Faced with the choice between two themes that I suggested I might address this evening, the organisers of this event preferred me to speak as an historians' historian, rather than to opt for a topic of more general or current interest, and I have agreed to do so. Yet I should nevertheless be dissatisfied if those among you who do not particularly wish to be lectured to by historians were to be irked by an academic disquisition on some arcane matter. I shall therefore do my very best to ensure that those of you who are not historians, or who are not engaged professionally in the academic trade, shall leave this hall with somewhat more than the fleeting impression of an event. And I shall do so not least by suggesting that genesis, even the genesis of Islam, has more to do with Charles Darwin than with the Bible or the glorious associations of the Greek language, and that the reference to light in the title of my talk has more to do with reflective de-liberation than with exquisite colouration.

Medieval ‘dancing mania’ has until recently remained an enigma in medical and religious history. This is because scholars tend to view it as an invariable medical syndrome instead of examining it as an example of the historicity of illness as semantic network. Taking the latter approach allows for grasping the phenomenon as a form of insanity specific to the Rhine basin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though one whose roots can be traced to the early medieval reception of platonic cosmology and ‘theurgy’. This paper examines the legend of the Kölbigk dancers in the above perspective and establishes that its chief motif goes back to Sulpicius Severus’ reception of ‘Iamblichus’ ‘de mysteriis’. Thus, dancing mania appears to have been a form of insanity, indeed, but one constructed through religious narratives.

When the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) compiled the famous encyclopaedic history of Nahua culture generally known as the Florentine Codex (1578/79–80), he relied heavily on Nahua aides. Educated in the western humanist tradition and knowledgeable about their own world, these native collaborators were crucial to Sahagún's project. This article focuses in particular on the drawings of the Florentine Codex, analysing the close relationship between text and image in Book Twelve, which tells the story of the conquest of Mexico (1519–21). The drawings have received little scholarly attention as they lack the artistic features of what was regarded as ‘classic’ indigenous pictographic writing. This article argues that the tlacuiloque, the writers/painters of Book Twelve, did not merely sprinkle some elements of indigenous pictographic writing in more European style pictures, but created a new idiom to transmit their own way of visualising intertwined histories of conquest.

This article analyses the main aspects of the activities of the late medieval royal chapel, comparing several Iberian Christian monarchies. Three definitions of the chapel were proposed since medieval times: the chapel as a collection of liturgical objects, as the human group devoted to the king's service by performing the Christian cult, and as a specific space inside royal residences. All three were put to use for the reproduction of the specific position of kings in Christian societies, as it was expressed in liturgical activities and in devotional practices. Common patterns and mutual influences are analysed, and the example of two ceremonial practices shows that these were more current than it has been argued by historians of the early modern period.

Within Christian iconography and in medieval Christian cult practices, floral depictions play a major role. The genesis of such floral pictorial signs has not been addressed in art historical writing. This article attempts to trace the origins of the Christian floral iconography, investigates the perceptions and usages of such motifs in cult practices and proceeds to demonstrate the extent to which Christian sources shared a common under-standing with world religions such as Buddhism. Buddhist and Christian sources appear to have taken recourse to similar iconographic formulae in order to make abstract, invisible deities perceptible to the believer. Floral iconography in Christian cult practices was an effective medium to communicate Christ's birth through the Virgin Mary and the story of his unique Passion. By transcending common allusions to Incarnations, it is even able to transport meanings which help the believer to find consolation in his quest of the Christian afterlife.

This paper explores the story of Lady Tan across genres from biographical record to temple inscription and marvellous tale, highlighting different representations of ‘the local’ in these stories: the loss of local belonging for some, inscribing the morals of a local community for others. Focusing on this tale, this essay argues that locality and belonging were contested constructs, especially during the Song-Yuan-Ming transitional period. Ex-ploring how literati understood themselves in relation to their localities contributes to our understanding of literati identities and the meaning of ‘the local’, in a period with ‘weak central government’, or as a repeating pattern of centralisation and localisation. It reveals the complexities in-volved in giving meaning to locality and negotiating belonging. In Ji'an prefecture, the centralising policies of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors were felt locally and affected how literati positioned themselves between central government and local community. This focus on literati writings from a single prefecture suggests that a close reading of the negotiations that form part of constructing locality and belonging in Ji'an can reveal the potential for a complex interplay between central government and local communities throughout China.

India has a rich and hoary tradition of maritime ventures over millennia. Since the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Indian seafarers have voy–aged across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal and even beyond for trade, religious and cultural objectives. Through experience and inheri–tance over generations, these seamen acquired maritime craft skills and wisdom that formed the bedrock of a total navigational package that stood the test of time and survived till an instrumented modern technology took over.

The article discusses the spread of agriculture to an unprecedented degree in the period from c. A.D. 500 to 1300 (early medieval times) on the basis of both epigraphic and textual materials that also speak of considerable diversity of crops, including what may be considered as cash crops. The author pays attention to the role of metal—especially iron—technology in the development of agriculture during this period. It also argues for betterment in manuring. Inseparably associated with the expansion of agriculture—as an impact of the issuance of profuse number of land grants—are better irrigation technologies. The diversity of irrigation tech-niques and hydraulic projects, local and supra local, had intimate linkages with the variability of access to precious water resources in disparate areas of the subcontinent. In this connection, the article also offers early Indian perceptions of the monsoons; it also seeks to underline the meteor-ologists’ observations of the correlation between the flood-level in the Nile catchment area (by the use of the Nilometer) and the pattern of rainfall in the subcontinent on a long chronological range.

Historisches Seminar, Leibniz University, Hannover. E-mail: sabine.mueller@hist.uni-hannover.de The legend of the ancient Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great was infused with new life in the Middle Ages. Medieval literature cast him as a popular subject, a moral exemplum and a model to be emulated by the nobility. One important aspect of this legend was his relationship with women that can be read as a marker of the different representations of the Alexander figure and their cultural contexts. This study examines the Alexander legend as it was reinvented in three major medieval texts, writ-ten by the French cleric Gautier de Châtillon, the German writer Johann Hartlieb and the Persian poet Nizami. While Christian literary representa-tions reinvent Alexander as an ascetic, chaste figure, exalting fidelity to one woman, his wife Roxane and alternatively as an ideal of gallantry and courtliness, the Persian romance tradition portrayed him as an en-ergetic, polygamous lover. In each case, his attitude towards women is deployed as a symbol of his political attributes.