Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and – against their will – to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

This chapter explores the ongoing and novel merging of gold mining with organized crime, highlighting the relation of drug trafficking, land grabbing, and other related sectors to deforestation. The recent gold-mining expansion and boom in the Amazon is linked to gold markets and the global political economy. The chapter scrutinizes the rise of narco-gold mining, linking drug trade, organized criminal groups, and money laundering with rainforest gold and the surge of authoritarian and mafia-like power. During the Bolsonaro era there was a significant deepening of the link between gold-mining activities and organized drug traffickers and criminal networks. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga. This chapter utilizes field research experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations to illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by communities currently being pressured and divided by increasing gold extraction in their territories. In the end of the chapter the discussion turns to solutions for how to address these and other root causes of deforestation in political economy.

The final chapter entitled Conclusions contains a summary of the findings of the study, explaining the key motivations and claims behind the Galenic understanding of bodily unity.

This chapter looks at the ways in which Galen posits the theoretical unity among the discrete physiological system, especially with a reference to tripartition. Unlike Platonic, the tripartition that is motivated by psychological conflict, Galen’s tripartition of physiological domains shows the three domains to be highly cooperative and co-dependent on each other. The respective material fluxes they control are together necessary for continued functioning. The chapter looks at Galen’s adoption of the popular philosophical idea that identity persists because of the form, and at his analysis of different causes, strongly influenced by the ideas of his contemporary Middle Platonists. While more popular analyses of causes explain that the body is unified in its design, it is the notion of cohesive cause, the chapter argues, that accounts for unified physiological functioning.

Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125-7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed voyages that would change the face of the known world forever. Travellers crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, undertook journeys to Mecca and the Holy Land, to the Near and Far East, to Europe and Africa. In 1492, the New World was discovered when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and in 1500 Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese by a fleet heading for India commanded by the diplomat Pedro Álvares Cabral. Travel writers from Iberia departed from a place with a fluid geographical and cultural identity in its own right. Playing host over the course of its history to people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages, Iberia has always been a place of cultural interchange and political flux. Travel writing is also a key part of medieval Iberia’s rich narrative tradition in which it presents universal and particular experiences which are contingent on the delicate relationship between fact and fiction.

That Jesus Christ is sinless is utterly uncontroversial within orthodox Christianity. But the modality of that sinlessness (whether it is necessary that Christ was without sin) and the explanation of that sinlessness (why it is the case that Christ did not sin, and perhaps even could not have sinned) have been the objects of intense christological controversy. This chapter considers and evaluates multiple explanatory models for Christ’s sinlessness, which lead to different accounts of whether and why Christ is impeccable.

Unlike rabbinic literature or medieval Jewish philosophy, travel writing has rarely been considered part of the Jewish canon and, as a result, has merited little discussion and analysis by modern scholars until fairly recently. Hebrew travel writing as a literary genre, broadly defined, first emerged in the context of the crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean also facilitated a renewed Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places in the Levant. The fact that the social context of this genre was the medieval European pilgrimage movement is the reason that most of its authors turned to Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic, which was the preferred written language of Jews in the Islamicate world. It also explains the closeness in form and some of the content between these Hebrew travel accounts and contemporaneous Christian-authored texts, such as the itinerarium or peregrinatio. At the same time, medieval Hebrew travel writings include place-specific information and lore similarly known from Arabic (Muslim-authored) literature of travel and geography.

Research in political science, economics, and public policy has primarily examined two types of government housing programs. The first involves low-income public housing in advanced industrialized nations like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, where beneficiaries receive subsidized rental housing or housing benefits without property rights. In contrast, research from cities in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia has focused on policies that grant land titles to residents of slums and informal settlements, providing property rights without additional housing benefits. I focus on a third type of program, understudied yet prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, including India: subsidized homeownership. It is theoretically distinct from rental programs or those accommodating informal settlements because it involves a large in-kind transfer and property rights. I argue that these initiatives uniquely influence how citizens invest in the future, escape poverty, develop agency (or what I call dignity) in social relationships, and wield power in local politics. To support this theory, I outline a multi-method study across three different programs.