It is fitting that Doris’s latest book, Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic World, is concerned with diplomatic gifts and exchanges, and artistic and intellectual influences through Mamluk and subsequent dynastic trade contacts. This theme is reflected in the contributions to this volume by her students and colleagues, bringing to light artistic exchanges that occurred between successive Islamic dynasties and those further afield in China, India, and Europe, from the twelfth to the nineteenth century.

An initial glance at the contents page may give the reader an impression of eclecticism, but a closer look confirms that there are multiple threads linking the articles together. They all present original research, many of them taking advantage of innovative scientific means, allowing the reader to re-examine familiar objects, as in the detailed study by Moya Carey of a pen box in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Given Doris’s outstanding contribution to our understanding of the arts and architecture of the Mamluk period, it is only to be expected that many of the articles focus on aspects of Mamluk artistic production and exchange. Sami de Giosa considers tile production during the reign of Qaytbay, Alison Ohta, the book bindings associated with Qansuh al-Ghawri, Maria Sardi, the depiction of fish on Mamluk textiles, and Rachel Ward, the relationship between Mamluk metalwork and Rasulid Yemen. Nikolaos Vryzidis’s contribution looks westwards and illustrates the reuse of a Mamluk lamp within a Greek ecclesiastical context, demonstrating how the Orthodox Church participated in eastern Mediterranean trade in the late medieval period.

Islamic art and epigraphic studies have progressed in leaps and bounds since Doris Behrens- Abouseif first enrolled at the American University in Cairo in the mid-1970s to study for her MA in Islamic Art and Architecture, but as modern development competes to destroy the fabric of many monuments, we still rely on the visual records of the early pioneers such as van Berchem, Wiet, Herzfeld, and Creswell to improve our knowledge. These resources have provided a solid foundation for Doris’s extensive list of published works and she has painstakingly encouraged her students to utilise them too, along with waqf records and other documentary sources. This is reflected in papers concerned with epigraphy on buildings of the Fatimid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. Bernard O’Kane and Bahia Shehab examine the inscriptions on the Mausoleum of Yahya al-Shabih in Cairo while Bora Keskiner looks at how a Mamluk inscription from the Qartawiyya Madrasa in Tripoli was replicated in Istanbul during the Ottoman period.

Doris has also been keen to capture the impact of relationships between the East and West and Melanie Gibson explores this theme in her article on the taste for ‘Persian’ tiles in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, while Jeremy Johns examines the relationship between the ceilings in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the Moukhroutas Palace in Constantinople. Tim Stanley explores the unacknowledged debt that European lacquer works owe to Persian craftsmen.