The enamelled Islamic dish which is in the Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck is well known to scholars of Islamic art. It is a unique and outstanding piece of work, yet, surprisingly, so far no monograph has been devoted to it. One of the earliest references to this object was made by Max van Berchem and J. Strzygowski. In 1910 it was on show at the famous Islamic exhibition in Munich. Then the dish was included in Alois Riegel's publication, which came out soon after World War I. The late L. A. Mayer mentioned it again briefly in connexion with a small glass bottle in the British Museum, which, like the dish, depicts dancing girls. Then an article by Hugo Buchtal referred to it once more. More recently the dish was described and illustrated by Sir Harry Garner.

Precious building materials have always been used over and over again — the spoils of the architectural war. A section of the Colosseum is now the Palazzo Farnese and the Church of the Wisdom of God in the respectable Surrey town of Kingswood harbours capitals from Ephesus, the Studion, and the Myrelaion in Istanbul, besides a quantity of Byzantine marble. Precious marbles were transported far and wide by sea and, although it is not surprising that porphyry from the Red Sea coast of Egypt is used in the Pantheon, it is interesting that Giallo Antico from Algeria or Tunisia and Pavonazzetto from Phrygia which decorated, for example, the Basilica Julia in Rome have been found at provincial Colchester.

It is common knowledge that the term used to denote the fluid product of suppuration at the site of an infection of tissue is “pus”. Less well known, perhaps, is the use of the term qualified by the adjective “laudable”. This is hardly surprising since even in medical circles “laudable pus” is nowadays rather an expression familiar to historians of medicine than a terminological commonplace currently circulating among practitioners of the art. Prior to World War II, however, the expression seems to have been common enough in popular parlance; it was part of the vocabulary of folk-medicine. Moreover, it is worth noting that in 1939 it still merited inclusion (s.v. “pus”) in Gould's Pronouncing medical dictionary. In that work it is defined as “a whitish, inodorous pus, formerly thought to be essential to healing of wounds”. Before proceeding to our main focus of interest it is important to point out that such a definition reflects the position of Galenic thinking and not that of the more advanced practitioners of 19th-century medicine. In the age of Lister (1827–1912) laudable pus was bluish-green matter characterized by the presence of what we now know to be a natural antibiotic, namely pyocyanin, generated by the organism Pseudomonas pyocyanea. Nowadays no pus is considered “laudable”, and the expression, to all intents and purposes, went out with Listerian surgery. So much for the purely medical aspect of the question.

In the Middle Ages the learned, who expected to control public behaviour and belief, tried to give their theories the force of law. Theology was the peak of the system, and canon law, though autonomous, naturally developed in parallel, and without conflict. True and false data about Islam were set in the framework of Catholic theology, and Islam, and the history of the Prophet as well, were defined in European terms unrecognizable by Arabs. The theology of Crusade was the theology of European relations with Islam; theology and history alike were little more than supporting propaganda for aggression, while canon law defined the limits within which the war was supposed to take place.

The maps which will be noticed here are evidently closely related to the wellknown Portolan charts of Italian and Catalan origin, of which some dozens of examples survive from the period of approximately A.D. 1300–1600.

In his classic study of the transmission of Arabic science into Latin, which contributed so much to our knowledge of the “Renaissance” of the 12th century, Charles Homer Haskins was the first scholar to bring into clear focus the morass of bibliographical information given by Wüstenfeld and Steinschneider, and he was able to define, on the basis of fresh investigation of the manuscript material, the activity and personalities of individual translators. The bulk of his evidence rested on the translators' prefaces, which give some or all of the following information: the title and author of the Arabic original, the Latin translator, the dedicatee, and other works by the same translator, whether contemplated or already finished. Such information provides a very useful framework for assessing the œuvre of a particular translator. However, the edition and investigation of the texts themselves have yielded a certain amount of new information and, although Haskins's work has by no means been superseded, we are now in a position to clarify certain points and add to his conclusions.

In the course of this seminar we have learnt, for example from Dr. Latham's paper, how fruitful it is in considering problems of cultural and linguistic contact to focus on one point, even if that point is only the size of the top of a pimple. I am going to do just the opposite, and to cover a very wide area, and I am conscious of the risks which I run in dispersing my attention in this way, but I hope that what I will say will give us the opportunity to go back over a number of themes dealt with in other papers. I am thinking in particular of what Dr. Daniel said, but indeed I might also be thinking of those classical marble columns which we were shewn stuck upside-down in alien façades: striking examples of the completely different meaning which a cultural element can assume when transmitted from one cultural realm to another.