Medieval Studies Spring Mini-Colloquium: “The Medieval Other”

Papers include:
Benjamin M. Liu, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside: “Medieval Spain’s Asian Other.”

This paper will be looking at the figure of resemblance that Foucault identifies as “aemulatio”, in the context of Medieval Spain’s knowledge of and relation to Asia. From Ramon Llull to late-14th and 15th century maps and travel narratives, China and “Greater India” are delocalized sites that, as they are desirously gazed upon from medieval Spain, also return a gaze that serves to constitute a Spanish polity.

Christine Chism, English, UCLA: “Over the Edge: Narrative and Cultural Extremities in the Travels of Ibn Battuta.”

This paper investigates Ibn Battuta’s experiences in South Asia, the Maldives and especially China — where he finally reaches the edge of cultural comprehension and suffers a form of culture shock that effectively ends his journey and sends him home to Tangier, traumatically neck and neck with the spread of the bubonic plague. This paper contrasts the sections of the narrative on China with other, more interpenetrative encounters with otherness in the narrative. It investigates the causes of the traveler’s sudden, uncharacteristic lack of willingness to encounter the strangeness to be found over the East Asian edge of the Islamic world, an unwillingness that pervades even the style of the narration, which becomes aversively vague and allusive. I chart the narrative’s flight back to the more familiar heartlands of the Dar al-Islam, where the traveler reencounters, almost with joy, the more encompassable alterities of the Christians and Jews to be found within its contact zones. I end with Ibn Battuta’s description of an incident at Damascus, where, in the face of the accelerating attritions of the plague, all the monotheisms join in a penitential fast and public procession, a performance of penitential solidarity that unite all the people of the book, and, in the narrative, effectively ameliorates the plague. In this traumatic return, the narrative effectively rerenders former alterities into relationships within an unstable continuum.

Nancy McLoughlin, History, UC Irvine: “The Monstrous Other: Jean Gerson (1363-1429) and the Deadly Sins of Politics.”

The fifteenth-century Parisian preacher and theologian, Jean Gerson, has been credited with laying the foundation for the early modern witch-hunts by blurring the boundary between divinely inspired women visionaries and diabolically possessed religious frauds to such an extent that all women’s claims to divine inspiration fell under increasingly severe suspicion. Gerson, however, did not reserve his accusations of diabolical influence for women. In the sermons he delivered before the French royal court, Gerson cast the enemies of the University of Paris, whether these were the princes of the blood or the queen regent, as the very embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Worse yet, he suggested that if these monstrous agents of the devil succeeded in influencing the policy of the French crown that Jews and Saracens would rejoice and France would lose its status as the most Christian kingdom. My paper examines Gerson’s deployment of a constellation of diabolical and religious others as a means of promoting his own authority, paying particular attention to how the multiple layerings of othering, which characterize his sermons, allowed him to condemn his enemies and present the University of Paris as a loyal voice of reason.

Comment: Sharon Farmer, History, UC Santa Barbara

jwil 19.iv.2010