The medieval Middle Eastern countryside was a dynamic space populated by groups uniting around powerful patrons, distinct religious practices, and a variety of languages. These groups, contrary to our expectations of a “community”, were often destabilised, negotiated, dismantled, and reconfigured. As a way to capture this dynamism, in light of literature and epigraphy, this talk explores a group of demographic categories that are often sidelined in our conventional taxonomies of the medieval Middle Eastern society – such as rulers and subjects, clergy and lay people, elite and non-elite.
Reyhan Durmaz is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the history of religion, particularly Christianity, in the late antique and medieval Middle East, with a recent book examining the transmission of saints’ stories between Christianity and Islam.
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