SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter aims both to expand and to question traditional fixed categorizations of works of art and the medieval cultures around the central and eastern Mediterranean that produced them. Like the Serce Limani glassware, many works of art crossed political and religious boundaries between societies in which varieties of Christianity or Islam were dominant. The chapter then focuses on the model of transculturation, the ability of objects to share, or accrue, meanings across the cultural and confessional divide. The phenomenon of transculturation, however, is by no means exclusively modern but rather has existed throughout history and is manifest in a wide variety of medieval Islamic material culture. The chapter argues that peculiar historical, geographical, and cultural circumstances caused a surge in many different kinds of exchange within and across the realms of the court and commerce in the Mediterranean between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.