Abstracts
A volume is currently in development which will feature articles based on the papers presented here. Most of the projects presented here were developed in the course of the Residential Research Group convened at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Fall 2007. Publication is anticipated for spring 2010.
Webcasts of the conference can be found here.
Travels, Crossings, and Encounters
•Brian A. Catlos, (History, UCSC), “Was there a Medieval Mediterranean?”
•Ramzi Rouighi (History, USC), “Islam, Christianity, and Encounters in the Mediterranean”
•Ray Kea (History, UC Riverside), “Material Life, Markets, and Western Africa's Urban and Rural landscapes (9th-13th centuries)”
Remodeling the Medieval Mediterranean
•Karla Mallette (French & Italian, Miami-Ohio), “Framed narratives and literary transmission in the medieval Mediterranean”
•Núria Silleras-Fernández (History, UCSC), “Lieutenancy, Empire and Female Agency: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic”
•Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, UCSC), “What is Medieval Mediterranean Literature?”
Transitions and Conversions: from Medieval to Early Modern
•Michelle Hamilton (Spanish and Portuguese, UC Irvine), “Rodrigo, the Last Visigothic King, and the Politics of Guilt”
•Daniel Schroeter (History, Minnesota), “Rethinking Jewish Identity in the Western Mediterranean in the post-1492 Era”
•Seth Kimmel (Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), “Redefining Religion: Morisco Assimilation as Catholic Reform”
The Mediterranean and the Modern World
•Marc Baer (History, UC Irvine), “Not Simply Jews, Not Merely Muslims: Following the Jewish Messiah Turned Muslim, 1666-1862”
•Oumelbanine Zhiri (Literature, UC San Diego), “Converts and the Birth of Oriental Studies”
•Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara), “Musical Genealogies of Identity and Authenticity: Reading Now into Then”
Abstracts
“Was there a Medieval Mediterranean?”
Brian A. Catlos, (History, UCSC)
The Middle ages has long been recognized as a period in which cultural, intellectual and technological currents ran back and forth among the various religio-cultural communities of the Mediterranean – Muslim, Latin, Greek and Jewish – transforming them all. This paper asks whether this dynamic of interchange is particular to the Mediterranean, or nothing more than the inevitable consequence of contact, conflict and commerce among diverse cultural groups, a typical feature of “Oceanic” systems. It begins by taking Horden and Purcell’s model of a Mediterranean as a complex aggregate of micro-regions characterized by interdependence, and asks whether this geographic character of the Mediterranean is manifested in cultural, social and institutional developments in the period from approximately 900 to 1400 C.E.
The picture which emerges is of a zone which, despite its heterogeneity presents itself in many contexts as a coherent unity characterized by mutual intelligibility and conveniencia. As such the Medieval Mediterranean be should be considered as a “historical region” in the same sense that “Europe,” the Islamic World,” and “the Jewish World,” are invoked by historians and scholars as a categories of analysis. This is to say it should not be reified or essentialized, nor endowed with a historical protagonism that it did not possess, nor imagined to be universally valid. It is, just as those other categories, one of many appropriate intellectual models to employ in historical analyses of the Middle Ages, but it has one which has been traditionally neglected because of the biases of nation-state oriented historiography and assumptions regarding the absolute incompatibility of rival confessional cultures.
“Islam, Christianity, and Encounters in the Mediterranean”
Ramzi Rouighi (History, USC)
The medieval Mediterranean seems to have been an ideal place for encounters. Judging from scholarly output, there were encounters happening left and right and it would not be an exaggeration to think of the Mediterranean as a hotbed of encounterers. The essay explores some of the assumptions supporting the notion of encounters. Among these, it pays special attention to the concepts of “culture,” “civilization,” “community,” and “world” as they are used by specialists.
The essay will then explore the question of the medieval production of the archival basis of modern Encounter Studies. Focusing on the Maghrib, it will argue for the integration of a discussion of the historical conditions that produced the archive upon which encounters scholars have based their studies. It will also examine some of the modern concerns that have supported the transformation of the Mediterranean into an encounters-prone area.
“Material Life, Markets, and Western Africa's Urban and Rural landscapes (9th-13th centuries)”
Ray Kea (History, UC Riverside)
My larger project (provisionally titled, “Greater Ethiopia and the Medieval Mediterranean World-Economy (8th-14th centuries”) examines the relations between Greater Ethiopia, the desert-steppe-savanna zone that stretches from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean world-economy (économie-monde). The project pursues four themes: (1) the world of economy; (2) the world of politics; (3) the world of knowledge; (4) the world of culture and the imagination. The research challenges conventional historical narratives about the interconnections between regional and macro-regional components of Greater Ethiopia, on the one hand, and the Mediterranean world-economy and the African Diaspora in Latin Christendom and the Byzantine Empire, on the other. It does so by drawing attention to the impact of Greater Ethiopia political economies on the Mediterranean world-economy and by placing iconographic and literary representations of Africans/Moors in the context of western African history.
My talk considers aspects of the “world of economy” and the “world of imagination.” It by examines lines of communication with particular reference to aspects of western Africa’s world-economy, namely material life, the functionality of markets, and the social dynamic of rural and urban formations. Methodologically, it attempts to integrate artifactual, i.e., archaeological, evidence and historical evidence. I would like to propose that the western Africa-Mediterranean connection can be understood in terms of the interaction of political-economic systems of power. Two useful concepts are employed as analytical tools “commodity chain,” which the presentation treats as a particular kind of line of communication, and the “socio-natural regime,” which is multi-faceted and incorporates different lines of communication. Commodity chain is defined as “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity.” A socio-natural regime can be briefly defined as “the construction of the rules, norms, and decision-making practices that create and recreate a particular configuration of matter, space, and society in a commodity chain (and in relation to other commodity chains). Processes of creation and re-creation entail political and social struggles.
Western African commodity chains were not only embedded in specific ecological conditions, geopolitical circumstances, and social relations of material production they were defined as well by differentiated cultural-informational lines of communication and cultural-religious repertoires. In other words, I would contend that in the western African context commodity chains/lines of communication can be written not simply as a political economy or a historical ecology but, to borrow from F. Moretti, as “a sociology of symbolic forms” and “a history of cultural conventions.” The presentation addresses these issues with reference to two western African examples: a the 20th century chronicle of a Muslim clerical group and an ‘alim who died in Andalusia in 1212 or 1213.
“Framed narratives and literary transmission in the medieval Mediterranean”
Karla Mallette (French & Italian, Miami-Ohio)
During the late Middle Ages, the cultures that ring the Mediterranean produced framed narratives at a rate not matched in previous or subsequent eras of literary history. The framed narrative brings together a collection of briefer narratives, often but not always linked by a general theme or by linguistic or literary motifs, within the 'frame' of a larger master narrative. The most familiar versions of the framed narrative include the 1001 Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Other framed narratives were produced in the medieval Mediterranean, however, including a group of anonymous texts that count among the most popular literary works in the early Romance language traditions: the Kalila wa-Dimna, a 'mirror for princes' translated from the Arabic into Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish; the Barlaam et Josaphat, a religious teaching text that journeyed from Buddhist origins into the languages of Christianity and Islam; and the curious work known in the east as the Book of Sindbad and in the west, most often, as the Seven Sages of Rome.
The framed narrative tradition holds particular interest for students of Mediterranean literatures. Scholars have long speculated that Arabic letters influenced the evolution of the Romance poetries of the late Middle Ages but have not produced manuscript evidence of that influence. In the case of narrative literature in general and the framed narrative in particular, however, the genetic relationship between Arabic and Romance letters is explicit and demonstrable. Translators in Christian Europe produced versions of Arab tales in Latin and the European vernaculars, frequently in the form of framed narratives. Subsequently, authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer created entirely 'European' literary masterpieces drawing upon the naturalized Arab tales.
This talk looks at the history of the Sindbad/Seven Sages tradition, describing the path the work followed from its origins in Abbasid Baghdad to European shores. I will track the transformation of the tales as they passed from Arabic into the Romance vernaculars, and identify mysteries that persist in this transmission history. And I will briefly discuss new methodological strategies that might be used to investigate such complex transmission histories and track the passage of framed narratives through the medieval Mediterranean.
“Lieutenancy, Empire and Female Agency: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic”
Núria Silleras-Fernández (History, UCSC)
This paper will present a comparative analysis of the nature of female authority in the context of the European and Mediterranean monarchies of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. I am going to discuss how the political role of women in the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries transferred to the Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century. The lieutenancy was an institution created to address the problems posed by the dispersed nature of the territories that composed the medieval Crown of Aragon that were scattered through the Iberian Peninsula, the south of France and the Mediterranean. Thus, the focus of the paper will be the Crown of Aragon, whose institution of the “lieutenancy” allowed some queen-consorts to become “seconds in command” -- and second only to the king. Queen-lieutenants had a very active and public role in politics. They were truly engaged in government: some of them for as little as two months, others for as long as twenty years. This paper will analyze the factors that contributed to women’s invaluable role in government in the Aragonese confederation while comparing it to the role played by gender in other kingdoms and Mediterranean ‘empires’, such as Venice and the Ottoman Empire.
“What is Medieval Mediterranean Literature?”
Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, UCSC)
The last decade or so has seen an explosion of interest in “Mediterranean Studies.” A half century after the original publication of Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949), scholars in a number of disciplines have once again found the Mediterranean a productive category of analysis, as evidenced in a proliferation of conferences, edited volumes, journals, and study centers. This renewal of Mediterranean Studies is part of an upsurge of interest in “Oceanic Studies” or alternately, “the New Thalassology.” In the field of Medieval Literature, on the other hand, “Mediterranean Studies” has found much less purchase. An MLA database search for the keywords “Mediterranean” and “medieval” or “Middle Ages” yields a total of 32 entries, over half of which treat topics in Intellectual or Art History. Taking that asymmetry as a point of departure, this essay explores the different ways “Medieval Mediterranean Literature” might be conceived; how it would relate to the study of the medieval Mediterranean in other disciplines; and what linguistic, thematic, and theoretical modifications or challenges it would offer to the field of literature as currently configured.
“Rodrigo, the Last Visigothic King, and the Politics of Guilt”
Michelle Hamilton (Spanish and Portuguese, UC Irvine)
In this paper I examine how the so-called “Fall of Spain/ Pérdida de España” (the Muslim invasion of 711 CE) is constructed by the Spanish scholars of the last century. While the exiled Spanish historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz treats the fall of Visigothic rule in Iberia to the Muslims as a clash of civilizations analgous to that of the Second World War, the historian/literary critic Ramón Menéndez Pidal constructs a Visigothic world torn by internal division much like that of Spain in the 1930s (before the Spanish Civil War). In both these scholars’ works the Fall becomes a historical event imbued with ethico-moral value—a tragedy from which Spain and the West seemed not to have learned the proper lessons.
“Rethinking Jewish Identity in the Western Mediterranean in the post-1492 Era”
Daniel Schroeter (History, Minnesota)
It is commonly assumed that in the post-1492 era, a Sephardi world was formed emerging from the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their resettlement in the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Western Europe and eventually the Americas. I would like to critically rethink the notion of the Sephardi world, by focusing on the many identities of Jews in the Western Muslim Mediterranean. The dominant influence of the Spanish refugees, over time, caused the Jewish communities, whether or not descended from the Iberian Peninsula, to identify themselves as “Sephardim.” This is despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that in most of the Arabic speaking world where Jews settled, one can trace a far greater assimilation into the native culture of the existing communities, than the other way around, and this was particularly the case in the Maghreb. The question I would like to pose is: what did it mean to be Sephardi, or phrased somewhat differently, when and in what contexts did Jews consider themselves Sephardi and how did this evolve over time? I argue that using the term Sephardi to describe the Jews in Western Islamic lands suggests an identity that did not exist in the past, or only in particular contexts that need to be teased out of the evidence contemporary to the periods involved. The tendency to ascribe “Sephardiness” to earlier periods, especially if one is talking about the Jewish communities as a whole, is a myth that has its origins in earlier periods, but is also a product of contemporary identity politics in the Jewish world today.
“Redefining Religion: Morisco Assimilation as Catholic Reform”
Seth Kimmel (Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley)
Modern scholars of Spanish conquest in both the New and Old Worlds presuppose the fundamental importance of private faith to religious and political history. There was a gap, they suggest, between a subtly syncretic or utterly heretical private faith and the public, religious practice converts came to perform. Some of Spain’s most critical early modern voices, however, would have simply refused the notion of agency upon which such religious duplicity and, indeed, political resistance hinges. Building on the Thomist thought of Francisco de Vitoria, the Morisco Jesuit Ignacio de Las Casas (1550-1608), for example, argued that because a broadly defined natural faith is universal, it is not particularly relevant. As long as Moriscos abide by orthodox Catholic ritual, they should not be punished for what Las Casas called their private doctrinal “doubts.” All Old Christians, he pointed out, suffered similar uncertainties.
Though this insistence on religion defined by obligatory practice seems to mimic Inquisitorial rhetoric, my presentation demonstrates that Las Casas’s post-Tridentine innovation was to cast the net of obligation more broadly. The coerced mass baptisms of the early sixteenth century bound both Moriscos and the reformed clergy responsible for their education. Las Casas’s line of argument does not fit neatly into historical and literary paradigms for studying religious representation and conflict in early modern Iberia. More broadly, Las Casas’s questions about how to define religion raise precisely the issues currently concerning anthropologists of Christianity and Islam, critics of the secular, and historians of “toleration”: What if religious ritual were not the expression of either some individual religious desire or social organization, but rather productive of it? What if the various forms of religious discipline and interpretation were a means for generating religious feeling, rather than reflective of it? And finally, is it possible to transform religious norms by inhabiting, rather than resisting them?
“Not Simply Jews, Not Merely Muslims: Following the Jewish Messiah Turned Muslim, 1666-1862”
Marc Baer (History, UC Irvine)
“Not Simply Jews, Not Merely Muslims: The Donme of Salonica, 1666-1862,” is generally concerned with conversion and crypto-religion in the Mediterranean. It is mainly concerned with the development of the unique ethno-religious identity of the Donme as they and others perceived it. It explains the complicated religion, culture of secrecy, and history of the Donme from their origins in the wake of the messianic movement of Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi to when the Ottoman state first recognized their distinctness from other Muslims. It explores the background of the Donme in Shabbatai Tzevi’s messianic movement which culminated in the rabbi’s conversion to Islam, the conversion of one group of Shabbatai Tzevi’s followers to Islam, the coalescing of the group in Salonica, and its splitting into three sects (Yakubi, Karakash, Kapanci). Considering how the Donme are portrayed today and how they have been depicted in Greek, Jewish, and Turkish historiography, it seeks to answer the question whether we should consider the Donme to have been Jews. A major question that is answered is what made Donme religion distinct from Judaism and Islam. The talk considers not only Donme religion and ethnic identity, but also what Jews thought of the Donme, and seeks to discover in what ways a comparison with “crypto-Jews” is accurate.
“Converts and the Birth of Oriental Studies”
Oumelbanine Zhiri (Literature, UC San Diego)
The early modern period in Europe was a time of momentous changes in intellectual institutions and epistemological procedures. Prominent among those was the birth of Oriental Studies as a vast field of knowledge taking as its objects histories, religions, languages, texts, artifacts, traces of the past and configurations of the present. It is a time when at least some knowledge of "Oriental languages" (meaning Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and what would later be called the group of Semitic languages, as well as some other historically related languages) became part of the background of the intellectual, the scholar, or the member of the Republic of Letters. I am going to focus on one aspect of this phenomenon, the participation of Orientals in this project. Orientalism is often thought of as an exclusively European or Western endeavor, where Oriental people, countries, and cultures, are simply the passive objects. In fact, this is far from true, and since the beginnings of Oriental Studies in Europe, people from the Orient played a significant, and often crucial part in the construction and evolution of the field. While some were Jews or Christians, others were converts from Islam. This paper examines the confluence of Oriental Studies and conversion: through a number of figures and works, I will study the role of converts in this crucial early period of Orientalism, and how the theme of conversion may be useful for our understanding of the issues.
“Musical Genealogies of Identity and Authenticity: Reading Now into Then”
Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara)
Medieval Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) is the point of origin for a number of different ethnic and religious communities who preserve even in modern times their identities as direct descendents of those who emigrated or were exiled from Muslim Spain over a period of several hundred years. Sephardic Jewish identity is based upon this idea, as are the identities of various “Andalusian” communities in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, as well as the histories of countless individual families scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond.
It is remarkable enough that so many different individuals and communities should trace their history and identity back to al-Andalus through direct blood descent, but it perhaps more remarkable that a second, even more widespread, network of cultural identities is maintained through the preservation and performance of “Andalusian Music,” said to be descended, through centuries of oral tradition, from the music of medieval Muslim Spain. These various regional musical traditions are now the basis of a number of modern communal identities all of whom trace the music they perform back a thousand years or more to the Iberian Peninsula. In various urban centers of North Africa such as Fez, Meknes, and Tetuan in Morocco, or Tlemcen, Algiers, and Constantine in Algeria, all the way eastwards to Aleppo in Northern Syria and southwards to San’a in Yemen, people perform “Andalusian music” as “their” music, and formulate arguments about why their version of the tradition is more authentic and richer than any other.
In Paris, there are over a dozen sites where Algerians living in exile (mostly of whom escaped the near civil war conditions of Algeria in the 1990’s) teach, rehearse, and perform this music. In Israel, the “Andalusian Orchestra” originally supported primarily by Jewish immigrants from North Africa, was recently designed the official second “national orchestra,” after the much older and renowned National Symphony Orchestra which performs primarily European classical music.
This paper explores the way in which these diverse musical communities (the members of which do necessarily claim personal descent from medieval Muslim Spain), maintain the identities of their traditions in various reconstructions and re-narrations of the past, particularly in that past which has its roots in medieval al-Andalus.