Xu Shanwei Encounters the Mediterranean

About this series

The Mediterranean was a sea of war, but also a sea travelled by merchant ships, pilgrims, translators, physicians, craftspeople, and books.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Latin West re-entered a world connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. Here, westerners encountered Byzantine, Arabic, Jewish, and more distant eastern civilizations. Through warfare, trade, migration, religious activity, and translation, they met things previously unfamiliar to them: new medicine, mathematics and astronomy, navigational techniques, foods and clothing, urban ways of life, poetry, and ideas about love.

These things did not move unchanged from one civilization to another. They were translated between languages, questioned across faiths, assigned new values in markets and courts, and put to new uses in schools, ports, homes, and at the table. Knowledge from elsewhere became local institutions; foreign objects became everyday necessities; unfamiliar ideas eventually became part of what people took for granted.

Xu Shanwei Encounters the Mediterranean takes Xu’s doctoral thesis, The Westward Transmission of Eastern Learning and the Revival of Western Culture, as its foundation. Drawing on work from the past three decades in Mediterranean history, translation studies, the history of science, archaeology, and material culture, it uses a historian’s first-person voice to tell stories unfolding at cultural boundaries.

The series treats neither East nor West as a self-contained whole, and does not reduce cultural exchange to a one-way transfer. It asks where people met, how they misunderstood one another, how they learned from and transformed foreign things, and why a culture eventually made something once unfamiliar part of its own tradition.

A compass, a bathhouse, a translated book, a merchant ship moored in port, a poem about love: together, these particular stories form a history of culture in motion.

Reading note

The series uses a first-person historical voice addressing an implied reader. Xu Shanwei enters the narrative as a historian who selects evidence, raises questions, and makes judgments. It invents no personal experiences and does not turn disputed scholarly arguments into unqualified conclusions. Historical evidence, the author’s interpretation, and later research are read in relation to one another.

Starting from the Mediterranean, we reconsider how culture takes shape through encounters.

Scholarly source: Xu Shanwei. Editorial adaptation and complete English rendering: Shitu, with AI assistance. The first-person narrator is an editorial construction based on Xu’s scholarly perspective, not a transcript of his words, a new article by him, or an invented account of his travels. Each essay gathers its sources and the boundary between evidence and interpretation at the end.

Read the published essays

3 published · Five parts, 34 planned essays

1. 1. The Mediterranean Reopens to the WestSep 30, 2026, 10:05 PM ET
2. 2. Three Languages in SicilyOct 1, 2026, 11:28 AM ET
3. 3. Frederick II’s Multilingual CourtOct 3, 2026, 08:05 AM ET

Scholarly foundation

Xu Shanwei, The Westward Transmission of Eastern Learning and the Revival of Western Culture (a working translation of the Chinese title). The supplied Chinese manuscript is the foundation; later evidence is checked and identified separately in each essay.