Global Middle Ages workshop at the University of Minnesota
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Photos:
large-group discussion
 Arun Saldanha, Susan Noakes, Geraldine Heng, Tomislav Urban |
large-group discussion
 David Theo Goldberg (back to the camera) |
small-group discussion
 Kairn Klieman, Rebecca Wilcox |
graduate students and faculty
 Mike Widner, Will Martin |
Workshop lunch:
 A smiling Susan Noakes |
Workshop lunch:
 Margaret Larkin at end of table |
GMA workshop: more photos
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | News, Resources, Workshops | No Comments
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at the buffet table
 Kevin Franklin, Roger Hart, Xinru Liu |
at the buffet table
 Geraldine Heng and David Theo Goldberg |
large-group discussion
 Susan McKintosh (nearest to camera) |
large-group discussion
 Roger Hart (right nearest camera) |
small-group discussion:
 Peter Schmidt, Susan Noakes, Roger Hart, Denise Spellberg, Gabriela Ilnitchi |
workshop lunch:
 Thomas Allsen (left nearest camera), Catherine Asher (right nearest camera) |
Conference News
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Conferences, News, Resources | No Comments
SCGMA will run 3 panels, including a roundtable forum, at the Medieval Institute’s 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2009.
SCGMA will also have a panel at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in 2010.
Third Annual Sacred Leaves Graduate Symposium
Saturday, December 6th, 2008 | News | No Comments
February 19-20, 2009
University of South Florida, Tampa Library, Tampa, FL
Conference site
Posted by Susan Noakes
Hindu Hagiography, Secularism, Islam and Resistance
Sunday, January 11th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
This is Ishan Chakrabarti, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Broadly speaking, I work on medieval and early modern literature from South Asia to the Middle East (Sanskrit, Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, Farsi, Arabic) focusing on themes of religion and cultural difference. I am currently working on furthering two connected projects.
The first of these traces Muslim figures through a variety of Vaishnava Hindu hagiographical compendia produced in the 16th and 17th centuries, immediately before the colonial encounter. The majority of the Muslims one encounters in these texts are kings. The kings have heard of the fame of the poet-saints and summon them to court, asking them to sing their devotional songs and perhaps a praise-poem for the king. The saints all refuse to do so, rejecting the king’s authority by adhering to the higher authority of Krishna. The kings attempt to give the saints gifts, but the only gift the saint-poet wants is to never have to see the king ever again. The king, after getting over being angry, realizes that this refusal of power is the mark of true devotion.
Contemporary South Asian politics would read the above as disclosing communalism. It would see in this narrative proof that the origins of the present-day communal strife between Hindus and Muslims lie in the pre-modern period, and that the blame for such lies with Muslim rule. In this vision, our saints would use Hinduism to resist Islam, embodied in the figure of the Muslim king. But we must read otherwise, and we must do so for a whole host of reasons: political, literary, theoretical and more.
I track narratives in the same texts where the saints meet Hindu kings. In those narratives, the exact same things happen, in the exact same order: Hindu saints resist Hindu kings. The tale isn’t about communalism at all, but rather centers on devotion and asceticism as a mode of life that necessarily rejects power. The incidental Islamic identity of some of these kings is merely that: incidental.
The second of my projects crosses over from the world of the saint to the world of the king and examines Farsi and Arabic texts on ethics and governance in attempt to sketch a genealogy of another secularism. I understand secular to mean not just a division of powers between religious institutions and the state, but also to mean a particular attitude toward religious difference (tolerance partially describes such an attitude, but is inadequate to a theorization of the secular) and the elaboration of an ethics without direct reference to any particular religion.
The texts I read are Islamic philosopher al-Ghazzali’s 12th century text Nasihatu l-Muluk (Counsel for Kings) and Nasiruddin Tusi’s 13th century Axlaq-i Nasiri (Nasirean Ethics). The kings represented in the hagiographies extensively studied such texts: in governing over a largely non-Muslim population, the techniques of difference-negotiation theorized in these texts informed their praxis.
al-Ghazzali’s concern over the role of the Caliph (the religious head) in state affairs opened the discourse of secularism. In his theorization, the Sultan (political leader) had all constituent authority, but was to be appointed by the Caliph, and had to swear an oath of allegiance to him. It was a compromise between State and Religion that did not dispense with Religion altogether but moved it away from the work of the State, that is, from governance. In practice, the Caliph’s role was reduced to that of a figurehead: Saljuq-era coins depicted the Caliph’s face even as the Saljuq regents – and not the Caliph – governed the city of Baghdad, the seat of the Caliphate.
Another nexus for secularism lies in al-Ghazzali’s treatment of what I call Islam’s “virtuous pagans,” to borrow a metaphor from the European Middle Ages. al-Ghazzali highlights the pre-Islamic (Sassanian) Zoroastrian kings of Persia as the highest exemplars of justice. In his history, the Prophet Muhammad is glad to have the good fortune to be born during the reign of Anushirvan the Just. The “virtuous pagans” in al-Ghazzali’s text serve as a model of conduct for Muslims, and this influence permeates Islam from its very origins.
Nasiruddin Tusi, commissioned by Mongol non-Muslim kings, theorizes an ethics independent of religion that focuses on the concept of Love/Justice. The two are related insofar as Justice is the juridical name of Love: Justice supplements and makes up for the fact that Love does not necessarily exist between all subjects.
Tusi never mentions the word ‘Islam’ and only states that the king needs proper religion: he does not need to be of the proper religion. In order to sustain an irretrievably plural society consisting of many religions, the king must dispense justice without attending to religious difference, and the subjects in turn must love one another disregarding their differences. But such Love/Justice, aimed at the sustenance of the state, ends up as another name of power.
This is where my two projects connect.
The Muslim kings of the hagiographies utilize the Nasirean ethic: they tolerate, dispense justice to, love and appreciate their Hindu subjects. They believe that non-Muslims can be exemplars of an ethical life, and divorce their acts of governance from religion. This is why such kings call Hindu saints to their court. But the subjects do not return this love/justice: the saints refuse their audience, reject the king and ask only that he never come to them again. What happened to the subject’s love for the king?
I propose that devotion – called bhakti in Hindi, Bangla and other Indic tongues – forms another ethics: an ethics of resistance to power. As noted earlier, this has nothing to do with communal politics. The ascetic has no interest in sustaining an elitist and statist politics/ethics, but desires rather to upset and reverse the power structure of the king. The ascetic, then, resists such power, and uses religion to articulate this reversal.
Is this resistance limited to Hinduism? Certainly not. The word used for Love in Tusi is muhabbat, but there is another: `ishq. That word is more central to the world of devotional Islam (Sufi or otherwise). I wonder if those Sufi orders that resisted temporal powers did not articulate their resistance in terms of this other love, another love that perhaps – like bhakti - would not just be a name for power.
Thanks for reading, and I openly welcome any comments, criticism or suggestions. I have much more written on all of the ideas above, and if anyone would like to read it, I would be happy to send copies.
My next post will examine manuscript differences in the hagiography of Kabir: a non-Hindu and non-Muslim ascetic consistently eulogized in Hindu hagiographies. I seek to relate these minute shifts in manuscript to a history of communal difference. Such a task is all the more crucial given the urgency of the present political situation in India, where, in the name of fighting terrorism, communalism and hatred are once again on the rise.
Posted by Ishan Chakrabarti
Seminar at UCLA - Mediterranean Studies: East and West at the Center, 1050-1600
Monday, January 26th, 2009 | Conferences, News | No Comments
Mediterranean Studies: East and West at the Center, 1050-1600
Mediterranean Studies: East and West at the Center, 1050-1600 is a series of seminars organized by Professor Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA French and Francophone Studies, and CMRS Associate Director for Medieval Studies) and funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
[The seminar] “will consider the Mediterranean as a geographical and environmental entity, the center for both East and West, and the site of a world system rather than a line of separation between the emerging “West” and an exotic “East.” ”
Schedule for upcoming seminars:
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Monday, January 26, 2009, 3:30-6:30 pm, Royce 306 |
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Monday, February 2, 2009, 3:30-6:30 pm, Royce 306 |
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Monday, February 9, 2009, 4-7 pm, Humanities Building 193 |
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009, 4:30-7:30 pm, Royce 306 |
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Monday, February 23, 2009, 4:00-7:00 pm, Humanities Building 193 |
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Monday, March 2, 2009, 3:30-6:30 pm, Royce 306 |
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
Seeking partners in Canada and the UK for a NEH+NSF+JISC+ SSHRC co-funded grant: Digging into Data
Monday, February 9th, 2009 | News | No Comments
A group of researchers at UT Austin - in the Humanities and Advanced Computing areas - is seeking partners in Canada and the UK interested in applying to the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant co-funded by the research agencies you may read on the subject.
Announcement of the grant here
Deadlines
Letter of intent - March 15
Final application(application form not yet available ) - July 15.
Our interests revolve around the topic of Holy War. We will use a number of databases (JSTOR being one of them) that we will query using a number of text mining processes. Depending on the specific interest of your institution we may look at the same databases and use
different processes or look other aspects of “war”- Cold War, colonial wars, etc.
If interested please comment this post or email anaventura@mail.utexas.edu or Dr. Geraldine Heng at heng@mail.utexas.edu
Thank you
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
Best practices - scholarly use of historical digital images
Sunday, March 1st, 2009 | News, Resources | No Comments
At this time, I would like to call your attention to a recently Call for Open Access to Digital Images issued by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).
The set of recommendations are aimed namely at the publication of historical digital images, which are core to the GMA project - hence, this post…
The MPIWG, which co-initiated the OpenAccess movement, just launched on its website a set of recommendations on the scholarly use of visual media. The material is the result of careful consultations the Institute conducted with scholars and representatives of leading museums, libraries, image archives and publishers.
More than best practices, the documents now published aims at creating “a network of mutual trust and cooperation between scholars and curators of cultural heritage collections with a view to facilitating access to and the scholarly use of visual media”.
This set of best practices are downloadable from the Institute’s website.
The document is addressed at curators - for example it exhorts them to accommodate scholars’ needs by porving access to hig-resolution images for a low cost (or no cost). It also addresses scholars exhorting them to recognise museums and libraries as the custodians of physical objects of cultural heritage. Furthermore, the document stresses the importance of the role of all stakeholders int he process as “guarantors of authenticity”.
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
Historical maps on GoogleEarth
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | News | No Comments
GoogleEarth skipped the 3rd dimension and went straight into the 4th one. If you want to see historical maps - and if you have GoogleEarth installed in your computer, - you simply need to expand the Featured Content -> Rumsey Historical Maps (Layers panel).
Unfortunately, no Medieval maps are available yet. Some of the earliest maps available are of Asia 1710 , Paris 1716 and Africa 1787.
However, it would be technically possible to have a Middle Ages map. In fact, how interesting would it be to have the our perception of the world through time?…
I am not sure whether the modeling required for these layers that juxtapose to Earth are flexible enough to allow a justaposition of the Earth the way that Lactantius or Cosmas Indicopleustes proposed…
And this is where Digital Humanities becomes so wonderfully complex. A historical problem becomes a problem of Mathematics, CAD and programming. How to juxtapose a flat texture to an interactive 3D model?:) Maybe virtual worlds such as Second LIfe offer some interesting approaches, as they constanly need to map 3D structures on 2D surfaces.
Comments are welcome!
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
metadata for medievalists: 2 workshops
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 | News | No Comments
The Medieval Academy of America’s Committee on Electronic Resources is organizing two workshops on metadata specifically in medieval studies.
If you’re working with data collections and/or in text analytics in this area you may want to attend any of these workshops, which will take place during the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI - May 2009).
Both workshops will be on Thursday, May 7 (sessions 54 and 166)
Complete conference schedule
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
Call for papers: Mapping Medieval Geographies
Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | Conferences, News | No Comments
Thanks to Dr. Anne Hedeman at UIUC we are posting this information on the following conference taking place next month
Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and geographical thought in the Latin West and beyond: 300-1600
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Thursday May 28th - Saturday May 30th 2009
Full program Save the dates!
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
SCGMA scholars in Pittsburgh!
Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Workshops | No Comments
Photo by Alan Craig
SCGMA scholars return from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center workshop (left to right: Anne Zimo, David Crane, Susan Noakes, Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie). Not pictured: Herbert Kessler. The group spent two days learning about TeraGrid and the possibilities it offers for research on the Global Middle Ages, especially tracing through iconography the migration of musical instruments westward through Western Asia and the Balkans and the mapping of Mediterranean trade and communications. Professor Kessler, President of the Medieval Academy of America, discussed prospects for connecting medievalists working in digital technology with TeraGrid.
Posted by Susan Noakes
Online archives on manuscripts: the popular vote
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
WSJ page showing the 'Discuss' section
You may have received an email from me when I added you to this SCGMA blog. I maintain this blog, and in fact my interest in the Global Middle Ages project has a social media spotlight.
This is why last Friday’s May 8 Wall Street Journal article entitled ‘The Next Age of Discovery’ resonated with me… in particular, a small section featured on the side-bar, under “Discuss”…
The article describes some of the digital techniques used in the recovery of manuscripts. If you scroll down, under the “Discuss” section you can read (as you can see on the screenshot):”What are the best online archives for historical documents, art and artifacts? Share your favorite sources at Journal Community.”
If you select that area, you will be taken to a blog-looking section where you can post your favorite archives. By 4PM CST of May 12 there were (only?) 3 suggestions by readers.
I could not stop wondering that we do not see this type of popular vote in this type of topic. Though it is arguable how ‘popular’ the recommendations of the Wall Street Journal readers are… I was still intrigued about tools out there to assess (and effectively visualize) popular preferences in topics that are often thought of as being exclusive to the academic arena… and how that information is being incorporated in academic research.
Your thoughts are welcome, as always!
Posted by Ana Boa-Ventura
SCGMA Zotero 2.0 Group
Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | News | No Comments
With the release of Zotero 2.0, it’s now possible and easy to share bibliographies between people with similar interests. You simply need to register for an account, then find a relevant group or create your own. So, I created an SCGMA group that I hope you will join. It should allow us to share our current research interests, our finds from various databases, and discover new things to read. Of course, Zotero only works with Firefox, but since it is the best browser on the market, there’s yet another incentive to switch for those who haven’t.
While Zotero was relatively useful and interesting before, the bibliographies compiled through it were stuck on a single computer and restricted to a single person. Since both of those limitations are now gone, it promises to be a far more useful tool. 2.0 is still in beta, which means it may well have bugs remaining, but it should be useable already and will only improve as the bugs get ironed out. So far, the sync functionality works just fine for me.
Right now I’ve only shared one item (the book I most recently finished that’s also directly relevant to the Middle Ages), but I will continue adding items as I research and test out this new version. Because of its previous limitations, I had installed and tried Zotero, but never relied on it much. Now, however, since I’m trying to move almost everything I do onto the cloud (I work from at least 3 different machines), I suspect I’ll find it much more valuable. And, as with most collaborative tools, the more people who join in and try it out, the more useful the collected data becomes.
Posted by Michael Widner
Visiting SDSC!
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | Resources, Workshops | No Comments
…baby and teddy bear included!:)
Left to right: Astrid Ogilvie (U of Colorado), GH, Stephennie Mulder with baby Daniela (U of Texas), William Phillips (U of Minnesota), Benjamin Liu (U of California, Riverside), and Roger Hart (U of Texas).
Photos by Alan Craig
Visualizing the genesis of a medieval text, layer by layer
Monday, August 24th, 2009 | Resources | No Comments
 LLC 24 (3) cover |
In the study of urban life during the Middle Ages in Europe, municipal statutes can provide great insight. The latest issue of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Journal includes an article by Malte Rehbein (National University of Ireland) entitled “Reconstructing the textual evolution of a medieval manuscript”. The article shows how a multi-layered text can be used to organically show how a text evolved: in this case, the text is Göttingen’s ‘kundige bok’. Full reference: Rehbein, M. (2009). Reconstructing the textual evolution of a medieval manuscript. Literary and Linguistic Computing 2009 24(3):319-327 Posted by: Ana Boa-Ventura |
Kalamazoo 2010: Sponsored Session - SCGMA
Friday, August 28th, 2009 | Conferences, News | No Comments
“Global Progeny: Medievalisms in Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature” - (Kalamazoo 2010)
Sponsored Session–SCGMA
Children’s and young adults’ fantasy works are often rife with
medievalisms, and in the past few decades the impact of globalization has emerged in the expanding scope of fantasy worlds.
For example, children’s literature often features a big desert to the south inhabited by turbaned, scimitar-wielding neighbors who are typically enemies. In recent years, these “others” have been brought to the forefront and are heroes/allies rather than villains.
Tamora Pierce’s feminist children’s fantasy series Protector of the Small, for instance, includes a cultural exchange with the “Yamani Islands’—basically a representative of medieval Japan. In addition, Linda Sue Park’ book A Single Shard (2002 Newberry Medal winner) details the life of a girl in mid- to late- 12th century Korea, while Kevin Crossley Holland writes about a boy’s experiences on the Fourth Crusade, and a girl’s on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in his Arthur trilogy and its companion book, Gatty’s Tale.
While we’ve detailed modern interpretations in this proposal, this session invites papers not only on modern re-interpretations of global perspectives of the medieval, but also presentations on medieval fantasy texts written outside of Britain/Europe addressed to or focused on children and young adults.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by 15 September 2009.
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“Globalizing the Middle Ages?” - (Kalamazoo 2010)
The Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages’
mission statement indicates that it “seeks to reconceive the field of Medieval Studies not in terms of Europe alone but also in relation to Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Asia.”
As scholars, we strive to bring a larger perspective into our work as well as our classrooms. When most of Medieval Studies is focused on western culture, how can we incorporate a global perspective—whether we study non-western texts directly or compare eastern and western texts as part of our studies?
This panel is open both to presentations on how to incorporate global texts/ideas into scholarly work and class settings, and also to papers which analyze global perspectives of western or non-western texts.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by 15 September 2009.
Call for Papers: Essays on Welsh Mythology in Popular Culture
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | News | No Comments
Essays On Welsh Mythology in Popular Culture
Kristin Noone (UC Riverside) and Audrey Becker (Marygrove College), eds.
In recent years, interest in Welsh mythology and legendary figures has grown exponentially in popular culture, with appearances in diverse arenas ranging from fantasy fiction to role-playing games, from children’s literature to tourist sites and even Celtic-inspired rock music and heavy metal. We are seeking essays that explore the uses and appropriations of these legends into “popular” spaces, hoping to trace the patterns of interpretation and reinscription to offer some insight into what meaning “Welsh mythology” retains in an increasingly postmodern, global society.
Sample topics (contributors are by no means limited to these) may include:
Depression-era fantasy and Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetralogy;
children’s literature and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence;
Diana Wynne Jones’s otherworldly Wales in Howl’s Moving Castle;
Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series and/or the film The Black Cauldron;
translations and adaptations of Welsh legends over time;
Welsh influences in online role-playing games such as Mabinogi or World of Warcraft, or action-adventure games such as Legend of Zelda;
the 2003 Welsh film and graphic novel Y Mabinogi
Twm Sion Cati, or the Welsh Robin Hood;
Welsh mythology in music, for example the Moody Blues’ “Are You Sitting Comfortably?” or Spring’s “Grail”;
tourism and tourist sites such as Caerleon or Machynlleth
McFarland & Co. has expressed interest in publishing this collection as part of the Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy/Folklore and Mythology Series; therefore, we will be submitting an official proposal once we have made final decisions on all submissions.
Please send titles and descriptions (600-700 words, or full papers if completed), of proposed essay contributions to Kristin Noone (kristin.noone@email.ucr.edu) or Audrey Becker (abecker@marygrove.edu) by September 1, 2009.
Digital media and learning competition to participate in President Obama new Science-Education effort.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | News | No Comments
This just in… [quote from HASTAC-web listserv]
“HASTAC is playing a major role in the new White House campaign to encourage students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The third-annual Digital Media and Learning Competition will award $2 million in support of participatory learning experiences that incorporate STEM principles. The competition launches Dec. 14 and winners will be announced in spring 2010.”
The competition is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and will be administered by HASTAC. Awards will be given in two categories: “ 21st Century Learning Lab Designers” and ”Game Changers” awards.