Tag: lone medievalist challenge

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Material Culture

These are images from the catalogue for the new exhibition at the Cloisters of a horde of 14th-century Franco-Jewish jewelry and other metalwork on loan from the Cluny. It’s material evidence of Jewish life in the town of Colmar and the material consequences not only of the Plague but also the accusations that followed around Jews and Muslims about causing the disease. The horde was buried in the floor in advance of the arrival of the Plague and the patriarch of the family was ultimately accused of causing it.

I had hoped to go up today and take some of my own pictures for this blog post because I haven’t seen the exhibition yet, but my own personal material culture (Marie Kondo-ing my apartment as I move back in) is the more pressing matter.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Medievalism

My current book project is a medievalist one, so I could share a zillion pictures for this topic and go in a thousand different directions; but I really like this photo, so I’ll go with it. It’s a picture that I took in the Cloisters during the Costume Institute’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition in 2018. The Cloisters itself is a medievalist building, made up of parts of medieval European buildings brought to New York and reassembled to create a modern image of a medieval cloister. The exhibition was made up of haute couture that draws upon both medieval and modern religious garb for inspiration.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Public Scholarship

Most of my public scholarship (of which I’m hoping do to an increasing amount in future years) takes a written form and so isn’t super conducive to photographs; but here’s a selfie of me recording an interview for an episode of a podcast, which I wanted to do in order to be able to share my work with a general public. My episode of the Frankely Judaic podcast can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/user-780716487/s-j-pearce-in-the-taifa-kingdoms-the-medieval-poetics-of-modern-nationalism; my colleagues in my cohort also recorded episodes, which can be found here: https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/resources/frankely-judaic-podcasts.html.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Character

This character is an ñ. This particular ñ is a sign above a restaurant in Inwood, a neighborhood at the very northern end of Manhattan. Phonetically, the sound that it produces is represented as /ɲ/. The grapheme (symbol, character) entered Spanish in the thirteenth century, as part of the orthographic reforms of Alfonso X, known as the Wise. Manuscript evidence suggests that it represented a transformation of an earlier representation of that sound as nn, next to each other, to nn, one stacked on top of the other — a space-saving measure followed by the shrinkage of the top n into a ~. (Still unpacking post-move, and all my history-of-the-language teaching materials are still in a box somewhere, otherwise I’d find a couple of good manuscript images where this happens…)

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Romance

This one’s a bit more personal and a bit less medieval, but I’m very fond of the photograph: There are a lot of Romance languages (Catalan, Castilian, Venetian, Bolognese, and standard Italian) implicated in this scene which portrays a medievalist with whom I once had a romance, communing with the art in the very-late-medieval mansion of the Romantic painter Mariano Fortuny.

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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: 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.