A survey of the definition and historiography of 'Islamic art' and the various approaches to studying it.
BiosSheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom share the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. A wife-andhusband team of scholars, they are the authors, singly and together, of more than a dozen award-winning books and several hundred articles on all aspects of Islamic art.
Paper was invented in China in the centuries before Christ and carried by Buddhist monks throughout East and Central Asia (Tsien, 1985), where Muslim Arabs encountered it in the eighth century CE. Muslims carried paper and papermaking to the Mediterranean region, and European Christians there learned how to make it by the twelfth century. Europeans not only forgot their debt to Muslim papermakers but also remained ignorant of paper's origins in China, so that when they first encountered Chinese paper in the sixteenth century, they thought that the Chinese must have learned the art of papermaking from the ancient Egyptians! Europeans then carried paper and papermaking, along with printing, throughout the globe. While the history of paper has traditionally been overshadowed by the history of printing, the spread of paper and papermaking is arguably equally important, for this relatively permanent, cheap, and flexible material not only encouraged the spread of written culture across the globe but also transformed many other human activities.This paper studies mobilities of knowledge from the perspective of paper making by examining how and when this technique diffused from China across Eurasia to the Mediterranean region and from there to the rest of Europe in the period between 600 and 1500. The main factors that enhanced and impeded this spatial diffusion of knowledge were the availability of raw materials and the adoption of differing technologies, but the roles of mediating aspects such as religion, trade, emigration, imports, and exports will also be discussed.
Pages 2108-2116. The PDB codes for the X-ray complexes of compounds 3a and 14i with NS5B were not indicated. Coordinates for the X-ray crystal structures have been deposited into the RCSB Protein Databank at www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/ home.do; the PDB codes for the X-ray complexes of compounds 3a and 14i with NS5B are 2qe5 and 2qe2, respectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.