Download PDF | Brian A. Catlos, Sharon Kinoshita - Can We Talk Mediterranean_ Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies-Palgrave Macmillan (2017).
166 Pages
PREFACE
THALATTA! THALATTA! TOWARDS THE SEA
The development of Mediterranean studies as a field or a framework for inquiry is usually traced back to Fernand Braudel and his monumental 1949 study, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (translated into English as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1972), a book that was pioneering both as a work of environmental history and for its analysis of the Mediterranean as a region. Ironically, Braudel’s work did not kick off a flurry of Mediterranean-oriented projects; rather, it served as the catalyst for the development of Atlantic Studies—a field (particularly given its initial focus on the North Atlantic) that resonated with the political situation of post-war Europe and North America and reflected the northwestern European orientation that dominated the academy at that time. In the intervening decades, though there were certainly historians who focused on the Mediterranean as a region, it was mostly as shorthand for the world of Greco-Roman antiquity. An important exception to this was Shlomo Goitein, whose work with the documents of the Cairo Geniza led him to characterize the world of medieval Arabo-Jewish traders as “A Mediterranean Society” (the title of his multi-volume opus on the subject).
Through the 1980s and 1990s, medieval historians became more comfortable using the Mediterranean as a regional frame, particularly in reference to economic relations, which were seen as binding a region otherwise imagined as cloven by the great cultural-religious divide between Islam and Christendom.1 Simultaneously, anthropologists and a few environmental historians were making a similar turn, while some scholars of culture were beginning to discern and investigate common trends and influences that seemed to unite the region.2 A watershed moment came in 2000 with the publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History—a dense, complex, uneven, and challenging book that built on the environmental history of Braudel and proposed a view of the Mediterranean as a coherent historical region from the time of the Neolithic through the Middle Ages. It was a work that seemed to ignore much that historians (particularly those of the Mediterranean) had considered important (such as culture, the state, and institutions, and indeed, historical narrative at all) in favor of sketching underlying relationships and characteristics that had endowed the region with historical consistency (if not unity) since nearly the era of the first human settlement. A short, waggish review of its findings might read, “A lot going on, but nothing happens.” Some readers took exception to this, while others were put off by the density of its prose and the weight of its scholarship.
However, the book was important, and not only for the novelty of its arguments and methodology. As is often the case with revisionary or revolutionary works (at least those that become successful), it seemed to provide a means of explaining what scholars in multiple fields had begun to sense for some time: that the varied shores, hinterlands and islands of the Mediterranean were linked by powerful cultural, economic and social bonds, even in the face of (and, to modern scholars, often invisible behind) those confessional and political divisions that formally separated them. It especially spoke to the dissatisfaction of some scholars of Mediterranean lands toward the dominant scholarly meta-narratives that viewed the Middle Ages through the anachronistic prism of the nation and that presumed ethno-religious divisions to be both consistent and largely impenetrable. For these reasons and more, The Corrupting Sea both coincided with and, in turn, energized an explosion of scholarship (not to mention a proliferation of journals, projects, institutes, and seminars) that embraced “Mediterranean studies” as a new and enabling frame of reference.
This was certainly the case with the editors of the present volume––two scholars of the Middle Ages (Catlos in religious studies and history, Kinoshita in literature) who found that established paradigms simply could not explain the sorts of dynamics we were uncovering their work. For us, The Corrupting Sea offered a framework in which political developments or cultural phenomena that seem anomalous or exceptional when seen through established categories like “Europe,” “the Islamic world,” national histories, and so on could suddenly make sense, even appearing normal (or normative) in Mediterranean terms. For scholars like us, the Mediterranean perspective has been liberating and productive, resonating not only with our own scholarship but with the less Eurocentric, increasingly sophisticated views of the world’s history and culture that themselves reflect, in part, the increasing diversity of our faculty and student bodies. And so, Mediterranean studies has blossomed in a flurry of enthusiasm that has animated scholars of art, history, religion, and literature.
But in academia, new paradigms for inquiry are no easy sell. Scholarship is conservative by nature. Beyond the investment some may have in reproducing the disciplines in which they were trained, there’s the simple inertia of existing institutional structures—departments and colleges, professional associations and conferences, specialized journals and other publication venues—all more or less wedded to a discourse of expertise that discourages experimentation or collaboration across disciplinary lines. So to some, “the Mediterranean” might seem an unruly and unpromising place. (Before the development of beach culture and institutionalized leisure in the nineteenth century, we should remember, the sea was generally seen as dangerous, irrational, unpredictable: a place where fortunes could be made but lives could be lost, a source of anxiety—hardly a welcoming place.) A frequent objection that “no one in the Middle Ages referred to themselves as Mediterranean” (disingenuous, given how few politically—or culturally-defined areas of study can lay claim to any sort of transhistorical existence) mistakes a topic in intellectual history—the history of conceptualizations of the Mediterranean—for the kinds of cross-regional, inter-ethnic or—confessional, multilingual, transcultural phenomena that the Mediterranean frame can help us to apprehend and analyze.
This is not to say that “the Mediterranean” can explain everything; it is clearly not the appropriate frame for every historical problem and scholars do not necessarily agree on what it means, what its extent and scope are, or how to put it to work as a unit of analysis. But this diversity of opinion is less a consequence of the desire to reify “the Mediterranean” than of the richness of the scholarship enabled by the Mediterranean frame. And so, the present volume poses the rhetorical question, “Can we talk Mediterranean?” both ironically (as if we required permission to challenge long-dominant paradigms), and sincerely (regarding the usefulness of this approach). The result is a candid and rather personal conversation in which five scholars from the humanities—one new to Mediterranean studies, one a pioneer in the field, and three who have been using it for some time— share the way that it has informed their own work, along with their assessments of its strengths and limitations. Social and economic historian and religious scholar Brian Catlos’s “Why the Mediterranean?” suggests that the sea provides a framework, which—at the very least—is no less useful for analyzing the past than better-established regional frameworks.
In “The Thalassal Optic,” art historian Cecily Hilsdale shows how an appreciation for Mediterranean interconnectivity forces us to reassess our approach to centers of production and patronage in the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Islamic world that were clearly interdependent but which have previously been studied only in isolation. Literary and cultural scholar Sharon Kinoshita’s “Negotiating the Corrupting Sea: Literature ‘in’ and ‘of’ the Medieval Mediterranean” outlines the potential of “the Mediterranean” both to generate new questions and insights about well-worn texts, and to bring different kinds of texts to our critical attention. “Desiderata for the Study of Early Modern Art of the Mediterranean” represents art historian Claire Farago’s assessment of the Mediterranean turn and how it relates to other trans-regional, hybrid, and non-canonical approaches, including recent work in Latin American art. Finally, in “The Maritime, the Ecological, the Cultural––and the Fig Leaf: Prospects for Medieval Mediterranean Studies,” medical historian and Mediterranean authority Peregrine Horden reconsiders the utility of the Mediterranean that he and Nicholas Purcell helped articulate. These essays are followed by “Beneath the Surface: Responses and Queries,” a re-creation of the discussion among the authors and the audience at the symposium where these talks were presented.
The volume concludes with “Reflections: Talking Mediterranean,” comprising the five panelists’ short responses to the others’ papers and the conversation they sparked. Our intention was not to produce a definitive or authoritative work on Mediterranean studies but rather to bring scholars from different humanities fields together in an open conversation about its uses and limitations. We, the editors, have embraced the Mediterranean as a frame of scholarly inquiry and, through experience, are convinced of its usefulness in revising, complicating, and enhancing the historical and cultural narrative of the pre-modern “West.” Our hope is that this short volume will serve as an inspiration or starting point for other scholars interested in exploring the Mediterranean as means of enriching their own particular field of study.
THE MEDITERRANEAN SEMINAR AND THE MEDITERRANEAN PERSPECTIVES SERIES
CanWe TalkMediterranean is the debut volume of the series, Mediterranean Perspectives, a collaboration between Palgrave Macmillan publishers and The Mediterranean Seminar. Founded by Catlos and Kinoshita in 2007, the Mediterranean Seminar is an interdisciplinary forum for the development of teaching and research in the Mediterranean frame. It grew out of a Research Cluster established in 2003 under the aegis of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Cultural Studies. Since its inception the Seminar has organized panels at many professional conferences (including annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Medieval Academy, the World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies, the Middle East Studies Association, and the InternationalMedieval Congress); a 14-week Residential Research Group at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute; four National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes for University and College Professors (Barcelona 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2015); and a 5-year Multi-Campus Research Project Initiative funded by the University of California Office of the President (2010–2015), consisting of quarterly workshops and conferences at six UC campuses and partner institutions (the University of Colorado Boulder, San Francisco State University and Loyola Marymount). We have also partnered with other institutions and organizations across North America and Europe, including theMedworlds conferences, the University of Paris, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Barcelona). Since the conclusion of our funding from the University of California, our board members and associates have raised funds locally so that now our triannual workshop conferences are held at locations across North America. Over the last nine years, scholars from a range of disciplines and research interests have taken part in our programs; the roster of scholars associated with the Mediterranean Seminar has grown to over 1100 worldwide. This same period has brought a proliferation of Mediterranean studies initiatives and publications around the world.
We were delighted when, in 2012, Palgrave invited us to propose this series, and are proud to present this, our inaugural volume. Looking to the future, we believe that the Mediterranean will continue to develop as a field of inquiry, enabling analyses that help solve dilemmas unresolved by more traditional paradigms, a revisionist perspective in the best senses of the term: one which encourages fresh and innovative research and teaching, firmly grounded in data, rigorous in nature, conscious both of the distorting nature of traditional meta-narratives and of our own particular subjectivities, and one that reflects and resonates with an ever more diverse academy, and the ever more diverse societies we serve. Boulder, USA Santa Cruz, USA.
Brian A. Catlos Sharon Kinoshita
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