(Left, Castello della Zisa, the Palermo museum of Islamic art. Right, the mariners’ church of La Martorana.)
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Meeting of Cultures
I don’t love the framework of “meeting of cultures” because I think that it frequently obscures the organic, syncretic nature of culture by trying to break it down into component parts, as if they were separable and had met at one point. The closest I could come was some images from the museum of Arab art in Havana, including the most spectacular late-seventeeth-century neo-moresque cabinet I have ever seen in my life. Cuba is the site of that legend about Columbus’ Arabic-speaking translator — because any civilized society would be made up of Arabic speakers —meeting the Taino chief, the cubanacán, and thinking that he had definitely met the right person — the Cuban Khan. And now, this Spanish cabinet inlaid with the motto of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, vanquished by Columbus’ patrons in the same watershed year he set out, has become a part of the collection of the Arab art museum in Havana, supported by the Turkish government in what is perhaps another attempt at a meeting of cultures and the assertion of imperial power in the Caribbean.
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Place to Visit
The first travel that I did after I knew that my tenure bid had been approved was to take a weekend trip to the city of Zaragoza in between two conferences a week apart in Cordoba and Barcelona, early in the summer of 2017. This was a really meaningful trip to me because before I had tenure I struck a bargain with myself that if I kept my butt in my chair and got my work done, in spite of feeling like I was sacrificing having any kind of life, that I’d do things just because I wanted to once I was post-book and post-tenure. It was especially hard to keep up the first half of the bargain the semester that I was at NYU-Madrid, when I had planned to start on a new project at the National Library there and spend weekends tromping around Castilian castles; and I couldn’t do any of htat because the book manuscript still needed significant this work. This trip to Zaragoza, then, a weekend between two conferences in Spain and Israel, was the first thing I did to keep the second half of that bargain with myself. And so Zaragoza, medieval and otherwise, — well, I understand why people who live there complain about it, but — as a place to visit for me represents a kind of personal and intellectual freedom that was totally new.
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Tradition
Three photos from Semana Santa in Seville, 2015. A long-standing tradition based on inquisitorial rites and rituals.
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Modern Significance (Day 18) and Edifice (Day 19)
Some views of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, a building that is all modern significance, and always has been. At the moment it was built it signified an attempt to unify a fragmented Muslim community that included military rulers who had been left to do their own thing until the center of power moved west in the middle of the 8th century. It came to symbolize Córdoba during the period of the Umayyad emirate and caliphate, when it became the visual touchstone for al-Andalus (about which the art historian Susana Calvo Capilla has written — Las mesquitas de al-Andalus — and which is quite self-evident in the illuminations of the Beatus commentary on the apocalypse). When Fernando III took the city of Córdoba in 1236, the building was converted into church and left, architecturally, just as it always had been because it was the modern look for buildings of all sorts. When modern aesthetics turned to the Europeanizing and the baroque, Charles V plunked a baroque cathedral down in the center of the building.
Its red and white striped arches are still a visual short-hand for the region. And it is the site that most closely reflects the debates about Islam, religion, and history in the peninsula in the contemporary period, about which my colleague Eric Calderwood has written about it: The Reconquista of the Mosque of Córdoba.
And finally, my favorite piece of paper ephemera: The Great Mosque is the first place I took students on a big trip in Spain, and this is a map from that visit, drawn for me by the colleague I was traveling with, of a suggested path through the mosque. So this is a modern, erm, signification of the space.
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Teachable
My favorite part of teaching is being the faculty advisor to a cohort of sophomores in the Presidential Honors Scholars program at NYU; we teach students research skills to prepare them to write their senior honors theses, expose them to the cultural offerings of New York City (opera, museums, etc.), and travel with them for a week in January to one of the cities where NYU has a site; the place is so much more teachable in person than in photos and lectures and it’s very rewarding to see the kinds of connections that students make to the material by being on site. (Photo credit: Noelle Marchetta)
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.
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.
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.
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.
