Classical Persian literature offers very few autobiographies. We tend to admire the works of great poets in that tradition, in this case Amir Khusraw, without knowing much about them as individuals. If Khusraw’s poems are like flowers, “Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders” shows the gardens where the flowers grew. Alyssa Gabbay’s fluid translation brings to…
Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from a medieval synagogue in Cairo. Craig Perry examined these…
At the turn of the 17th century, Florentine Francesco Carletti left from Seville with his father Antonio for Cape Verde, where they were planning to buy slaves for resale in the Caribbean. He ended up in an almost decade-long circumnavigation of the world, the first private citizen to do so. His travels took him to…
Lavishly illustrated, Samurai explores the reality and myths of the samurai from medieval times to today’s popular culture through objects from international collections. Essays by scholars throughout the book discuss the warrior class’s historical origins in the medieval period’s civil wars and stories they told of their own achievements. Although the samurai social class was…
It’s a spring evening in 1921 in Bangalore. Nineteen year-old newlywed Kaveri Murthy is dining with her husband at the posh Century Club when there’s a murder.