Irvin Cemil Schick – författare

This major reference work covers all aspects of architectural inscriptions in the Muslim world: the artists and their patrons, what inscriptions add to architectural design, what materials were used, what their purpose was and how they infuse buildings with meaning. From Spain to China, and from the Middle Ages to our own lifetime, Islamic architecture and calligraphy are inexorably intertwined. Mosques, dervish lodges, mausolea, libraries, even baths and market places bear masterpieces of calligraphy that rival the most refined of books and scrolls.

Women in the Ottoman Balkans were founders of pious endowments, organizers of labour and conspicuous consumers of western luxury goods; they were lovers, wives, castaways, divorcees, widows, the subjects of ballads and the narrators of folk tales, victims of communal oppression and protectors of their communities against supernatural forces. In their daily lives, they experienced oppression and self-denial in the face of frequently unsympathetic local customs, but also empowerment, self-affirmation, and acculturation. This volume not only deepens our understanding of the distinctive contributions that women have made to Balkan history but also re-evaluates this through a more inclusive and interdisciplinary analysis in which gender takes its place alongside other categories such as class, culture, religion, ethnicity and nationhood. This original and stimulating examination of the lives of Muslim, Christian and Jewish women in southeastern Europe during the centuries of Ottoman rule focuses especially on those social relations that crossed ethnic and confessional intercommunal boundaries.