Edited by Cassandre Lejosne and Adrien Palladino (Aiming for publication in 2027)

This edited volume explores how monasteries, scriptoria, and madrasas shaped the intellectual and artistic landscapes of medieval Eurasia. From Armenian and Georgian monasteries in the highlands of the Caucasus to Islamic centres of learning in Persia and India, these institutions were far more than sites of study. They were sites of translation, creation, and circulation of knowledge, technologies, and visual cultures.

Despite their significance, these institutions remain understudied as part of a broader, interconnected network. Often confined within national, linguistic, or religious historiographies, scriptoria, schools, and madrasas have been approached primarily through compartmentalized disciplinary lenses: architectural historians have explored their spatial design and symbolic vocabulary; manuscript scholars have focused on their roles as production sites; and cultural historians have traced ideas circulating through these spaces, frequently within narrowly defined religious frameworks—Christian or Islamic, but rarely both in comparative perspective.

This volume seeks to challenge and move beyond these limitations by rethinking the house of learning as a shared institutional archetype across Eurasia. Drawing from art history, archaeology, manuscript studies, intellectual history, and the history of science, the volume offers a series of interdisciplinary case studies that reposition these institutions within broader historical, cultural, and material networks. The Caucasus stands at the heart of this story—not as a remote frontier, but as a pivotal crossroads where Byzantine, Persian, Islamic, and local traditions converged, collided, and gave rise to new cultural syntheses. The volume traces these dynamics eastward, encompassing the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, regions still too often sidelined in conventional narratives of the medieval world. Houses of learning are considered here not as static institutions but as dynamic spaces where texts, images, and ideas were continually remade. Sacred writings were copied and interpreted, students and scholars crossed linguistic and institutional borders, and patrons mobilised architecture and manuscript culture to assert power or shape new identities. Beyond words, knowledge was produced through material practices—handling books, carving stone, organising space, performing rituals. Illuminated manuscripts, painted walls, and scientific instruments reveal how pedagogy, piety, and cultural contact were embedded in tangible media.

Covering the ninth to fourteenth centuries, the case studies situate monasteries, scriptoria, and madrasas within broader currents of political upheaval, theological innovation, and mobility. Far from isolated, they emerge as laboratories of synthesis and contestation, central to rethinking Eurasia as a landscape of circulation, encounter, and experiment.

Practical information

• Deadline for title and short abstract: November 1^st 2025
• Deadline for final paper: April 1^st 2026
• Words: 50-60,000 characters (footnotes and spaces included)

Please do not hesitate to contact both Adrien Palladino (adrien.palladino@phil.muni.cz) and Cassandre Lejosne (Cassandre.Lejosne@unil.ch) if you have any inquiries.