In his discussion of criteria for creating a humanistic curriculum in world literature, David Damrosch brings attention to the impossibility of adopting the anthological logic of inclusion and addition. In his statement that “other approaches are needed” one hears the necessity of systemic and historical approaches. These two discourses, as Immanuel Wallerstein in another foundational text of this symposium reminds us, do not form oppositions but “linked pairs.”[1]
Adopting a genealogical approach, historical as well as systemic, our humanities courses might begin with a contemporary term, and then uncover or trace genealogies of that term throughout different traditions. A contemporary—and transnational concept—might be situated in different traditions or codes of literary expression. In one course, for example, I situated the notion of “grace” within European Renaissance court societies (Castiglione’s sperazzatura), Lutheran Protestantism (Sola Grazia), the pre-Islamic Persian tradition of Shahnameh (Ferdowsi’s Farr), as well as the Islamic tradition of Sufi poets’ Tariqat. The Ancient Chinese concept of actionless-action or wu-wei could also belong to this constellation of genealogies.
A second approach, which is currently underway in many European libraries and archives, involves the discovery and account of the migration of books, ideas, and knowledges across national borders in the Early Modern Period. A productive example here is the intensive work on the Medici Oriental Press, which Press purchased Persian, Arabic, and other oriental manuscripts in the Levant, Persia, India, and Ethiopia, while at the same time bought the Florentine Codex, Sahagun’s research into Mesopotemia. Hundreds of astronomical, medical, poetic, and religious texts were brought into the same collection within Florence and Rome. Made available to humanists, they represented a kind of hidden textual and visual archive, at the same time translating ancient texts and writing new ones, helping forge the humanistic canon.
Until now, the activities of the Medici Oriental Press have been framed in terms of a missionary or evangelical logic. Yet the manuscript collection, not studied until now, displays a different rationale: books of medicine, astronomical treaties from Samarkhand, and above all poetry (e.g. 16 copies of Saadi’s poetry in Persian) do not fit into the missionary ideal. Research into the provenance of these texts, together or severally—why they were purchased, and how they were received and used—would point to a method that is both systemic and historical. In my personal and most recent research in the Laurentian library, I have encountered a document that uncovers a moment when Europeans and Persico-Islamic cultures bring together differing solutions to visualizing royal genealogies. Throughout, cultural forms, religious eschatologies, and aesthetic regimes determine the choices of artists from East and the West.
Uncovering such a hidden ‘archive’ which constituted the humanists’ sources, leads to new readings of classics. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for example, becomes a different book not only when read through the lens of Borges’s story, “Ariosto and the Arabs,” but also through the coming-to-light of non-Western libraries—images, manuscripts and travelers—available to Ariosto in the Early Modern court of D’Este in Ferrara. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration, as another example, might be taught as a manifesto of the Renaissance; yet, it it, one also finds references to Arabs and Persians, yielding truths about these traditions that do not emerge from the traditions themselves.
[1] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Thinking About the Humanities,” in Wallerstein And the Problem of the World.