State Debate & Knowledge Collaboration among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the Abbasid Near East, II

In this volume we introduce the debate as a new format in Medieval Worlds. In this format, scholars are invited to contribute to current topics of interest either with an essay or with comments to this essay. The series is opened with a lively discussion of the concept of “state” in medieval studies and offers contributions by Brent D. Shaw, Nichola Di Cosmo, Stefano Gasparri and Cristina La Rocca, Hans-Werner Goetz, John Haldon, Yannis Stouraitis and Régine Le Jan. In our stand-alone article series, Michaela Wiesinger, Christina Jackel and Norbert Orban discuss first results of their ground-breaking ERC project Arithmetic, in which German mathematical treatises from the Late Middle Ages are studied. The second stand-alone contribution by Andrew Wareham compares English and Chinese sources with regard to peacemaking around the turn of the 11th century. The second instalment of our thematic section on Knowledge Collaboration among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the Abbasid Near East (guest editor Nathan P. Gibson) presents further studies on textual evidence of “other” (religions) as well as insights into possible uses of digital tools in this context.