Tag: Medieval Institute

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Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Middle Ages

A few years ago, the Medieval Institute launched a new scholarly initiative. Designed to highlight the wealth of scholarly information here at Notre Dame while increasing scholarly community and cross-communication across disciplines and ranks, the Medieval Institute Working Groups were established as a means of creating such an academic crossroad.

One of these groups, Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean, sought to push against the popular image of the Middle Ages as a uniquely Western European Catholic phenomenon. The organizers, Dr. Thomas Burman (Director, MedievaI Institute), Dr. Gabriel Reynolds (Professor, Theology) and Andrea Castonguay (Ph.D. Candidate, History), believed that by shifting the geographical parameters from Northwest Europe to the Mediterranean basin and opening up the confessional borders of scholarly investigation that had previously segregated the Middle Ages into self-contained Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim spheres, the Working Group would bring new perspectives to the idea of the Middle Ages and facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to the period.  If a topic was somehow tied to the peoples, cultures, and civilizations active in the Mediterranean at some point during the Middle Ages, the Religion and Pluralism Working Group judged the topic fair game for discussion, inquiry, and exploration.

The Catalan Map, c. 1525.  British Library Add. MS 31318 B

While this rubric for a field of critical inquiry might be seen by some as generous to a fault, its breadth is actually the Working Group’s greatest strength. By casting a wide net, the Religion and Pluralism Working Group attracted a diverse group of members and speakers, most of whom would not necessarily interact with one another in an academic setting outside of a social hour.

During our first year in 2017-2018, we hosted 8 sessions where the topics of discussion and the presenters themselves reflected the group’s diverse make-up. The inaugural session was led by Dr. Jeremy Pearson (Bryant University), then a postdoctoral fellow at the Medieval Institute, who presented an article on William of Tyre (d. 1186), an archbishop and Dominican friar of European origin born in the Crusader kingdoms and privy to a unique perspective on the interplay between European Christians, Levantine Christians, and their respective relationship to the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Although not by design but by happenstance, the Working Group continued to focus on Christians in the the Middle East and how they responded to Islam during Fall 2017 by reading Michael Penn’s Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (UPenn, 2015) and hosting Dr. Jack Tannous (Princeton University) for a lecture and discussion on Syriac Christian sources and their importance for understanding the early centuries of Islam, the establishment of the Umayyad (661-749/750) and Abbasid caliphates (749/750-1258).

William of Tyre discovers Baldwin IV’s leprosy, from Histoire d’Outremer, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 12, f. 152v, mid 13th century. Image Source: Wikimedia .

During our Spring 2018 sessions, our attention turned to other parts and peoples of the Mediterranean and other types of scholarship. Whereas our Fall 2017 sessions focused on using religious texts to understand historical events, our Spring sessions turned to the ways in which different types of physical evidence, from archeological records, material culture, personal journals, could tell us about the medieval past. Dr. Sarah Davis-Secord (University of New Mexico) joined us for a discussion of her book, Where Three Worlds Meet: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell UP, 2017) and spoke about the pros and cons of reconstructing centuries of history from physical objects in the absence of written records. Eve Wolynes (Ph.D. Candidate, History) presented a chapter from her dissertation on Venetian and Pisian merchant families and the various differences between Italian merchant families and commercial practices during the Late Middle Ages that her source material revealed over the course of her investigation.

Last but not least, the three co-organizers of the Religion and Pluralism Working Group, Tom Burman, Gabriel Reynolds, and Andrea Castonguay, all took turns presenting various works-in-progress to the group.  Gabriel Reynolds presented book chapters on sinners and sin in Islam from his forthcoming book, Allah: A Portrait of God in the Qur’an, while Andrea Castonguay presented a dissertation chapter on Muslim dynasties and competing Islamic sects in early medieval Morocco.  Tom Burman closed the 2017-2018 year by presenting with Dr. Nuria Martínez de Castilla (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) and Dr. Pearson the fruits of their collaborative project on the purported correspondence between Byzantine Emperor Leo III (r. 717-741 ) and the Umayyad caliph ‘Umar II (r. 717-720) and its dissemination in Latin, Armenian, Arabic and Aljamiado (medieval & early modern Spanish languages written in Arabic script) literature during the Middle Ages.

Poema de Yuçuf, c. late 14th century. Manuscript B; Author and copyist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia.

As the Working Group moved into its second year, its members sought to keep up the momentum while upholding the group’s commitment to rethinking the traditional academic boundaries of the Middle Ages. Noticing the lack of sessions devoted to Byzantine scholars and studies during the previous year, the members of the Working Group rectified that by asking the resident Byzantine postdoctoral fellows, Dr. Lee Mordechai and Dr. Demetrios Harper, for their recommendations. As a result, the group read Phil Booth’s Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent At the End of Late Antiquity (UCalifornia, 2017), which explored how monasticism, initially a very vocal way of rejecting centralized power and empire, became an important component of both the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Empire during the 6th and 7th centuries. In addition, Dr. Paul Blowers (Milligan College) was invited to speak about the interplay between the pre-Christian Classical world and the Christian Byzantine world in theatrical literature. Issues related to the Byzantine world and its relationship with the former Roman Empire were also discussed during a presentation by Dr. Ralf Bockmann (German Archaeological Institute Rome; Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton) by way of changes to church structures and saint veneration in Christian North Africa during the transition from the Vandal (435-534) to the Byzantine (mid 6th- mid 7th century) period.

In a similar vein, the organizers sought to diversify the Working Group’s membership by reaching out to new members of the wider Notre Dame and St. Mary’s community and asking them to present their research. Dr. Hussein Abdelsater, a new member of both the Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Department and Medieval Institute Faculty Fellows at Notre Dame,  presented a paper on the miracle of the splitting of the Moon and the ways in which it was discussed in Qur’anic exegesis. Dr. Jessalynn Bird (Humanistic Studies, St Mary’s) presented early work on Jacques de Vitry (1180-1240) and and Oliver of Paderborn (fl. 1196-1227) as part of a new book project on Mediterranean geography in the writings of Western Europeans. Dr. Robin Jensen (Patrick O’Brien Professor of Theology) gave a presentation on the tension between early Christians, their adherence to the commandment to have no false idols, and the presence of Classical deities and statuary in the Late Antique Mediterranean landscape.

Falnameh: The Book of Omens,  16th Century Persian manuscript; Artist unknown. Image source: Source: US Library of Congress.

Moving outside of the South Bend community, Dr. Mark Swanson (Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago) was invited to speak about the ways in which Copts in Mamluk Egypt read various Arabic works such as the writing of Moses Maimonides (c. 1135-1204) and the Pentateuch of Saadia Gaon (c. 882 -942) and incorporated their ideas into Copic liturgy and liturgical writings. This presentation along with Dr. Swanson’s generous show-and-tell of publised Coptic primary sources was especially interesting to several upper year Theology Ph.D. Candidates working on Near Eastern Christian communities, who were pleased to learn more about the various resources available for the High and Late Middle Ages.

From its inception, the goal of the Religion and Pluralism Working Group was to bust down the various walls that silo academics and scholars into a specific discipline while reminding others–ourselves included–that the Middle Ages was a long historical period encompassing many different civilizations, peoples, faiths, and geographies, and that we need that multiplicity of specialists in order to understand this period in history. There is no such thing as a medievalist who can act as the sole representative of the discipline, nor can they bear the discipline’s weight all by themselves. Rather, there are medievalists working in concert with and parallel to one another and the strength of the discipline rests upon their abilities to connect with one another, share information, and challenge their own understanding of the Middle Ages through repeated exposure to the different flavors and facets of the period.

In order to best represent and reflect the multi-faceted nature of the Middle Ages and the diversity of contemporary medievalists, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the period is in order.  The Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean Working Group provides such a space, and it is our intention to keep this momentum going during the 2019-2020 year and beyond.  Stay tuned to MI News and Events for details and future meetings!

A. L. Castonguay
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History
University of Notre Dame

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Blog Posts: A New Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Notre Dame Undergraduates

Important Update 7/26/18: The Medieval Institute recently merged the Medieval Undergraduate Research website with this one. All posts from the old site have been transferred here, and the  undergraduate content can now be found under the "Undergrad Wednesdays" category. The rest of the information in this post remains accurate and up-to-date.

The Medieval Institute recently launched a new website, Medieval Undergraduate Research, to provide a new community platform for undergraduates studying any area of the Middle Ages. Pedagogically, one of its purposes is to help instructors introduce a new kind of writing assignment in the classroom: the blog post. The recent rise of the digital humanities (DH) has placed particular pressure on medievalists to pursue new scholarly pathways, not only in their own scholarship, but also in the classroom as well. One simple way to increase students’ DH experience is to give them writing assignments based on digital genres. Translating foundational humanities skills–critical thinking, reading, and writing–into newer online platforms, prepares students for a job market that increasingly expects them to be able to communicate effectively in digital mediums.

On this site, posts, carefully revised and edited with help from instructors and myself, the site’s Webmaster, become mini-publications that students can add to their resumes as evidence of their ability to write professionally for a wide audience. Faculty can also use the blog post to encourage students to think about the course material they are learning in an alternative format, not with the intention of replacing the traditional academic essay, but rather as a supplement to it. In fact, many of the standard elements of a conventional assignment could be incorporated into these posts as in the sample assignment provided below. However, students should pay careful attention to audience as the platform encourages students to write “with a different voice and tone than they might use in a traditional essay” and to “explore the multimedia possibilities offered by” the genre.[1] Certain assignments, crafted with an eye towards interlinking and online research, could even focus on developing students’ digital literacy, finding, reading, and evaluating the quality of their online sources.

Contributions to this online forum can address any topic under the large umbrella of medieval studies, leaving the possibilities for assignment topics wide open. For example, a series of posts currently published under the course category “Chaucer’s Biggest Rivals” respond to a prompt written by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, worth quoting in full:

Translation Critique Project for Blog: You can write this blog post either on Pearl or Gawain. There are two parts to this: you will translate a passage of your choice and then comment on the various stylistic devices used by the poet in one of the passages given (e.g. word play, metre, rhyme, stanza structure, imagery). Then you will write a critique of Marie Boroff’s translation (she is considered the best American poetic translator of Middle English). A copy of Boroff’s translations can be purchased inexpensively and one will also be placed on Reserve in the Library; however, her Gawain can also be found in any edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. You may wish to look at Boroff’s introduction to her text, where she gives the rationale for her approach. You will want to consider the problems of literary style, accuracy, faithfulness to the medieval poet’s text, and the demands of modern English in your analysis, and you should have no fewer than five examples to illustrate your views. (The Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary are good resources for this type of research as well). The length of this assignment is about 1000 words, so not very long, and we are going to post the best of them online on the ND Medieval Institute’s blog website (Medieval Undergraduate Research), with the help of Dr. Nicole Eddy [the site’s former Webmaster]. And we will put the appropriate image from the Pearl or Gawain manuscript with your post, or perhaps other appropriate images. See: http://blogs.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/undergraduate-research/.

Many of the students tasked with these critiques found innovative ways to connect the material to modern culture in order to adapt their more traditional analyses to this newer genre and to address a wide audience. Examples include Karen Neis’ “An Ugly, Bad Witch” and Elizabeth Kennedy’s “Visceral Moments in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”

Some reflections on a manuscript reproduction project completed for a “History of the Book” course at St. Mary’s College across the street are currently joining those translation critiques. These posts, written under the guidance of Sarah Noonan, reflect on the process of manuscript production from the materials (parchment, ink, etc.) to the artistic decisions that go into designing the mise-en-page. Next semester, I will require students in my Canterbury Tales course to write blog posts that close read a short passage in lieu of one of the shorter close reading essays I typically assign. Historians, theologians, and philosophers will likely approach the blog assignment differently, and we welcome disciplinary diversity. We hope to gain wide interdisciplinary coverage that represents the full breadth of Notre Dame’s medieval curriculum.

Instructors using this site as the basis for course assignments should feel free to experiment with a range of traditional and creative prompts. We are also open to accepting work performed for extra credit, so long as the submissions undergo revision based on feedback from an instructor or TA. Individual students are invited to send us individual submissions based on successful work they performed for their classes, such as a major research project, or an analytical essay, revised to match the length and tone of a blog entry.

Medieval Institute, Hesburgh Library. Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Moreover, in the coming months, we plan to roll out a supplementary classroom visit program for which I, or one of my regular contributors, will give quest lectures. Our presentations will consist of a twenty-minute talk about how to set up and write a successful blog post in WordPress. This program will provide an additional resource for faculty who want some extra support implementing their technology-based assignments.

We are, of course, far from the first ones to suggest blog posts as course assignments (see what others have said, here,  here, and here). However, as opposed to some of the more informal models in common use (weekly reading responses, daily prompts, etc.), all of which serve valuable purposes, the posts for this site are meant to be more formal and involved. As a centralized hub for undergraduate bloggers at Notre Dame, these carefully revised and polished contributions are meant to function more like mini, peer-reviewed publications. With this goal in mind, we encourage faculty and undergraduates to participate in this project and are eager to work with you at any stage of the process.

Sample Assignments:

Update 4/27/18: Here is a sample assignment that aims to improve students’ proficiency in digital genres. ‎

Update 5/4/18: Here is an extra credit assignment also in use for the undergraduate site.

Karrie Fuller, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame/St. Mary’s College

[1] Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).

A few additional resources for DH teaching at the undergraduate level:

Hacking the Academy, May 21-28, 2010 (http://hackingtheacademy.org). (There’s also a book version of this project published by the University of Michigan Press, 2013.)

Brett, Hirsch, ed., Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012).