East Meets West In The Middle Ages And Early Modern Times

This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

'The Damned Fraternitie': Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 examines the construction of gypsy identity in England between the early sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century. Drawing upon previous historiography, a wealth of printed primary sources (including government documents, pamphlets, rogue literature, and plays), and archival material (quarter sessions and assize cases, parish records and constables's accounts), the book argues that the construction of gypsy identity was part of a wider discourse concerning the increasing vagabond population, and was further informed by the religious reformations and political insecurities of the time. The developing narrative of a fraternity of dangerous vagrants resulted in the gypsy population being designated as a special category of rogues and vagabonds by both the state and popular culture. The alleged Egyptian origin of the group and the practice of fortune-telling by palmistry contributed elements of the exotic, which contributed to the concept of the mysterious alien. However, as this book reveals, a close examination of the first gypsies that are known by name shows that they were more likely Scottish and English vagrants, employing the ambiguous and mysterious reputation of the newly emerging category of gypsy. This challenges the theory that sixteenth-century gypsies were migrants from India and/or early predecessors to the later Roma population, as proposed by nineteenth-century gypsiologists. The book argues that the fluid identity of gypsies, whose origins and ethnicity were (and still are) ambiguous, allowed for the group to become a prime candidate for the 'other', thus a useful tool for reinforcing the parameters of orthodox social behaviour.

To expand our understanding of medieval literature in its wider context, there is a desperate need for more translations, since not every text in the Middle Ages was written in Latin, English, or French. Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220) represents a major contribution to thirteenth-century German romance literature. The present English translation will allow those without knowledge of Middle High German to read and enjoy this significant composition and gain remarkable insights into a literary discourse that was to transform the late medieval canon. Rudolf’s work deserves particular attention because it includes remarkable examples of medieval multilingualism, tolerance, and multiculturality. The poet developed new aesthetic and ethical values, and presented an innovative relationship between a humble yet intelligent and compassionate individual and God by introducing, as his protagonist, a Cologne merchant, who supersedes even the Emperor Otto in his religious devotion, humbleness, and goodness. Finally, Der guote Gêrhart is clearly based on an eleventh-century Jewish narrative by Rabbi Nissim, though we cannot yet explain the lines of transmission from the Judeo-Arabic text to the Middle High German romance.