audiobook Home Rule: Households; Manhood; and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (The Lamar Series in Western History) by Honor Sachs in History

Description

This original book untangles fundamental confusions about historical relationships among Islam; representational images; and philosophy. Closely examining some of the most meaningful and best preserved premodern illustrated manuscripts of Islamic cosmographies; Persis Berlekamp refutes the assertion often made by other historians of medieval Islamic art that; while representational images did exist; they did not serve religious purposes.The author focuses on widely disseminated Islamic images of the wonders of creation; ranging from angels to human-snatching birds; and argues that these illustrated manuscripts aimed to induce wonder at God's creation; as was their stated purpose. She tracks the various ways that images advanced that purpose in the genre's formative milieu--the century and a half following the Mongol conquest of the Islamic East in 1258. Delving into social history and into philosophical ideas relevant to manuscript and image production; Berlekamp shows that philosophy occupied an established; if controversial; position within Islam. She thereby radically reframes representational images within the history of Islam.