The pseudo-Arabic motifs found in middle Byzantine religious structures in Greece, especially at the tenth- to eleventh-century monastery complex of Hosios Loukas, document an awareness of Arab-Christian communities in the “Near East,” especially religious foundations of the Holy Land that were among the most revered centers of early monasticism. A variety of Christian portable objects inscribed with Arabic and pseudo-Arabic – including manuscripts, icons, and liturgical vessels and furnishings – offer possible vehicles for the dissemination of Arabic as a Christian language and for Arabic and pseudo-Arabic inscriptions as signs of ancient monastic authority. Networks of communication between the Byzantine Empire and regions of the south-eastern Mediterranean (that were under Islamic political hegemony) facilitated the movement of people, things, and ideas. Tracing the dissemination of the visual culture of Arab-Christianity generates a revised map of middle Byzantine artistic and cultural connections, challenging Constantinople’s status as the dominant model for middle Byzantine art and central source of Orthodox Christian authority and identity.

Paintings and other objects made in late medieval and early modern European sometimes contain what appears to be highly stylized ornamental writing, often reminiscent of contemporary Arabic scripts but seemingly devoid of linguistic content. Often called pseudo-kufic and now more commonly pseudoscript, these passages of apparently meaningless writing continue to vex historians of art. This chapter aims to advance our understanding of pseudoscript by examining its use in the paintings of the Florentine master Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469). A close reading of Lippi’s pseudoscripts, including a few examples in which he surprisingly included legible content, emphasizes that while pseudoscript was a widespread phenomenon, it is perhaps best understood through careful consideration of its particular uses in specific contexts.

Art historical study of writing in the Islamic world centers on calligraphy, beautiful writing as a high, perhaps the highest expression of Islamic art. This calligraphic ideal is shadowed by the prominent place on Islamic buildings and objects of decoration that looks like writing but is not: called pseudo epigraphic, pseudo Kufic, and the like. The study of pseudo-writing in Islamic art has one of its origins in another curious phenomenon, the prominence of Arabic-like decoration on medieval Byzantine churches. This chapter investigates ways that the presence of Arabic script on objects and buildings in medieval Islam (and Byzantium)conveyed meanings in the large space between the binary opposition of “real” and “pseudo” writing, the ways writing means by way of pattern or cipher, and also through talismanic and incantatory functions.