Walking through the streets of Florence in the late 14th century, Tatar slave female children could be easily observed. The existence of Tatar slaves is also confirmed in slave trade contracts, transport contracts, official documents of city governments, and contemporary literature. Genoa was the city with the highest proportion of Tatar slaves in the late 14th century. Between 1351 and 1380, the proportion of Tatar slaves in Genoa was 90.9 percent, and from 1381 to 1408 it was slightly lowered to 80 percent. More than half of the slaves traded in the Venetian market between the 1360s and 1450s were Tatar slaves. In the late 14th century, Florence was also one of the cities where the proportion of Tatar slaves was considerably high.
Who are these unfamiliar strangers of Tatar slaves unlikely to be met in Italian cities such as Florence, Genoa, and Venice in the Later Middle Ages? This article aims to reveal the ethnic identity of Tatar slaves mentioned in European documents of the Later Middle Ages, analyzing a register of slaves created in Florence in 1366. In 1366, the government of Florence ordered citizens that bought slaves to report their purchase of slaves and to pay taxes (35 Florin to 1 Florin tax). The analysis of this register of slaves permits us to confirm whether Tatar slaves frequently appearing in the Italian records of the Middle Age belonged to the same ethnic group or not.
Travel accounts, chronicles, and the papal correspondence revealed that the term of Tatar was used as a common word referring to Mongol. In general, Tatar slaves were regarded as Mongols in Medieval Europe, although in strict sense, the Mongols are ethnically different from the Tatars, that is an umbrella term for different Turkic ethnic groups bearing the name Tatar. However, it is likely that all Tatar slaves mentioned in the Florentine register of slaves did not belong to the same ethnic group in that they did not share common physical characteristics enough to regard them as one category. We may conclude that Tatars slaves encompass a broader group, even though the term of Tatar defines the Mongols. However, it is certain that Mongol slaves were so numerous to come across routinely in Italian cities in the Later Middle Ages.

This paper aims to examine “the circular model of existence” called “devir” in Turkish. There are various Sufi writings based on the concept of devir, which are called “devriyye” in the terminology of literary studies in Turkey. Originally, devir means the way that all beings have been manifested from Oneness and come back to Him, and has been imagined as a circle. Although devir is theoretically based on the Unity of Existence (Ar. Waḥdat al-wujūd), devriyye has not been analyzed enough from a philosophical perspective. In this paper, firstly I reveal the definition of devir through one of Niyazi-i Mıṣri (d. 1694)'s works, Risâle-i Devriyye (Treatise of Devriyye). Mıṣri is known as a Sufi poet positioned in Akbarian tradition taken from Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-'Arabī (d. 1240) renowned by the title of al-Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest master) and his followers. Secondly, to explore the positioning of devir as a Sufi terminology, I analyze other descriptions of devir in the commentary on Mıṣri's poems written by a representative Sufi Shaykh in 19th century Anatolia, Muḥammed Nuru'l-'Arabi (d. 1888).

This article reflects on the need to improve the dissemination of the research activity carried out within universities. It is based on a specific and personal case: the author's experience within the Visionarias Project (www.visionarias.es), which works to rescue the hagiographic and mystical literature of Castilian women between 1400 and 1550. The article is divided into five parts: the first part is devoted to the role of women in the dissemination of knowledge in late medieval Europe; the second part deals with the literary and cultural activity of two Castilian nuns: Juana de la Cruz and Maria de Santo Domingo; the third part briefly presents the Visionarias Project; the fourth reflects on the usefulness of performative studies and theatre in the study and dissemination of female texts; and the fifth part puts forward some ideas on how to use social networks in favour of true scientific dissemination.

This paper deals with the scopic enactment and negotiation of the scalar dynamics of gendered nationalism and their implication for women's third prison in the Egyptian post-independent setting. Women's Third prison is a critical category referencing Middle Eastern women's intersectional positioning between kinship feudally-inflected patriarchy and political familism with the latter constituting the panacea and pinnacle for the imagination and gender imaging of women placed in the national body-politics. The paper tackles the questions of the gender politics of nationalism and their scopic drive underpinning the cinematic adaptation of the gender story of the nation from text to screen along two historical contexts―the period of developmental and global modernity. Adopting a multicultural feminist approach, the paper examines three cinematic adaptations of two novels and a play. These are Idris' Al'Ayb (Disgrace 1962), al-Zayat's Al-Bab al-Maftouh (Open Door 1960) and al-Asaal's Segn al-Nisa (Women's Prison 1882). The paper approaches the adaptations - Idris and Khalifa's Al'Ayb (Disgrace 1967), Youssef Issa and Latifa al-Zayat's al-Bab al-Maftouh (Open Door 1963), Abu Zikri and Naoum's Segn al-Nisa (Women's Prison 2014) - through both McClintock's framework on the gender politics of nationalism (1997), Hucheon's notion of “the context of creation … and reception” (Hutcheon 2006, 15) and Mulvey's take on the visual pleasure of narrative cinema. The paper capitalizes on the medially induced turn in Translation Studies (Littau 2011) with its attention to context and media as parameters and venues for constructing the self-image of national cultural identity. The paper argues for the following: first, the significance of the context of creation and reception as a regulating and shaping parameter for the politics of adaption - conceived in repertoire with the narrative reservoir and scopic schemes shaping the horizon of expectation of the target audience; second, the technologies of violence of gendered nationalism and its scopic enactment of the scalar dynamics of social hierarchy through the visual narrativization of the gender story of Western styled nation-state. Third, the visual narrativization of national cinematic adaptation administers a transmedia story-telling within the scopic regime of modernity and global modernity. Fourth, Western styled nationalism negotiated the inherent paradox of modern nation-state through the social-contractual relation of women to national body politics - visually narrativized through the Egyptian styled pleasure of national cinema fetishistic scopophilia. Ultimately, the paper argues for the sustainable persistence of women's third prison, whose metamorphosing visual narrativization tolls the knell for the nation-state's hyphen putting the current social order in jeopardy with no redemption for a viable alternative.

Determination of economic performance over the long run requires an analysis of the supply-side factors as a priority, rather than the demand-side factors. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to measure the growth and the contributions of each supply-side factor in the four selected Arab countries from 1991 to 2019, and then, to describe the dynamics of economic growth type of each country by decade. The findings suggest that firstly, even for countries that are in the same sub-region, the types of economic growth are totally different by country. Secondly, the type of economic growth in each country has changed according to their economic policy, and it has appeared that only one country among the selected Arab countries, that is, Morocco, has successfully changed its growth type from input-driven growth into TFP-driven growth for the period, in other words, from extensive growth to intensive growth.