December 15, 2018 | Ingrid Hartl | HI Research Blog |
The current blog entry is dedicated to the latest volume of our open-access e-journal Medieval Worlds edited by Walter Pohl and Andre Gingrich.
On 1 December, Medieval Worlds 8.2018, entitled Transcultural Contacts and Literary Exchanges, was published online. This issue follows a strong interest in recent submissions in dealing with transcultural and diplomatic contacts and with intellectual and literary exchanges, in developing global perspectives for the investigation of literary works.
Stories that are retold in different cultures and languages are in evidence in all times and ages. The story of the Buddha, widely spread in the European Middle Ages as Barlaam and Josaphat, is one such example, which reached far beyond its original area of production. Christian Høgel takes this and other examples as test cases for his contribution to the discussion of global literature in both pre-modern and modern times. In order to avoid Eurocentric terms and to find a word that is applicable to most ages and places, he falls back to the concept of empire and introduces the terms ‘imperial languages’ and ‘imperial literature’ as new angles of examination. “Global literature is trans-imperial”, Høgel ascertains, before testing his theory on medieval and modern examples. Literary concepts are viewed from a different comparative angle in The Global Eminent Life by James T. Palmer. In this article the author examines collected biographies of holy figures from Latin and Byzantine Christianity and from Buddhist China in the sixth century AD. He focuses in particular on the conceptions of these collections, on their intentions – presenting lived examples by recounting narratives that showed principles in action and preserving the stories for later purposes – to provide a starting point for meaningful comparison. Further elements under consideration are the intertextuality of these collections with recorded texts, being conceived as part of a larger canon of texts, but also with memorial landscapes (steles, shrines, tombs, etc.) as well as the organisation and preservation of the stories at institutional levels, where manuscript witnesses might be remixed, excerpted or added to depending on the needs of a particular time.
The sixth century was a time, when a number of exceptional diplomatic exchanges between Turkic and Byzantine rulers took place. Following the collapse of the Rouran Empire, the Turks, a nomadic people originating north of China, had rapidly gained prominence in interior Asia between the existing sedentary empires. Li Qiang discusses in The Geopolitics on the Silk Road the official envoys between Western Turks and Byzantium as portrayed in the Byzantine sources related to this topic and analyses the four main diplomatic activities between these two divergent powers in detail. Embassies and messengers moving between Christian and Muslim rulers are also quite well documented in the tenth century. “The messenger is the place of a man’s judgment” investigates diplomatic contact between the first Umayyad caliph of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Rahman III, and the Christian rulers of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires as well as in the western Mediterranean, by considering the people who were chosen to act as envoys. In her analysis of various embassies, the author Courtney Luckhardt focuses on the confessional aspects of the ruler-messenger relationship. In order to appoint envoys who could “both represent the interests of the ruler and present them effectively to an opposing power”, Muslim caliphs took advantage of the multi-religious Andalusi society and used Jewish and Christian courtiers to serve their rulers’ diplomatic aims. Christian rulers seem to have followed different objectives in their choice of envoys, although some examples of confessional difference are also found among their diplomatic representatives. The role of envoys as cultural brokers is exemplified in The Aristotle of Pippin III by Christian Gastgeber. This article re-examines the contents of a papal letter from c. 758 AD, specifically an included list of books, which testifies how Greek literature was exported from Rome to the Frankish court. This notable case has been subject to animated scholarly discussion, mostly based on the choices made by the modern editor of the letter. Gastgeber revisits the manuscript witness and in a micro-analysis of the text he offers a new critical reading of the book list. He then proceeds to assess this new interpretation in the context of the letter as well as in the context of Greek language learning and of Greek literary presence in the early Frankish kingdom. A close reading of a text is also conducted by Patrick S. Marschner in his article on Biblical Elements and the ‘Other’ in the Chronicon regum Legionensium. The chronicle under scrutiny is part of the late twelfth-century Corpus Pelagianum, which provides a narrative of Iberian history from the Visigoths to contemporary twelfth-century Hispania. In a careful analysis of ethnonyms, denominations and biblical references Marschner explores the intellectual perception and imaginative depiction of Iberian transcultural societies.
The transmission of Greek is once more taken up in a project report, in this instance the transmission of Greek philosophy and science to a cultivated Arabic elite from the eighth century onward, which was investigated in the ERC project Greek into Arabic. Focusing on the Arabic translations of Greek philosophical thought between the eighth and tenth century AD, the project among other results has developed two online linguistic tools for the research of these texts: the Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum, a lexicographical reference database built on the Greek and Arabic Lexicon, and the system G2A, developed for the alignment and analysis of translations. Philosophical thought in the early Middle Ages is also the subject of study in the ERC project 9SALT. In a synchronic approach all four main philosophical traditions of the ninth century (Latin, Greek, Syriac and Arabic) are studied. The bases of comparison are writings of Aristotelian logic which were received in all four literatures. Aiming at the development of a new narrative of the history of logic during the ninth century, this project intends also to make quite a number of previously untranslated or unedited texts available for further study.
Giving access to hitherto little explored texts by providing transcriptions, editions or translations lies at the core of three other recently finished ERC projects dealing with transcultural contacts and literary exchanges. THESIS offers insights into the intellectual exchange between the European universities in the late Middle Ages by focusing on lectures held on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, delivered by every scholar finishing his study of theology between mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. A corpus of about 500 manuscripts was made available on the project website. The late Middle Ages are also the time frame for OVERMODE, a project which explored vernacular religious literature in Eastern Central Europe in a comparative study. Not only did it focus on the political dimension of these texts, but also on translation cultures of that time and medieval bi- and multilingualism, which resulted among other publications in the edition of pivotal texts for the study of medieval intellectual exchange and translation (Biblical Apocrypha in Vernacular Reception of the Bible in Late Medieval Central Europe; The Vade mecum in tribulatione of John of Rupescissa in Seven Vernaculars). Multilingualism in the thirteenth and fourteenth century also forms the very basis of the project MONGOL. Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Russian biographical and historiographical literatures supplemented by a number of other genres were the sources for collecting information about people active in the Mongol Empire in a prosopographic database. This data is used to study the mobility of people, the knowledge as well as object transfer and connectivity in Mongol Eurasia. Connectivity in Eastern Central Asia is studied through the lens of cultural encounter and religious transfer in the ERC project BuddhistRoad, which concentrates on Buddhist networks along the Silk Road in an area between the Taklamakan Desert and north-east China from the sixth to the fourteenth century. This region was a transfer and contact zone, where ethnicities, languages and trends in material culture intermingled, and in and through which Buddhism was successfully transmitted for around 1500 years.
Medieval Worlds 8 thus offers manifold approaches to the development of global aspects in Medieval Studies. Its overview of ERC projects engaged in the investigation of cultural translation and knowledge transfer from Europe to East Central Asia might provide stimulating points of contact for global Eurasian perspectives.