Episode 8 - The 'Global' Middle Ages: A Conversation with Dr Shazia Jagot

How can the study of the 'Global' Middle Ages decentre traditionally Eurocentric frameworks of medieval studies? And how do we even define the 'Global' in 'Global Middle Ages'? 

In this episode, I unpack these questions with Dr Shazia Jagot, a Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. We discuss how the study of cross-cultural influence and transmission can untether the study of the medieval world from traditionally European and English perspectives. Dr. Jagot examines the opportunities as well as the challenges that this approach to the medieval can open up for scholars and students alike. We touch upon issues surrounding periodisation, categorisation and terms like 'influence' before considering how analogues and sources are fruitful ways of exploring conceptualisations of the 'global'. These approaches enable us to view 'English' literature as a kind of tapestry that brings together science, intellectual history and material culture from across the world. 

Our discussion turns to the question of how medieval literature can transform our conventional, often negative, understanding of 'anachronism' by framing it as a generative, creative tool in texts like 'Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan' and 'Beowulf'. Dr. Jagot discusses how her transcultural work across texts intersects with the study of Islamic and Christian connections perpetuating conversion narratives within Middle English romances. Our conversation segues into a consideration of Hispano-Arabic literary traditions and the blurring of cultural boundaries and lines of transmission, opening up the question of how far origin studies are actually useful ways of exploring the Global Middle Ages. From Attar's 'Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr' (The Conference of the Birds) to 'The Arabian Nights', medieval Islamic texts demonstrate a self-conscious awareness of their own 'literariness' which sheds new light on conceptualisations of authorship in these narratives. 

We conclude our conversation by talking about some of our favourite modern-day adaptations of the medieval Persian and Islamic world, including Hamid Ismailov's 'Of Strangers and Bees' where Avicenna is reimagined as a bee! 

At its core, this episode invites you to reconsider how certain terminology, approaches and frameworks shape our view of the medieval world and how the 'global turn' in medieval studies facilitates this reconsideration. 

Note: No prior knowledge on the topic is needed. All terms and texts are explained in this episode in an accessible manner! 

For more information about Dr Shazia Jagot, please visit this link: https://www.york.ac.uk/english/people/shaziajagot/#profile-content. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Hi everyone, welcome back to Interwoven. This week I'm joined by Shazia Jagot, who's a really exciting guest we've got on this week. She's a senior lecturer in medieval and global literature at the University of York. Her work specializes in the intellectual, literary, and cultural transmissions between the Islamic world and late medieval England. Prior to York, she was a lecturer in medieval literature at the University of Surrey and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Southern Denmark. Shazia, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

I'm well, thank you. And thank you, Aska, for inviting me. I'm really excited to be in conversation with you and to think about kind of the medieval world and the global middle ages in all kinds of different ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Yeah, um, it's such an exciting topic, especially since it's quite a new field that listeners may not be fully aware of. So could you tell us a little bit about the global middle ages and what the study of it entails?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yeah, I mean, in many ways, the global middle ages is not a distinct field in some ways. It's been around the idea of the global middle ages, it's been around for at least 20 years, um, and it's been um a kind of a theoretical model, a methodological method, uh a framework, even for literary scholars and historians to kind of think with. Um, and there have been some great kind of big projects that have been looking at the global middle ages. Um, for instance, Naomi Standen and Catherine Holmes have led a big project, so both historians that look at kind of looked at kind of Europe and Asia together, so kind of these comparative models um looking across a wider medieval world. Um, then there's been theorisations of the global that we see, for instance, from literary scholars. So Geraldine Heng um is the scholar who's been really kind of leading the way on that front, so she's got some great kind of um big kind of theoretical essays that came out in the um in the 2010s around that time, um, and then her big work on um race in the European Middle Ages as well. I was also thinking about the kind of the globality of thinking about race in in the Middle Ages. So historians have been thinking a lot about kind of global history for a while as well, and what it means to do global history in in the medieval period, um, and there are ways that the the kind of the global, I often use the word global in kind of inverted commerce. It's been useful for me to kind of think with and and to kind of frame my own research interests and expertise. So I'm primarily interested in the literatures of the Islamic world in the medieval period and that of medieval England and and and um and the Mediterranean, and thinking about kind of contact across those two different places. One is a huge geographical region, um, and then thinking about um kind of England in particular, which has been my main focus for a long time. And the global Middle Ages has been kind of both useful to think with and also and think against as well, to kind of think about how we how we think about connection um across these different kinds of spaces during the medieval period. Um and there's been lots of um kind of critique of the global middle ages too, and rightly so. So, in the way that it has often been employed in in in a Eurocentric way, in the way that it can often be about a particular European country or a particular, I mean England in particular, English literature in particular has been a discipline that has been foregrounded in some ways, in in ways that um global middle ages can be kind of inherently Eurocentric. And um and there's been some really thought-provoking, interesting work by scholars thinking about critiquing the global middle ages, thinking about what what it actually means to do um work, how we actually bring experts together from different disciplines in medieval studies, which is such a huge field in itself, um, and the medieval itself is a term that is riddled with all kinds of other challenges, right? In the way that it med the medieval itself, the way that we think about the Middle Ages itself, is already inherently Eurocentric in terms of chronology and periodization. So it's exciting, it's challenging, it's um uh an interesting space. This kind of global turn, I think, is what we think about it. There's been a global turn in medieval studies um in the last couple of decades. Um, and I'm not at the forefront of global of the global middle ages in any way, but I think it's it's been a useful paradigm to kind of think with. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

You mentioned uh picking up on um specific terminology that's used within the global middle ages and critiquing it or kind of judging how far it's it's useful. And uh you mentioned in conversation with Alexandra Kingston-Rhys that this type of scholarship isn't necessarily comparative, nor is it strictly within the bounds of English literature as as we may see it. So, what frameworks do you use do you use to conceptualize these moments of cross-cultural contact? And um, do terms like influence risk being simplistic or um one-sided?

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, such a great question. That's questions that I've been grappling with for a really long time. So um, my own kind of I guess my own background, I did an English literature degree um at UK University, so I did a very traditional English literature degree, um, and then I went away and did um graduate studies in the study of the medieval Islamic world, um, and then I kind of brought the two together in my own PhD, and for a long time I've been thinking and grappling with this kind of ways of thinking about kind of frameworks because that the question of influence is something that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about because there are certain ways that we can think about um one thing influencing another in literature, so there are ways that we can find very direct links between texts. So we know that for instance, we know that Chaucer was reading Boccaccio, right? And we see that as an influence in his work, we see that as a direct source in the way that he's using Boccato in the Knights Tale or Introidus and Crusader. So, you know, there is a whole history around what we call sources and analogues, for instance, in Chaucer's scholarship, um, in in other ways that we kind of trace genealogies of comparable texts and these kind of influences. Um, and the work that I do, I'm looking at texts and not just tech, not just literary text, but also um intellectual text. So I work in intellectual history as well, that we know had a quote-unquote influence on poetry, but might not have a direct source, right? So it might not be that we can say Chaucer was exactly reading a um philosophical treatise by Ibn Rushdis, Veroese, who's a big uh philosopher of the medieval period, but we can certainly discern traces of that work in his um in Chaucer's poetry. So, how do we then conceptualise that kind of relationship? Well, there isn't a particular kind of direct textual source that we can point to as hard evidence. That that's one of the big kind of questions um that I've been grappling with for a for a long time, and and and influence is something that is really kind of wrapped up in those questions of movement and those questions of really unidirectional movement, right? Something that's moving really from the Islamic world into England and into kind of well, Europe more kind of broadly. Um but influence is itself is also kind of Eurocentric in the way that it's employed, um, it's appropriative in the way that it's employed as well, so it's about one region or one space or one place kind of gobbling up the other thing that's coming its way. You know, so kind of grappling with a kind of Eurocentricism in inherent within ideas of influence, but often when you're talking about uh we well, when you're trying to trace these often kind of direct but also kind of diffuse lines of transmission from a text that's coming from a non-European language, so something that's coming from Arabic, for instance, um, although in many ways I also argue that Arabic it is a language of Europe, it is a language of Europe in the in the in the Middle Ages, it is, I would also say, a language of England in many ways as well. It's one of the languages that is in England from at least the 12th century onwards. And when we come to thinking about those lines that are coming, um, those kind of lines of contact or influence that are coming from from Arabic into English literature, often um the case for hard evidence is required or doubly required from the scholar to try and prove that there was a kind of influence. So some of the ways that I'm thinking about these kind of not even cross-cultural influences but unidirectional forms of movement um is is also tied up with how kind of critical critical scholarship and critical reception has been thinking about influence or sources and analogues and how we kind of break those things down, how we destabilize them a little bit, how we look to towards things like decolonial frameworks in order for us to kind of think about how one text is present in another text or one way of thinking might be present in another text when that text or that way of thinking comes from outside of um Western Europe. Does that make some sense? Is that a kind of convoluted way of saying that I'm still thinking about frameworks? But these are the kinds of questions that I'm asking, constantly asking, and and constantly trying to kind of uh work you know, I'm constantly working within frameworks, and I'm also trying to kind of destabilize a little bit too.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yeah, what you said about movement was really interesting because it reminded me of Ayush Lazakhani's work with the avian framework and that idea of like almost being a bird moving through regions, and it also like reminded me of Harold Bloom and his theory of influence, which is very much kind of it's received a lot of pushback, but I really like that image of it being pottery that's been been, I guess, spun and changed across time. Um but I recently found out that a ring with the name Allah inscribed on it was discovered in Sweden and it traces back to the 9th century, which I think is really cool. So um I was wondering how far material or visual evidence allows us to see that kind of unidirectional movement that you mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah, yeah, and in many ways, material culture also allows us to see other forms of kind of cross-cultural contact in different regions, right? So, um, and material culture is actually so generative and so productive and so useful and valuable. Um, and and I'm always looking at the work of art historians because I think art historians are doing some really great work in that field in thinking and also having us kind of think conceptually about how we think about um cross-cultural movements. So uh Finba Barry Flood, for instance, who's an Islamic art historian, has this great way of thinking about objects as being kind of micro histories and thinking about them within kind of global micro histories, too, um, and the object as archive as well, which is something I'm also really interested in. So thinking about how you can kind of unpack uh an object and what that might tell you about its own kind of history, but then maybe the history of its particular technology or its particular colour or its particular usage, right? Which is why it's kind of moving from place to place. Um, I'm really interested in astrolabes, really, at the moment. This is the kind of um object that is um endlessly fascinating to me. So if you don't know what an astrolabe is, an astrolabe is a handheld device um that allows you to do all kinds of different astronomical um and a couple of astrological um functions um in the Middle Ages, including things like finding out the length of a shadow or the position of the sun and the moon in the in the skies, the position of stars and different constellations. Um but they also carry they also kind of are these little micro histories in themselves, these astrolabe. So I've been working a lot with Chaucer's traitus on the astrolabe, and but also thinking, which is his kind of main pro scientific text on this instrument, um, but also thinking about the object itself. And um, I've done a little bit of work actually on a um on a deconstructed exploded astrolabe that was produced by a British Muslim artist called Sarah Chowsry just in the last kind of five or six years. It was um a finalist in the Aesthetica Art Prize, um, and so she kind of explodes this astrolabe out, so you see, in its different kind of components. Yeah, and it has and she uses it as a way of thinking about migration and post-colonial history, and she puts in you know, she etches things in Urdu onto the because that's part of her own kind of post-colonial migration history, and it's and she calls it Sirat. So SIRAT, which is kind of means path, the kind of way of knowing, and so there's really interesting ways that I'm thinking thinking of of the astrolabe, both in a way that it's kind of conceived and used as a material object, both as a functional material object, but also as an artifact in the um in the medieval period, but then also how kind of contemporary artists are thinking about it as well. So that's just one kind of material object that I'm thinking of and and and using. But the the most fascinating thing about the medieval world or the global middle ages, however we want to think about it, is that there are endless um material objects that we can spend time thinking about. There was a really great exhibition at the British Museum a couple of years ago on the Silk Roads, which have these um fascinating objects that allows you to think about kind of both local and regional and kind of broader kind of movements from place to place as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

But yeah, that's really interesting because um I mean riddles are a really cool way, I guess, of conceptualizing the material world as well. And something that I've been looking at recently are the kind of connections between the exoterbic riddles and Arabic riddles, and a lot of them are so similar in terms of how they describe specific objects, and it really like goes to show that there may be cultural differences, linguistic differences at points, but materiality is something that's kind of a constant in some ways. You you mentioned an astrolabe, and I wanted to know more about how it is that I guess your work in the global Middle Ages is turning, I guess, literary studies into something more interdisciplinary.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I can claim that I'm doing huge amounts of work there. I think that there are lots of ways, lots of scholar scholars who are doing huge amount of interdisciplinary work, and I'm just kind of one of them, I guess, just also trying to work interdisciplinarily with a literary framework. Um, and and part of that part of the reason is I mean, I'm interested in lots of different things, so I've got quite an eclectic range of interests. I always say I'm kind of Jack of all trades, master of none in some ways as well. Um, and literature, of course, is my base, you know, literature is is what I teach, it's kind of what I love, it's kind of what I'm trained in, but I'm also interested in the way that literature is inherently interdisciplinary, right? So that you're already you can think about form and content, but you can also think really carefully about ideas, right? In the way that poetry and prose is kind of full of kind of intellectual ideas. I I'm primarily working on Chaucer, who I've been working on for a long time, um, who is kind of one of these poets from the Middle Ages that we know is so steeped in um in a form of intellectualism and a kind of layman's intellectualism. So there's lots of lots of ways that you can unpack particular ideas or um or different kinds of ways of thinking interdisciplinarily with his texts, as it were. So I think that's I'm interested in what a text can tell you. So sometimes it's the text that is is pointing you in other directions. So I did I've done some work for a long time on one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales known as The Squire's Tale, and I spent a lot of time thinking carefully about a few of those lines where he cites an Arabic um optical authority known as Ibn Al-Haythem in Arabic or Al-Hazen in Latin, and those lines kind of in it's all about kind of magic mirrors. That's kind of what kind of exploded out for me, a way of of thinking about kind of mirrors, right? Thinking about optics in the Middle Ages. So in sometimes it's the text that is leading you to another subject, right, and and and making you think about another discipline, as it were, outside of that kind of poetry. But it also means that the work that I do is quite slow because it takes me a long time to actually um learn about another subject. So I've spent a lot of time learning about optics, and I've spent a lot of time learning trying to learn about kind of medieval astronomy or medieval mathematics or medieval medicine. So, you know, these are all subjects in their own right, they've all kind of got their own histories, they've all got their own scholarship, um, and it's really thinking about well, what what can I as a literary scholar learn from these other disciplines and other kind of critical material around these disciplines? Um, and then what is it that what is the literature doing that is kind of interesting or raising particular kind of interesting questions um about optics or medicine, or you know, it's about thinking about those two kind of things hand in hand.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Yeah, I think I've veered off your question about no, no, no, no, that that's completely okay. Um you mentioned uh like what texts can tell us within themselves, and I think the the global Middle Ages is something that I've been thinking about in relation to romances and medieval romances because they just explicitly look at an encounter between the Christian and Islamic worlds, especially within um conversion narratives. So, how would you say you approach something like literary transmission differently to when a narrative within itself kind of makes it clear or almost gives it to you in a way?

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Yeah, oh that's a really interesting question. I think so. There are I think Middle English romances do really interesting things with uh when you're thinking about literary transmission. I think I think of objects too. So if we go back to material culture, I think there's lots of ways that they're doing really interesting things with objects, uh the way that silk might appear, for instance, you know, other ways that materiality appears in um in romances, across the romance tradition, I think, too. So the chanson digest too, so the the French tradition also does really interesting things with objects, and there's a great scholar called Shiron Khan Mohammadi who's doing some great work on thinking about objects in um and the way those objects are connected to the Islamic world in um in medieval romances. So I think in some ways they're all kind of there are lots of things that tied up together, right? So that and that the form of a particular or the genre of a particular text is also important for us to kind of pay attention to. So Middle English romances are doing medieval romances work within particular uh you know, it's a particular genre, it uses particular motifs, it uses particular kind of tropes, and the conversion narrative, for instance, is one of those, right, that we often see over and over again in different Middle English romances, and that the figure of the Saracen, quote unquote, um, is also this reoccurring figure um who at times is explicitly a Muslim, at times is implicitly something else, right? So there's and the way that it kind of blurs those boundaries between um both racial difference and religious difference, and um, and that has a lot that also has a longer history too, in the way that kind of romances romances develop. So the two things go hand in hand in the way that we think about, and the way that I think about intellectual history and transmissions of particular texts or objects or ideas that are moving from the Islamic world into into medieval Europe and into England, and the way that ideas of Islam are moving um across those places, um, and the way that they're being kind of received and used in popular literature, for instance, right? And so um those two things I think go go hand in hand, and they're often not discussed hand in hand. I think you often people think about them through a particular lens, which is also really productive. So you know there's been lots of work on thinking about Middle English romance and post-colonialism, for instance, or middle English romance and race recently, but we know the two things kind of go hand in hand in lots of ways too, right? At least I do anyway, that you can't divorce one from the other.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

You mentioned how um Saracen in itself is a bit of a blurry term, it's not very well defined, and kind of building off of that, are there moments where um the boundary between cultures or literary traditions becomes blurry or hard to decipher? So something like Hispano-Arabic literature where it's hard to trace certain conventions or tropes or genres back to a specific point of origin, cultural origin, um, or a linguistic one?

SPEAKER_01 21:14

I think all the time, in lots of ways, and I think that you know, in lots of ways, origin studies are kind of obsolete. It was um a topic and a contentious topic in lots of ways too of philologists for a long time, but the kind of age of philologists is also kind of dwindling right now in the in the way that yeah, in our kind of current academic climate, as it were. Um, but this kind of search for the origin of a particular new kind of expression of of a literary motif, right? And kind of thinking about kind of where that kind of comes from. Um and uh and there was lots of debate in the um 20th century around the origins of the love lyric, for instance, which is kind of where we get this with an Hispano Arabic strophic poetry, um, which is a really fascinating debate. In itself, and um, you know, we had people who are working in Hebrew and Arabic and and Latin kind of kind of thinking about philological debates, um, and there there was lots of blurring of boundaries in in those debates. There are lots of specific ways where you can trace um words and their origins, and they can tell you some really really interesting things about how the vernacular is being used in a particular space, or the way that we can think about how romance and Arabic was were working together in in regions across the Iberian Peninsula. Um, so that it raises really interesting questions about um cultural forms and and cult and language and language use, I think. Um, but that kind of searching for uh the origin of some of some it's no longer productive, right? It's no longer it's kind of so tied up with ways that we think about nationalist nationalistic literatures too, um, and the way that we've you know, why do you want to search for an origin? What does it tell us? When actually thinking about those quo questions of contact, maybe, and questions of those moments of contact and exchange are perhaps more fruitful for us. And then they don't necessarily always have to be positive either, you know. We often think about contact as being purely positive, but it's not always positive, right? So um but I'm not kind of what's tied up tied up in that. So yeah, so there are always I think there are lots of boundaries that are being kind of blurred, um, and I think that blurring is where we ask the most interesting questions or can give rise to the most interesting questions.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

And uh uh I guess blurriness also contributes to what you said about resisting that nationalistic um direction of something like philology and a return to specific origin. And how does your study of the global Middle Ages um kind of decenter that or move or change our perception of what it means to be a medievalist or to study the medieval yeah, um so I really wouldn't I wouldn't think of myself as somebody who does study of the mid global Middle Ages in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

I think I'm just a like a participant in um in ways of thinking about different geographies in the Middle Ages in some ways. I'd like to think that my work is allowing us to ask different questions of um English literature in lots of ways in the way that we think about medieval um English literature. Um I think that there are you know who calls themselves a medievalist and where I mean there are bigger questions, and that's also around kind of disciplinary training and where you're being trained in what region of the world you're also being trained in, um, and those kind of lineages that are tied up with your training as well. Um, and also goes back to kind of what is the medieval itself as a period, and we can get kind of bogged down in those questions and go round and round and round in circles um thinking about that and and never really kind of coming up with any answers. But there's been lots of really interesting scholarship from people who work in all kinds of different what's called in in the US anyway, kind of area studies of people who work on the Islamic world, people who work on you know the Arabic Islamic world, people who work on Persian world, people who work on um the literatures of of East Asia, um, who are thinking about what it means to be kind of global medieval, or what it means to be medieval. We cannot map on the same chronologies and periodizations across these different places, right? And that the medieval one itself is also kind of inherently kind of Eurocentric in those ways. So in that for a long time I didn't think of myself as a medievalist when I was doing my PhD, I didn't understand it as a as a term, really. You know, I never really set up to become a medievalist, I was just interested in a particular topic and I was interested in the kind of questions it was raising, and and that brought me to where I am.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Yeah. Um in one of your articles, Defamiliarizing Romance, The Arabic Zira in the English Literary Classroom, um, it's an article that me and my friends really enjoyed reading because we had a we had a paper for on Arabic romance, um and it was something that we were discussing, and a lot of my friends raised the the idea that there's sometimes a bit of a hesitance to encounter non-Western or non-English narratives because we don't want to risk being simplistic or anachronistic or even inadvertently orientalist in writing about non-Western literature and what are some of the problems as well as the opportunities that translation can pose for scholars but also students.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah, well I'm oh I'm really appreciative that you read the article and that it kind of raised debates and um yeah, and uh I think that's really wonderful to hear. And you know, for uh for a long time I've been re I've been teaching a module at the University of York called Medieval Arabic and Persian Global Narratives, again in kind of quote marks, and it's a module that's for second-year students, so students who are taking a degree in English and related literature, which is what it's called at York, um, and who are like you encountering these texts for the very first time. So it's the very first time that they're reading um anything, and we read things in translation, but we also do a little bit of Arabic language work alongside that, and we think a lot about what it means to read in translation as well. So um sometimes we read extracts from two different translations or something, and I ask them to think a little bit about kind of all what what kind of differences can we see in these translations. Um, we do a little bit of work around um how the translator themselves might be setting themselves up, but you know, in introductions to translations, they might tell you something a little bit about their translation process as well. So there's always this kind of being mindful of the fact that we are reading in translation and that every translation you know has a particular kind of approach that's been kind of taken to it. This sense that you're already feeling a little apprehensive in some ways is already a good sign because it already means that you're not kind of gonna go kind of you know gung-ho into it and kind of be kind of the and I'm sure you wouldn't just be automatically orientalist, but you know that that you kind of go in with with a sense with a sensitivity, right? That you're reading something that's new and that's something different, but that doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, we read new and different things all the time in lots of different ways, right? That it doesn't necessarily have to be a problem, right, in it in that way. Um and I think reading critical material by scholars who are experts in that particular um text or in that particular field really gives you the kind of tools to be able to start thinking about that text in a critical manner, right? In the same way that you would do with a text from medieval England, right? You might have gone through your whole school education. I mean, I certainly did. I went through my whole school education, I came to university and I read Chaucer for the very first time at university, I read Beowulf for the very first time at university, and so that is also a completely new and different space. You know, I was learning old English, and I never, you know, I didn't know what old English was. So, you know, that there is already, you know, you you're already reading new and kind of different things. It's just that this is in a the can the context is different, right? So that all the context might not be as familiar. It might take you a bit longer to find the scholarship that you need to find um related to that particular text. So I think that there are I'd like to think of it as that there being more opportunities and that the challenges are productive challenges, they're challenges that are kind of generative and that they are allowing you to broaden your horizons in in lots of ways, if and especially if you're already approaching it with that kind of sensitivity to it as well. So um I think I think yeah, reading critical material is always helpful. So, and you know, there are so many great resources. There's a great dictionary of Arabic literary terms, for instance, and I often point my students to that so they can look at, you know, we look at terms, we look at genre, different terms of genres, I give them lots of kind of explanations on different forms, you know, what is a puzzle, for instance, or a qasidah, you know, what is a sirah itself, for you to then start to feel like okay, I've got a little grasp on on form here. And as literary scholars, these are all things that you're already aware of and already comfortable with, right? You can already think about genre, you can think about form, you can think about verse, right? You're just learning a new set of terminology and a new series of tools, I guess, to help you um navigate that.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Yeah, um, thank you for that. Um in your work you've also looked at Ibn Al-Haitham and his influence on Chaucer. And I was wondering what again some of the opportunities look like when it comes to almost reconstructing or understanding the transmission of past information when historical records may not be fully complete. Um yeah, what what's the that process like?

SPEAKER_01 30:51

Um so I guess it's it's a big question, and it's a question that I guess historians of science and historians of philosophy also grab with them, people who work on intellectual history and then transmissions, and you know, in the sense that we are always faced with limited historical records, right? And there's always a sense, there's always going to be a place where we can we we're only reconstructing what what we know with what we have, right? And then you know, and there are times when there are lots of kind of maybe blank spaces, or you know, there are you know, you're waiting for a manuscript to appear somewhere um that tells you something about a a translation, or yeah, so as medievalists you're always grappling with. There's you know, there's also there's huge amounts of stuff in the archives. There may also only be kind of a limited amount in relation to what you're interested in. Um, and I'm not strictly a historian of science or or historian of philosophy, and I'm not strictly somebody who's interested in carving out particular transmission histories. You know, I often rely on that scholarship, you know, the the people who've done that hard work, as it were, to tell me where a text is and where it's been. And what I'm interested in is also those gaps as well. So, with when I was working on Ibn El Haytham, you know, there are some really interesting ways that when um Jean de Maine mentions him in The Romance of the Rose, raises lots of really interesting questions about what he might have known about Ibn El Haytham, right? And there's no dire again, there's no direct source, there's no direct kind of text. I don't know what was what text exactly was in his hands or you know, at his on his desk, or or what his friends were talking about, but there was some certainly something in those clerical circus circles in the University of Paris that tells us enough to know that well he knew enough to be able to put it to write about him in his poetry, right? That there's enough there um for somebody to think that he was important enough to mention and certain certain kind of things around his biography that he mentions as well. And so those those questions I think are really again, I think the questions are really generative and really interesting. Um we will never know the answers to some of these things, um, and that there are lots of um suppositions that we might have to make or ways that we might want to suggest, you know, for filling in the gaps in kind of ways that we we're we're suggesting a um a possibility or a potential of something happening, and and in many ways what you're doing is you're laying the groundwork for for the next scholar who picks up that question, or you know, in in 50 years' time when a manuscript is discovered somewhere, right? That there's this kind of trail that's a scholarly trail that's being left as well.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Yeah, that's a really nice way to think about it, uh a scholarly trail. Um uh well you mentioned filling in gaps, and um I was wondering how far modern day frameworks can help with that or can aid the study of medieval literature, so something like I guess like post-structuralism or like intertextual intertextuality and ideas of that. Um how do they play a role or do they play a role in I guess trying to fill in gaps or or trying to understand those gaps?

SPEAKER_01 34:08

Yeah, yeah, I think they do. I think I think theory in general is and you know, lots of medieval scholars use use theory or more modern day concepts of theory, post-structuralism, or intertextual. I mean intertextualities is lots of medieval literary scholars will be using, even if they're not pointing to it as a specific kind of theory, but kind of thinking about intertexts, for instance, is such a sorry, the ice cream man is just kind of history. Um yeah, so so there's lots of ways in which in which kind of theory in um you know post-colonialism as was really useful at one at one point um for thinking about ideas of um difference and othering in um late medieval English literature. Right now, we know that kind of uh thinking about race and ethnicity um is really kind of been really kind of generative and useful for medievalists and and for then medievalists for also be to think be to be thinking about it within its context as well. So for for many years I was a journal editor of a journal called Post Medieval, which is uh a journal that has been kind of at the forefront of allowing scholars to um to think kind of theoretically um and to think theoretically in medieval studies too. So um there's lots of really kind of thoughtful kind of generative work. Queer studies is another way that it's really kind of queer theory is kind of really generative for thinking about um sexuality and gender in medieval literature and in medieval history, um, and there's lots of kind of great work that's being done there. So there's lots of ways it it's really productive and yeah, shouldn't be kind of dismissed, I think, as a way of thinking about the past and thinking with the past.

unknown 35:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Um and I think some of those gaps that you mentioned are also sometimes what well, from what I've seen, from what I've read, is is the reason as to why certain critics are a bit more hesitant about the study of the global Middle Ages because they believe that there's a lack of evidence to support certain like assertions or um arguments, and how would you kind of respond to that scepticism?

SPEAKER_01 36:23

Um Well, I mean it's hard to say without specific kind of examples, I guess, too, right? I think that the the best work that's being done in a kind of shall we say quote unquote global frame or a kind of medieval thing, a medieval world maybe, or world in medieval literature, are people who work collaboratively too and multilingually as well. So people who are working collaboratively across disciplines or working um with multiple languages and often kind of the two kind of go hand in hand, um, where you're thinking about uh whether it's a shared space or a region or an object or a text or or something that kind of gives rise to those questions about kind of contact and exchange, um, and so those kind of kind of those kind of investigative kind of research questions are happening around that. Um, I think that the the idea of the lack of lack of evidence of something um is you know kind of goes back to those first things that I was talking a little bit about when I was thinking about frameworks and kind of influences and for me anyway, what kind of evidence are we asking for and what are we setting that up against? So, what is the kind of criteria that we're setting up this up against? So, for instance, there is a there is a cycle of stories in the Thousand One Nights that is all about a it's often known as the Ebony Horse story, um, and it's about uh a kind of a mechanically engineered horse that's very similar to the squire's tale, um, and it's a kind of another romance story in the in the A Thousand One Nights. Um, and I teach an MA module called Chaucer Arabic Learning in the East, and we read the Squire's Tale alongside um this cycle of stories from Thousand One Nights. And a few years ago I had a student who said to me, Chaucer must have known this story, he just must have, he absolutely must have. And there's no direct evidence that we have. We know that there are there are certain kind of this idea of this magical mechanical horse appears in a couple of French romances that Chaucer probably kind of knew, so that that's uh a link in. But I can't give you a text that says, you know, this is the this is the manuscript of the Thousand One Nights that um was in England that Chelsea was reading of the Ebony Horse. But there are those similarities are so strong, so striking, and there's lots of differences, of course, and and and and um we can't map those two things on kind of directly, but again, there's a really kind of generative questions that we can ask when we put them side by side, and I think that framework is which is both comparative and connected, so those two kind of nodes that I'm always kind of pushing and putting against, it's it's the questions that we can ask, right? And then that sometimes when we're thinking about, for instance, transmission histories of literary texts in particular, we can't always point to direct um to direct evidence because often it might not be there, but there are other ways that it might be in the air, it might be through an oral transmission. There, you know, that the text is telling us, well, something was there, right? Even if we can't kind of point to, and it's our job, I think, to ask those questions as to what could that be, and um to not outrightly dismiss it because we're uh when you know it doesn't fit within our model of a particular source or a particular kind of evidence, which again I think is Eurocentric in its framework as well. Yeah. So that I guess that would be my long-winded answer to a skeptic, but I it it depends, right? You you are right to be sceptical of the quote-unquote global middle ages in many ways. There's lots of critique around the global middle ages in lots of ways. You can be sceptical about a person's methodology in the way that they're going about a research question or research project. Yeah, I mean, those are all valid things, but they're also valid ways in which they're being kind of used and produced and theorized as well. Sorry, I'm talking the abstract, but I was trying to think in the abstract there too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

No, no worries. Um in defamiliarizing romance, the article we were discussing earlier, um, you described how the sea of safe fictionalizes a Yemeni king by presenting him as a proto-Muslim, um, despite being set in a pre-Islamic past, and that kind of reminded me of Beowulf, where you also have the reception of a pagan past that's being sort of distorted or changed under a Christian lens. Um, and it made me think about it like how historical narratives seem to be contextualized and brought into conversation with the present moment of their creation. And so are there other moments in Arabic or Islamic literature where that element of almost anachronistic creation occurs even within that historical period?

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Um, so the sirah, as a kind of the popular sirah, the sirah sha'miyya, these kind of quote-unquote kind of chivalric kind of romances, however we want to think about it in um in English terms, is full of that. So a lot of the the heroes, um there's one that has a heroine, so um no, it's known as the Attil Himma. Um, it's been translated into English, there's a nice condensed version of it called the Tales of Princess Fatima, the kind of warrior woman, in a penguin translation. But the Sira usually play around with that kind of historical um anachronism around its central protagonist and the hero. So and the Yazen is one kind of example of that. Um the Sirath Anta is another one which is kind of also quite close to Beowulf. I think all the closest to Beowulf in terms of its chronology of production um that plays around with with historical chronology in that way. So this the Sira is a kind of genre kind of full of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

I mean that also kind of reminds me of Hadith by Advariat, where there's also I think there's moments of almost anachronism in in that text too. Um and I think the the term anachronism is also interesting because it I think it's something that again me and a friend Ella were discussing. We often view anachronism as modern day like scholars or readers imposing modern frameworks onto something that shouldn't receive it, but then you have moments like this where anachronism or how we perceive anachronism to be is has been happening from like that historical moment. And so this is a bit of a long-winded way of asking this, but how would you I guess see anachronism as fruitful in today's world?

SPEAKER_01 42:57

Oh yeah, that's yeah, that's a big question. I think it oh, I might take it back to the Sierra in some ways. I think it's interesting. I think actually, as literary scholars, as modern people, might think we think of anachronism as kind of inherently a kind of negative right now. I think it's you know it's anachronistic. You might get that on your paper when you're writing writing essay, right? This is anachronistic, this is um and and theory might be you might be accused of that if you're using theory, right? To think about the past, this is kind of anachronistic, and and you want to be sensitive to anachronism, right? You want to be kind of you want to be using it in a um in a way that is kind of uh justified, or or that you you want to be kind of aware of the anachronisms when you're kind of doing that kind of work, right? Um, and that we we often privilege ourselves as kind of being there, you know, at this stage of the world in world history where we know all these things, blah blah blah. And yet when we're looking at something like this, you are there's a way that it's that anachronism is it in a fictional way is really fruitful, it's really kind of productive, it's allowing uh a poet or a series of poets or or Writer or series of writers to play around with historical frameworks and chronologies in a way that the audience is also kind of receptive to, right? That they kind of um that an audience would understand that this figure is a figure who lived, you know, in a pre-Islamic past with Saif, for instance, but yet there are all these kind of markers of a burgeoning Islamic religion, you know, the way that he's also connected to the Prophet Muhammad in lots of different ways, right? And and so there's a really kind of interesting, self-consciously kind of fictional um fictionalizing of this anachronism that is really fruitful for this for this, you know, for this genre of writing that is really exciting, I think. So we can in that way I think anachronism, anachronism and fictionality, I think, are two concepts that that we can think about and think about how they're kind of working together.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

That that self-awareness is like one of my favourite things about um the conference of the word of the birds by Atar and how you have all of these different seera's or seera-like stories being recounted. So stories of Al-Halaj or Leila and Majnoon, and even I I love this like this image of the hubo bird having the word bismillah inscribed on its beak, so there's just textuality covered in in further textuality. There's so many, I guess, almost casings and codings of it. And yeah, are there more moments of that across Arabic or Islamic literature where, like you mentioned, there's that element of self-awareness of I guess being a literary creation?

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Yeah, yeah, plenty of it. So um Atar is so he's writing in Persian, and the uh the Vantikaltair or the Conflict of the Birds is this kind of allegory, um, this kind of mystical allegory, and it uses so it's quite different from it's in different set differently from these Sira Sha'abia, but it uses you know, it uses the kind of stories, um well-known stories, um, you know, real-life figures, so Al Halaj, for instance, um, and then well-known stories like Lilian Majnoon, and kind of brings them together. He also mentions um Rabia Al-Adalwiyya, who is this really famous proto-Sufi woman, and um within that that text. So he is very self-consciously fictional and literary. You know, these are all kind of stories that you know, you're talking about casings, I think that's lovely. These are all stories that are kind of cased within each other, right? So they're all kind of layered within each other. Um he's deploying this framework structure, right, which is really kind of typical of what we see both in Arabic and Persian literature across the Islamic and Persianate world. Um, and you know, the Thousand One Nights is kind of the most famous example of that, and there's stories within stories that get very um get dizzying. So the Thousand One Nights is very dizzying in the way that it nests stories, um, and you just kind of completely lose your thread at some point. Um, and then and and the example that Atoy is also kind of drawing on is one of the most famous medieval texts kind of in the global world, as it were, or across the medieval world, which is Kililawadimna, which is um this kind of we might call it a beast fable, for instance, is a story of um comes from the Sanskrit, has its roots in Sanskrit, and then comes into Arabic via uh Bahlvi or Middle Persian. Um is kind of um the version of it is written by somebody called Ibn al-Mukhafa, um, who is writing in the kind of the period between the Umayyad Caliphate Fate and the Abbasid Caliphate, and he um his version of Kleila and Dilma is the one that kind of explodes, so his version of it in Arabic explodes, gets translated, moves around and Arabic gets translated into lots and lots of different languages, um, also ends up in um in Europe as well. Um, and that is also a framework narrative that's also kind of stories within stories within stories, also kind of gets quite dizzying um and has this fable kind of element to it. And Atar's also thinking about that text when he's putting together the comforts of the bird, so that's his also kind of that kind of casings, as it were. Yeah, and lots of writers are doing it. Um, the other kind of Persian poet that I can think of who is kind of in the uh in the line of kind of collection of Persian poets with Atar is somebody called Nizami, um Nizami um Khanjovi, who's from um a town called Gunj, which is now in Azerbaijan, and um he is somebody who plays around with motifs of writing and of the pen in lots of his works as well. So he is but most well known for bringing us a narrative version of Lilian Mujnun, which becomes again like Ibn Al Mukhaf's Khalil and Dimna, becomes a version that is then um kind of exported out into the world, just narrativizes Lilian Majnun, which was before that was a collection of kind of anecdotes and different verses, and known in kind of our history. Um and even in there, we've got you know stories the kind of the way that letters operate, the way that writing operates, the way that Majun writes Lali's name in the sand. There is a kind of uh self-conscious literariness around that text, and um and Izami does that a lot across his writings, right? He's really interested in kind of thinking about what the pen does and the um metaphors around kind of writing in the pen. So there's lots of really interesting, really lots of lots of interesting kind of examples of that.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

Um like that self-consciousness, I think makes the reception of something like the Arabian Nights even cooler. It's like you see that happening in real time um centuries after it was first produced. Um, and in one of my previous episodes, um Dr. K.L. Naismith, he he's a Hawaiian translator, and he spoke about how the Arabian Knights was translate translated into Hawaiian in the 18th century, which is so cool, and I was like, whoa, that's that's crazy. Um and I think that again, that self-awareness I uh for me raises questions about I guess ideas of authorship as well. So how did these Islamic writers um perceive themselves as writers and how does that again seep into their work or broader literary study? Yeah, a big question.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

I think there are lots of um so there are lots of writers in Arabic and Persian who conceive of themselves as writers, so you know, um Atar at the end of the Conference of the Birds has this lovely epilogue where he's talking about himself, right? And the first line of that epilogue is uh about Atar with his scent with his sweet scent or something like that. He's kind of playing around with this kind of um the word Atar as well. So there are ways in which they are kind of thinking about themselves as authors. Ibn al-Mukhafa has a whole kind of preface at the beginning of Khalil and Dimna where he's giving you direction as to how you should read this text, right? So he's writing within a particular genre known as Adab, um, and he he's kind of setting out what you should learn from this text, how you should learn from this text, but almost like a kind of pedagogical framework. Um so there are ways in which there are particular authors who are um thinking about their authorial presence, I guess, in their texts, um, in that way. Um and then there are lots of texts where we don't really know who the author is. So The Thousand One Nights, for instance, no named author. We can't even think of it as a text in a way that we think of a text it doesn't have a beginning, it doesn't really have an end. Well it did have a kind of beginning actually, but it doesn't really kind of it is kind of it's so free-flowing in the way that it is has been kind of put together, the way that it's kind of conceived that um it's a work of multiple, multiple, multiple authors, authors, uh quote unquote, you know, po poets, um, reciters, um storytellers, really, um, across across the medieval Islamic world. The same with the Sera as well, they don't necessarily have all the ship penned to them because they are they were told by different storytellers in different places and um were kind of serial serialized, so they were kind of the stories that you would come back to and hear here the next episode of, as it were, um, and then and and were written down often at the same time as they were also kind of moving around in an oral transmission as well. So they've also got really interesting those kind of the way that we think about it, it's kind of literary transmission and it's literary histories, kind of tied up with orality as well. Yeah, so I think authorship is it's a huge question on its own and operates um in different kinds of ways. Some ways that are similar to if if you know something of medieval English literature, you know there are some things that have authors and there are some things that don't have authors, Beowulf is a good example of that, some things that exist only in one manuscript, again, Beowulf, So Yamaha Green Knight, um, and some things that exist in multiple, multiple manuscripts that we know, you know, Chaucer is a good example of that. We know almost everything about his life, right? So um, and yeah, and he's also self-consciously kind of uh literary playing around with authorship too in some ways. So um, you know, he inserts himself as a pilgrim in the Canterbury Tale. So um there's yeah, there's lots of kind of ways in which there are uh similarities, but then also kind of divergences. There's nothing, nothing else like the House of One Knights, and there's nothing else like the trans that transmission history of it, which kind of goes across uh centuries and centuries and centuries and across different uh geographies, right? So into Hawaii in the 18th century, into Latin America when in in the 16th century, you know, it's it's moving across with colonialism and uh imperialism, and it's kind of it's yeah, there's nothing else quite like that, I don't think.

unknown 53:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

And you mentioned orality and it reminded me of Harfers and how his poetry, it often refers to his name, but he hasn't actually written any of it. I think it was one of his dis disciples, I think, who wrote it, and I think that like just juxtaposition is so interesting and is another, I guess, gap that needs not to be filled but to be pondered upon. Um and in one of your articles on um transcultural interconnections and Islamic fictionalities, I loved the term um Islamic medievalisms because I think medievalism just generally is really cool, but I had never encountered that concept. And I was wondering if you I guess had any favorite like medieval receptions of the Islamic or Arabic world, um, or if you have any thoughts on what makes a successful medieval adaptation of of that world.

SPEAKER_01 54:52

Yeah, oh that's a I've got um there's some things I've really enjoyed, and there's some things that are I don't know what makes a good adaptation. I think that's so subjective in so many ways. Um, and I think that contemporary novelists should be free to do whatever they want to do. Layla Abulela, who's um a contemporary British Sudanese uh writer, has kind of reinterpreted Atile's Conference of the Birds um for one of her novels. Um, and it was around three women in Scotland who go on a um Scottish Muslims who go on a journey um to the grave of the earliest Scottish Muslim woman. So uh uh I think that's right in Macy, and I can't remember what it's called now, the novel, but that's that I thought was was just wonderful, like really kind of you know, playing around with the kind of concept of Atar and Hamid Ismailov, who I know you kind of mentioned to me already, is yeah, an Uzbek writer, um, has this great book called Off Stranger and Bees, where one of the central characters is Affissena. So Avi Senna, who is probably the most I yeah, I would absolutely say he is the most well-known uh intellectual figure of the medieval world. So um a philosopher, a physician, writes these huge kind of encyclopedic works that are really kind of um popular um both in the Summit world and in medieval Europe. Um he comes from Bukhara, which is now in Uzbekistan, and um Ismaniloff writes this allegory, which is kind of this really kind of fascinating allegory where um Avicenna is one of these kind of central characters, he's kind of a wandering sage in medieval Baghdad, and then he has a section where he has another kind of section where the central character is a bee, and the bee is called Sina. So this idea that kind of Avicenna kind of reappears in this kind of bee form, like it's kind of fascinating. So I really love that too. Just comes it was so completely, you know, it was it was it's allegory and it's taking allegory again in in a completely different direction. It's also about a post-Soviet uh era um novel, and it's also kind of drawing on this this really famous fictional character. So I think there are some really um yeah, really kind of interesting ways that it's happening. There are ways there are other novels that I didn't, you know. Um Salman Rushdie had a novel on where he re re-imagines A Thousand and One Nights, um, and he has Al Hazadi and Ibn Rushd or Veroese as his central characters, and that wasn't for me something that I thought was particularly successful. I think Amore's Last Sai is brilliant as a text. Um that's something I would absolutely recommend, but this one was something that I didn't think was particularly successful, as it were. Yeah, and I think there is some really, really great kind of contemporary novel like works or kind of contemporary novels that are coming out that think about the Islamic world um or the medieval world in general, right? So too, we see that also in um in Lauren Groff's work, for instance, with Matrix, I think that's what it's called, where we're where it's thinking about Marie de France, um as well. So there's yeah, lots of great work that's coming out.

unknown 58:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:11

Um the book about bees sounds so so interesting, and I think that's that sounds like Ismail Love from what I I read We Computers a Hussle novel, and that was um that does a similar thing. He kind of reflects about on AI and its relationship with rediscovering the past. But we don't really know whether AI is a human being, whether it's representative of the Persian poet Hafaz, um, or whether it's like even representative of intertextuality and um the lack of authorship because AI refers to itself as we, so it refers to itself as in the collective first person, and it's really easy to forget that it's an artificial model that's speaking. Um, and I think that that like again, that like boundary between uh reality and unreality is really, really cool to see. Um yeah, um, and just just to I guess end off, what do you see sort of the future of this is an another big question, so it can be broken down. Um but what what do you see the future of the study of the global Middle Ages looking like? What are your some new areas of scholarly interest?

SPEAKER_01 59:26

I think there um I think there are I so the work that is being done that is kind of really comparative um and collaborative. So I think there's some really interesting kind of comparative and collaborative work um that is happening in kind of big projects. Um obviously right now I can't think of any, but um but so I think that the kind of this I I think the most kind of generative future of whatever might we call again quote unquote the global dates is when people are working kind of collaborative where collaboratively where there are kind of scholars from different who are working in different um fields and expertise and who are kind of coming together to think about um whether or not you're thinking kind of comparatively or you know around a particular kind of thinking comparative across a big kind of topic or question, or whether or not you're thinking about a particular space or region where you're thinking about kind of particular kind of connections, and I think that's probably you know what I hope to be the most kind of generative kind of work that is coming out of whatever we think of as the kind of global middle ages, and I hope I kind of move away from a um uh a kind of inherent Eurocentricism that privileges one particular region kind of looking out into the world. And I would really hope that you know, even these kinds of conversations where you know where even where we're thinking, even you, you know, as a student who's thinking about kind of what this means, is even that kind of uh ways of thinking about the globe or the kind of the global, what does that even mean? We think about it as a kind of global turn in medieval studies, but it for me it's not settled as a thing, right? It's not for me, it's not a kind of I think what there are yeah, that we're we're we're within this kind of turning phase, as it were, and we're thinking kind of about what it means, um, and that it it should be it should be a space where we're all learning and that we're all we're all able to kind of actually take ourselves out of our own silos to learn from experts in other fields, even if it isn't useful, directly useful for the work that you're doing, you're still learning something new about another another region, you know, whether or not that's in the same century that you're interested in, or the same kind of genre of text that you're interested in, or a particular figure you're interested in exploring, um, that that kind of collaborative work, way that it kind of it opens doors out into other fields of scholarship at undergraduate level, at postgraduate level, that you know that that it's allowing us to do that kind of pedagogical work that I think is really important for the future of our field.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

Yeah, yeah, I I completely agree, and I just wanted to thank you once again for taking out the time to to speak with us. Um, it was a really, really insightful conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:10

Oh, thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. Um yeah, thank you for your great, great questions.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

No worries, it's yeah, it's been wonderful. Um, join me in the next episode of it as we continue on.