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'Oute of araby cometh the best': imported jewels, Arabic science and crusading nostalgia in medieval English lapidary traditions

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Silvia M. Marchiori .

In this talk, Eleanor Myerson will show how imported jewels were received in medieval England as geological witnesses of the Christian nature of the Holy Land, both inviting and evading possession. The late medieval jewel trade bore the legacies of crusading trade: the European fashion for pearls has been linked to cross-cultural contact in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, with Acre being a high-status pearl market. The geological origins of Syrian jewels implicated claims to their ownership in notions of the Holy Land as physical, possessable territory. The God-given natural agency of jewels became the basis for their widespread use in medicine – in combination with translated Arabic science. In medieval lapidaries, the catalogues of jewels in Exodus 28 and Revelation 21 are intertwined with economic and medicinal understandings of stones, in complex and contradictory ways.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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