The Medieval History Journal

Once considered a dangerous Christian heresy, Manichaeism is now seen as an early world religion astriding the Silk Road. Evidence for its presence in China was found among the Chinese texts discovered in Dunhuang in 1911. Since then, research on the history of Manichaeism in China, both as a foreign religion in the Tang and Yuan periods and as a secretive folk religion in China associated with peasant rebellions under the Song, has benefited from a series of discoveries—texts, inscriptions, artefacts, archaeological sites, paintings and so on. This article will survey the new material found in the intervening century and examine how a new chapter in the religious history of China has been written by an international team of research scholars.

The relative freedom of movement and commercial efflorescence in Mongol Eurasia has received increasing attention. The Mongol conquest and the dissolution of internal trade barriers have been credited with this period of intensified travel and exchange. Moreover, the normative and structural quality of human mobility in medieval Eurasia has recently been characterized as premodern globalism. Yet, Goryeo Korea’s integration in that global phenomenon, though an integrated part of Mongol Eurasia as a Mongol-Yuan ally and satellite, is not well understood, nor is the pan-Eurasian experience of travel in the Mongol period. This study attempts a preliminary comparative investigation of Goryeo sources documenting travel– such as the Nogeoldae, Bak tongsa, and literati-official poetry–with well-known European and Inner Asian travelogues, such as William of Rubruck, to texturize experiences of travel across Mongol Eurasia. It argues that the experience of travel was structured by the postal relay system, but that a culture of identification still relied on routine oral suasion alongside tangible written credentials. Second, dangers and anxieties surrounding travel plagued all Eurasian travellers, yet these were localized to specific routes. Last, both ends of Eurasia demonstrate the simultaneity of interlinked continental and maritime circuits of travel and silver as the common currency of travel. The article is an effort to write Goryeo Korea into the global history of human mobility in Mongol Eurasia.

Throughout medieval Europe, Hebrew records were accepted as evidence of economic and legal activities. European archives, chanceries and cartularies are dotted with Hebrew signatures, lines of text and full-fledged documents. This article limits itself to one form of practical document that is defined, not by content, but by visual and linguistic features: Jewish bilingual charters, mainly in Latin and Hebrew. The article is an exercise in transnational history, comparing bilingual Jewish deeds from tenth- and eleventh-century Catalonia with parallel documents from thirteen-century England, fourteenth-century Germany and Austria at the turn of the fifteenth century. It analyses their bilingualism with particular attention to visuality and orality. The relationships between each pair of languages are examined using a visual criterion: the mise-en-page of the two languages on the parchment or in the book of records. Its conclusion applies as much to the tenth century as to the fourteenth century: Jews asserted their identity not by the content of their language but by the visual presence of Hebrew letters. Jews marked themselves with the Hebrew alphabet, while the content conveyed through these letters—whether in Aramaic, Hebrew, Norman-French, Catalan or German—was secondary.

This article studies the development of the political system in the Kingdom of Valencia between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It analyses the evolution of, and relations between, the general legal system, the royal government and administration and the main organs of power representing the political community of the kingdom. This case, which is supported by extraordinarily rich legislative and parliamentary sources, is an excellent example of the political transformations that were taking place across Europe during this period.