Society for the Medieval Mediterranean: al Masāq Prize Winners

al-Masāq Prize Winners We'll be hearing from the winners of the al-Masāq Prize, Angela Isoldi and Dr Alice Croq. Angela Isoldi, 'Tales of a traveling handbook: Authorship, structure and contents of a 15th-century medical manual for travellers' What if you had to leave for a long, dangerous trip through a vast land, and you had no one around with any medical skills? The answer comes from a fifteenth-century physician from Cairo, Ibn al-Amshāṭī (1409-1496), who wrote a short yet hacks-packed medical manual for a Vizir embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and gave it the title of al-Isfār ʿan ḥukm al-asfār (“Revealing the regime of travels”). This fascinating manual, which has survived in its manuscript form, was meant to accompany its bearer through the journey and to provide them with all the necessary advice to prevent and cure physical damages caused by the harsh environment. In this talk, we will explore how the contents of al-Isfār were selected and organized in order to fulfil this goal. Alice Croq, ‘Syrians in Cairo, copts in Damascus: The Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras as Seen from Christian Manuscripts and Islamic Documents’ During the 12th to 14th centuries, several cultural, economic, and social factors brought Syriac Christians to Egypt, whereas others led Copts to Damascus. My current research focuses on these (apparently) counterintuitive phenomena by bringing together different types of little-studied and hitherto unknown sources. The corpus mainly consists of scribal notes in Syriac and Christian Arabic manuscripts. To deal efficiently with the rich historical material in the manuscripts, I developed a database, SAMAD (The Syriac and Arabic Manuscript Database). My ongoing project is to cross-check the data thus obtained with newly discovered Islamic legal documents kept at the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem. This webinar was recorded on 19 February 2024 For more information: https:///www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/ Upcoming events: https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/whats-on/... Facebook:   / woolfinstitute   X (formerly Twitter): @Woolf_Institute