manuscripts – German Historical Institute London Blog

Measures of Success and Failure: Remembering Money in Medieval History Writing

At the beginning of February, Marcus Meer’s project ‘Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)’ welcomed Gabriele Passabì to the team. Together, Dr Meer and Dr Passabì will look at why medieval chronicles abound in specific numeric references to sums of money (such as prices, taxes, debts, exchange rates) and broader discussions of monetary topics (about the debasement of currency, or problems with inflation or deflation, for example). Monetary rhetoric, the project argues, was a versatile communicative tool used in medieval chronicles to serve institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and to frame aspirations for the future. By investigating the monetary rhetoric of chronicles produced by and for cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the project will trace different manifestations of expanding monetary consciousness(es) and the economic thought and practice that accompanied them. In this post, they give a glimpse of their current work.

Knowledge Production between Mission, University, and Colonial Administration: Swahili Studies in Britain and Germany, 1840s–1940s

The brutalist Philips Building in central London does not look very inviting at first. Nevertheless, it is a magnet for students and researchers from all over the world working on Asia and Africa. Nowadays probably the most important institution in the Global North for research on the Global South, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) was originally founded in 1916 to train colonial officials and to produce knowledge about the British colonies.¹ Little trace of this remains—today, SOAS calls itself ‘The World’s University’ and is considered internationalist, left-wing, and anti-imperialist.

Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge, 2016). [↩]

New Publication on Manuscript Newsletters around 1700

The new volume Scribal News in Politics and Parliament 1660–1760, which has just been published as a special issue of the journal Parliamentary History, gathers twelve essays by scholars from Britain, Europe, and North America on the role of scribal news in reporting about parliament and politics in Britain between 1660 and 1760. The volume grew out of a one-day conference held between the History of Parliament and the German Historical Institute London (both institutions are neighbours on Bloomsbury Square) in December 2018 to explore a hitherto underinvestigated topic at the intersection of political and media history.

Ethiopia Illustrated: Manuscripts and Painting in Ethiopia – Examples from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century

The newly published anthology Ethiopia Illustrated: Church Paintings, Maps and Drawings is a result of my appointment as Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences in 2017. The suggestion was aired to publish a volume with my research articles on Ethiopian manuscripts and paintings, which had previously appeared in a variety of journals accessible to readerships in Europe and North America, but which were not easily accessible in Ethiopia. Such a project necessitated obtaining permission to republish the articles, which fortunately was quickly forthcoming. But it also necessitated obtaining funding to print not only seven articles, but also no fewer than 146 illustrations in one volume. The Ethiopian Academy Press was keen to do so, but asked if financial assistance was available.

The Greedy Dog – Gestures, Postures and Emotions Portraying Degrees of Vice and Virtue in the Sixteenth-Century Iyār-i Dānish

An outstanding illustration preserved as a detached folio in the Chicago Art Museum, attributed to the Mughal artist Farrukh Chela, illustrates the fable of the ‘Greedy Dog’ which forms one of the significant narratives from the Iyār-i Dānish,¹ a collection of stories written by Emperor Akbar’s historian and confidant, Abul Fazl, and illustrated in 1595–1600.

The Iyār-i Dānish was a collection of animal fables, whose tales served as an educational ‘mirror for princes’ for Mughal emperors. It was translated from an earlier version composed in Timurid Herat (present day Afghanistan) during the fifteenth century, and was illustrated multiple times by Mughal artists during the final quarter of the sixteenth century. [↩]