Sharing a Taste? Material Culture and Intellectual Curiosity around the Mediterranean, from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Century

Within the context of a research project that seeks to explore new concepts and, possibly, arrive at more productive paradigms, it is interesting to observe the degree to which the study of the transfer of artefacts between the Islamic Middle East and Europe has already evolved away from early art-historical modes of enquiry. It has become increasingly attuned to the need to take account not only of political and economic factors but also of ideological issues, and has begun to address what may be couched in contemporary terms as hybridity and transformations of meaning and identity. Above all, alongside the perennial concern with periodic conflict set against a background of wary coexistence, recent approaches have shown a greater awareness of transcultural impingement, so that however fundamentally a European phenomenon the Renaissance may be, it can be seen as one within which contacts with the Islamic world were embedded