Global Middle Ages

Global Middle Ages

In Spring 2004, the Medieval Studies program introduced new collaborative, team-taught, interdisciplinary graduate seminars. These seminars are of two kinds. To bring medieval studies into an ever more complex, interdependent, and internationalized twenty-first century, we will teach an interconnected medieval world—a "global" Middle Ages—and the interrelationship of culture, ideas, technologies, religions, and movements across periods of time and geography. To teach the interconnected relationship of culture in its many forms—literature, music, art, cartography, politics, law, etc—team-taught seminars across disciplines will also be introduced in thematically organized units.

One goal of the new seminars is to inculcate practices of thinking across periods, cultures, territories, and disciplines, even as medieval studies at the University of Texas continues to emphasize the importance of intensive training in disciplinary knowledges and practices. Course descriptions and information on public lectures and visiting faculty associated with the new seminars will be posted on this website.
The Global Middle Ages

Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500-1500 AD

Medieval Studies: MDV 392M & MDV 685L/MDV 385L, Spring 2004, T/Th 4:00-7:00
Unique #: 62095 & 62075/62070
Crosslisted: History, English, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, Asian Studies, African/African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies
UT Instructors: Heng, Spellberg, Talbot, Lariviere, Hart
Visiting faculty: Kea, Liu

Graduate courses taught in most university departments today focus on individual countries & cultures, making it difficult to develop a complex sense of what the world is like—how civilizations, ideas, and institutions are interconnected, or how culture, resources, and technology move across geographical space— in any given period of time.

This team-taught, multidisciplinary graduate seminar at UT—the only one of its kind anywhere—will train students to look at the world as a whole: to study the routes along which people, material artifacts, and ideas moved; examine the similarities and differences among religious, social, legal, & economic systems around the globe; and follow the development of warfare, states, cities, hierarchies of organization & power, and transformations to modernity during the premodern period that we will call, for convenience, the “Middle Ages” (approximately 500-1500 AD).

Five UT faculty from History, English, Religious Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian Studies, and two visiting faculty specializing in medieval Africa and Eurasia, will collaborate in seminar to map a global continuum from Spain in the West, to China in the East, and spanning Europe, Maghrebi & Sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic Near Eastern civilizations, and India.

We will examine the border zones of contact created by wars of religion between West & East, which drove transfers of culture and ideas, and consider the role of war in creating overarching collective identities and geopolitical communities, states, and premodern nations. We will follow the track of technology, money, skills, & information along established trade routes like the trans-Eurasian Silk Road and the gold caravan routes of Africa, from points of embarkation to termini in emporia and courts. We’ll see how the slave trade, religious missionizing, pilgrimage, and exploration simultaneously offer the globe as a series of discrete zones and a gridded network of linked spaces. We’ll consider the role played locally and globally by technological wonders such as compass, stirrup, gunpowder, and paper, and certain key mathematical, legal, and philosophical concepts.

Our global transversal will be driven by a set of overarching questions that will complexify in the course of the semester. For instance: does social and economic organization reproduce itself in similar-ways-with-difference throughout the globe in premodernity, so that themes and patterns can be traced across kings and courts, warrior and administrative culture, institutions and codes, laws, mythologies, literature and art, across the world? Are there “global feudalisms”—systems of organizing agriculture, external defense and internal order, political hierarchy, and relations to land—that conjointly mark the long period of premodernity in distinct ways? Do cities, states, empires, and institutions in this period borrow from, and imitate far-flung models—communicate—in ways that have yet to be fully understood? (Consider a recent remark by cellist Yo-yo Ma that “the Silk Road is the ‘Internet’ of the premodern age.”)

To train students to “think globally” and across disciplines, while working locally, and with the disciplinary tools inculcated by their own departmental training, the seminar will also offer opportunities for students to conduct original research in many fields. For students in literature, for instance, the genres of travel literature, biography, romance, hagiography, journal, chronicle, and legend offer opportunities to work on the Alexander legend, Prester John, Marco Polo, St Thomas of India, Benjamin of Tudela, Ibn Battuta, the Franciscan journals on the Mongols, Cathay, and the Great Khan, crusade chronicles, Charlemagne romances, Christopher Columbus, etc, within a global perspective & a rich, multifaceted international context.

Each student will design his/her own contribution to the seminar in consultation with a faculty member on the instructional team. Because the faculty team has a wide variety of specializations (from Indic legal codes to Chinese mathematics, science, & technology; from Indo-European courtly culture to gender in Islam), student projects can take many forms. It may also be possible for visiting faculty to oversee projects (the visiting Africanist has a subspecialization in Arabic cartography). The unique format of this seminar allows for substantial flexibility.

How to enroll for this seminar: This seminar is crosslisted with a number of departments & programs. Interested students should consult Cristina Zambrano at: 475-6356 or cris.tina@mail.utexas.edu. The seminar will meet as a group twice a week for 3 hrs (a total of 6 seminar hrs a week); students may also meet individually for conference hours with an instructor of choice for the supervision of their seminar project & contribution. Information on the faculty instructional team (names, publications, specializations), topics covered by each instructor, and a provisional list of sample seminar texts, is also available on request from Cristina Zambrano in Calhoun 210, Department of English, M-F, 8-5.

We welcome students from any department, period, field, discipline, or specialization who has something to offer the seminar, and who are willing to work substantively at thinking through the issues we will address. No prior knowledge of the medieval period, or of any of the countries & questions we address, will be assumed.

THE FACULTY:

In chronological order of teaching segments: Geraldine Heng, Denise Spellberg, Ray Kea (U of California, Riverside), Cyndy Talbot, Richard Lariviere, Xinru Liu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Roger Hart.

Geraldine Heng specializes in medieval European literature, with a focus on England, and in feminist, race, postcolonial and cultural theory. Currently Director of Medieval Studies at UT, her publications include Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia UP, 2003), and articles in PMLA, the Yale Journal of Criticism, differences, and Genders. She teaches and publishes on crusades, travel, race, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality in medieval culture.

D. A. Spellberg is a specialist in gender, religion, and the historiography of medieval Islam, and leads the Middle Eastern division in the History dept at UT. She has published Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of `A'isha bint Abi Bakr (Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), and contributed most recently to the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, the Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia; and The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

Cynthia Talbot is a specialist on the social and cultural history of medieval India, and Associate Chair of the History dept. She has published Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval India (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and articles in journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Indian Economic and Social History Review.

Richard W. Lariviere specializes in Sanskrit and in Indian legal history. Among his publications, the most notable is the prize-winning critical edition and translation of the Naradasmrti, an early Sanskrit text on legal procedure (ca. 500 AD). In his academic career he has been honored by a number of international bodies including the Collège de France where he was a visiting professor 1996-97. He is currently Dean of Liberal Arts at UT Austin.

Roger Hart specializes in the history of traditional China and the history of science; his research interests also include critical theory and early Chinese philosophy. He is currently completing a book manuscript "'Western Learning' in Seventeenth-Century China: A Microhistorical Approach to World History." For more information, see his web page: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rhart/

OUTLINE OF TOPICS OF COVERAGE:

Heng (Europe): What are the ‘Middle Ages’? Modernity? Premodernity? Feudalism(s): what/why/where—Europe/the world. Crusades, Wars, and Empires. Identities and Communities in Transition: Christendom, ‘Europe,’ States, Nations, Cities, Individuals. Race, Ethnicity, and Difference: Jews, ‘Saracens’, Mongols, ‘Others’. Technology, global transmissions, and social organization: stirrup and gunpowder, chess, paper, Plague. Gender and Sexuality. Childhood and Youth. Travel: pilgrimage, missionizing, trade, exploration. Imagining the World: Literature and culture.

Spellberg (Islamic civilization): Trade and Intercultural Connections (including Jews and the India trade, Arab writers on Franks and Vikings). Holy War: Spain, the Meditteranean, the Near East. Islam and Relations with Christianity and Judaism (tolerance/violence/acculturation). Intellectual Transfer of Philosophy and Science from Islamic Spain to Europe (reason, philosophy, the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture). Gender and Sexuality (Adam and Eve, the veil, marriage, isles of women). Popular Culture (the ‘Evil Eye’: intercultural-transcontinental transmission of colors, symbols, motifs, beliefs, practices).

Kea (Africa): Kingdoms, cities, and material and military culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cartography. Trade routes, caravans, emporia. Medieval African Manuscripts. Islam and Christianity in Africa. Legends and Romances.

Talbot (India): Hindu-Muslim Identities and Encounters. Court and Capital in Medieval South India. Gender and Warrior Honor in Indian Literary Narratives. Hindu Temples and Royal Patronage.

Lariviere (India): South Asian social structure and personal identity. Feudalism in India—or its absence. Transmission of information. Creation of knowledge. Relationship between politics and religion in South Asia. Indian understandings of the world. Gender and sexuality in Indian legal texts.

Hart (China/East Asia): Cultural Identities: Confucianism and Being ‘Chinese’. Cultural Transmissions: Confucianism and Buddhism throughout East Asia. Material Culture and Exchange: Science, Technology, Trade (including gunpowder, printing, compass, etc). Conflicts of Cultures: Warfare. Translation of Cultures: The ‘First Encounter’ of China and the West (Europe). Globalization: What, When, and Where?

EXAMPLES OF TEXTS:

Spellberg's sample list of texts:
Selections: from the Koran, chronicles, tales of the Prophet; Usamah Munqidh’s autobiography; Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah; Ibn Rushd (Averroes); Ibn Tufayl; Maimonides on reason and philosophy; Siyasatname, Book of Counsel for Kings; The Place of Tolerance in Islam; Communities of Violence; The Jews and the India Trade Documents: “The Pact of Umar;” “How the Jizya is the be Collectured and from Whom;” Isabella and Ferdinand’s “Edict of Expulsion of the Jews;” al-Mas’udi, “The Franks;” Nizam al-Mulk, “On those who wear the veil;” al-Idrisi’s 10th-century map for Roger of Sicily that features al-Waqwaq, the island of women.

Talbot's sample list:
Primary sources include: selected temple inscriptions from the Chola period of South India; excerpts from North Indian literary narratives relating to the expansion of Muslim power in the subcontinent (e.g., Kanhadade Prabandha and Khazain al-Futuh); selected accounts of foreign travelers to the Vijayanagara capital in South India; passages from the North Indian Madhumalati (an Indian Sufi romance).

Secondary sources include: selections from Lives of Indian Images; India's Islamic Traditions; New Light on Hampi: Recent Research on Vijayanagara; Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia; assortment of journal articles.

Hart's sample list:
Primary sources include selections from: Lao-Tzu’s Tao-Te Ching; the Analects attributed to Confucius; the Mengzi attributed to Mencius; Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West; writings on Buddhism in China, Japan, and Korea; writings for Khubilai Khan on the Great Learning; treatises on Chinese science and technology, including gunpowder and printing; Matteo Ricci’s True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven; documents of the Jesuits, their Chinese collaborators, and their critics; documents on China’s military policy toward the West, opium trade, and Tai Ping Rebellion

Secondary and theoretical readings include selections from: A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China; Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power; The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Biographies of Scientific Objects; The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective; China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures; Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System; Andre Gunder Frank’s Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age; The Global Transformations Reader.