Operas, novels, and religious instructions: life-stories of Tibetan Buddhist masters between genre classifications

The present volume contains case-studies of hagiographies from various cultural and religious backgrounds and explores context specific and culturally embedded narrative strategies of religious life-writing. Tibet has a vast and vibrant tradition of religious biography and autobiography, and the articles by Sernesi, Scherer and Schwieger in this volume illustrate its richness by an in-depth analysis of selected (and in part rather unexpected) examples of this literature. The present article tries to provide a somewhat more general framework, introducing several types of hagiographies and their respective textual structures and relating their narrative format to the purposes and the effects they may have on their audience. My focus is on traditional religious life-writing from Tibet, but the features observed here can easily be extended to contemporary biographies and modern contexts, as the contributions by Schwieger and Scherer in this volume show. I restrict myself to written life-stories, but it should be born in mind that Tibet has a lively and vibrant oral tradition of storytelling as well, including the life stories of Buddhist masters which are often recounted at religious gatherings, such as public teachings or rituals, or in the context of pilgrimage

Revisiting the Mamlūk empire : political action, relationships of power, entangled networks, and the sultanate of Cairo in late medieval Syro-Egypt

This chapter’s questions the commonly assumed link between political practices of integration and integrity on the one hand – which appear as empirical realities from many sources and studies – and the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate of Cairo (13th-16th centuries) as a dominant, autonomous and imperial historical actor on the other. It problematizes in particular the holistic nature of these assumptions, their merely descriptive value for understanding the region’s history, and the potentially misleading consequences of their normative character. At the same time, this chapter proposes to reflect further on the powerful idea of the Sultanate as an empire. It actually considers this notion of “empire” as a useful way out of this predicament, because it invites to engage with insights from other fields of historical research and to define valuable analytical tools, including from social network theory, to further and refine current assumptions about and understandings of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action. Confronting such tools with various cases from the center and the peripheries of that Syro-Egyptian political action, this chapter argues that the imperial appearances of the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate were always constructed in the micro-history of people and their negotiation of particular cultural, socio-economic and political relationships, which were extremely fluid and multivalent, permeable, and continuously organized around the court in Cairo