Islamic Artefacts in the Mediterranean World:
Trade, Gift Exchange and Artistic Transfer

The book focuses on the biographies of islamic artefacts which are not thought to end with the place and moment (or time span or places) of their creation / production, but rather to initiate there. The migrating artefacts studied in this volume are not considered as "pure" objects, reflecting an original idea of an artist, rather the essays collected here concentrate on processes of reuse, reframing and transforming "Islamic" objects in Christian contexts, if not on the dynamics of migration itself. Even if an object remains physically intact or unaltered, it can become "different" in a new setting and the way it has been observed.

In short, the book poses the question of how artefacts migrate between "cultures" and how they "lived" and were seen within specific aesthetic or cultural value systems, which in turn are not to be understood as closed entities.