Month: August 2019

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Play

A few years ago because of weird end-of-term makeup scheduling, I found myself with two three-hour meetings in a week with my first-semester freshmen rather than the usual one three-hour meeting. It was long for them once a week, and I knew that neither they nor I was going to make it through two of those in the last week of the semester. So instead, for the final class meeting I had them play medieval-themed board games and evaluate some of the historical ideas that seemed to underpin them. That’s them playing The Alhambra: The Board Game. (There’s also Don Quijote: The Board Game and Toledo 1085: The German Card Game.)

This year, I’m going to set aside a day for students in my history of Spanish class to play De Vulgari Eloquentia: The Board Game. It’s absurdly complicated and took three PhD-hours to set it up the first time I tried to test play it.  I’ll have had them read and compare the prologues to that text and to Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramatica de la lengua castellana. Then I’ll have them play and evaluate the game as a tool for conveying ideas about language to a general public and then assign them to design their own game (or app) to do the same thing for either the Nebrija text or an Alfonsine one.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Philosopher/Theologian

This is the building colloquially referred to as the “Maimonides Synagogue” after the philosopher/theologian who is depicted in a statue outside. However, Maimonides was dead by 1204, and this is a 14th-century building. There’s lots to unpack here (but I just spent the day driving from the Canadian border to NYC, so I’m not going to unpack it — might update this later in the week), but the quick encapsulated version is that the mismatched chronology says a lot about the compression of time and individual members of minority groups in the service of reimagining history for touristic purposes. (Photo Credit: Museum of the Diaspora)

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Monstrous

I love this gargoyle (at Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, Paris; my photo from 2014) because you can see very clearly how he is really a water spout. Gargoyles and chimeras (those that aren’t part of the drainage system) are, in the words of the late art historian Michael Camille, the “monsters of modernity” left to us by the Middle Ages. To me gargoyles have always felt very present in difficult modern moments (such as this one: https://wp.nyu.edu/sjpearce/2015/11/18/as-a-medievalist-i-cant-help-you-maybe-nobody-can-or-what-im-not-going-to-tell-my-students-after-paris/), and with so much of Notre Dame now gone, they feel both closer and farther away, more of a help and perhaps more in need of help themselves.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Author

This is an opening of Beinecke Hebrew MS Add. 103, formerly of Jews’ College London. It is a Hebrew-language life of Alexander the Great translated from a now-lost Arabic version. The colophon of the manuscript falsely attributes the Hebrew translation to Samuel ibn Tibbon, the Hebrew translator of many  important works of Arabic philosophy, most notably Moses Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed. The translation was probably composed in the middle of the 12th century, a period when the roles of author and translator are becoming more well defined. And although (at least in broad strokes) the role of the translator was much more circumscribed and limited than that of the author, prestige would still accrete to a text by virtue of claiming for itself a famous translator.

(This is a text and a set of ideas that came out of my first book and that I’m just about ready to go back to in the interest of pursuing a line of inquiry — a comparative study of changes in attitudes toward the role of the author versus the translator — in both Semitic and Romance texts in this period. I’m hoping to start tackling it toward the end of this year. Suffice it to say, I’ve lots more to say about this topic, so maybe it’s just as well that I’m limited to a short post by virtue of being on my iPhone and mid-moving…)

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Current Interest/Read

I’m moving this week, so I can best show my current interest with the few books that I left unpacked to work on the introduction to my current book project and the chapter that I’m currently writing. The book is a reception history, examining the ways in which medieval poetry and poets from al-Andalus are implicated in various nationalist discourses of the 20th century. I’m reading and writing about different modes of constructing national identity and how different facets of it (language, religion, race, geography, etc.) function for the various nationalist writers whose work I am analyzing.

The book that I’m actively reading is Christina Civantos’ The Afterlife of al-Andalus (SUNY Press, 2017), which looks at traces of Andalusi literature in Argentine and Palestinian writing. I’m finding it to be an engaging book because I don’t understand the medieval history in the same way that Civantos does in order to set up the foundations from which she can carry out a postcolonial analysis of post-Andalusi literary works. And so it’s challenging me to more carefully articulate how I’m thinking about empire and governance in medieval Spain and its consequences in the modern world for the introduction to my own book.

And for non-academic (but not totally unrelated) purposes, I’m reading The Making Of, which is a series of interviews with the key players who were involved in the renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, just outside of Brussels, which I visited last month. It’s funny how reading sometimes, completely coincidentally, groups thematically: I’m doing a lot of reading in postcolonial theory at the moment, both in and out of my academic life.