The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 1, Page 113-136, May 2023.
Historians have studied the medieval city from many different perspectives already, and even literary historians have endeavoured to identify the evidence in fictional texts pertaining to urban spaces and figures. In many cases, however, the cities as they emerge before our eyes are rather imaginary or dream-like, and lack in historical specificity. This situation changed, as this article demonstrates, with the case of Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220) and the verse narratives by Heinrich Kaufringer (ca. 1400). This study examines the data we can cull from both sides and presents it as the crucial indicator for the emergence of a new literary discourse dedicated to the world of late medieval cities. We begin to discover, though not yet in any consistent way, the formation of urban protagonists and of narrative contexts that are predicated on urban settings.

The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 1, Page 137-160, May 2023.
Drawing on earlier scholarship that argues for the existence of the middle classes in the Mughal Indian society, this article aims to render their sociocultural history more visible through a re-examination of the Mirzanama. The text, often associated with the elite, on the contrary, addresses the middling petty officialdom, advising them on micro-aspects of their sociocultural lives such as the etiquette of dining. Read imaginatively, the advisory reveals class consciousness—in terms of being distinct from both the nobility and the common populace—to be an important factor defining the middle-class way of life. Significantly, a micro-historical reflection, macro-historically helps us challenge the recently created dichotomy, in historical scholarship, between the elite and the non-elite, by reasserting the presence of sufficiently conscious middle strata.