jews” was assigned to this sub-ethnic Jewish group. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, this article aims to prove that the presence of Jews in Central Asia was not continuous, and therefore the modern Bukharan Jews are not descendants of the first Jewish settlers there. It also attempts to determine where Central Asia’s first Jewish population disappeared to.