in search of transgressive and heterodox ideas
The term "history of ideas" has been proposed by the historian Arthur O. Lovejoy. Just like comparative literature, it is one of the disciplines that apparently belong to a past, and whose "death" is repeatedly announced. Its rebirth after the turn of the millennium has been announced under the title of "global history of ideas", since the discipline, as it was traditionally practised, was criticised for its eurocentrism.
The object of studies in this discipline is what remains after the delimitation of various other specialised fields, such as history of philosophy, of literature, of art, etc. Typically, a historian of ideas deals with beliefs and world views (such as that of a 16th-century Italian miller, presented in the famous Carlo Ginzburg's book The Cheese and the Worms), scientific concepts, and more generally, the ways of human thought.
Personally, what attracts me toward this discipline is that it covers all the heterodox viewpoints that stand at the frontier of what is culturally defined. My history of ideas is a history of cultural transgression, be it in religious rituals and liturgies, culturally defined classes and categories (friend and enemy, ours and theirs, domestic and foreign, belonging and non-belonging, etc.), recognised genres of thinking and writing. The research that I realised deals with some specific topics, such as the idea of the unspoiled, pre-lapsarian language (Adamic tongue, the languages of angels). I am also interested in the conceptualisation of otherness across the religious divides in the Mediterranean region, as well as the permeability of such divides. This research deals primarily with the medieval and early-modern thinkers, such as Ramon Llull or Guillaume Postel, transgressors of the cultural and religious divides, such as Anselm Turmeda, later known as Abdallah at-Tarjuman, and the scholars converts of the beginning of the 20th century, such as Titus Burckhardt. The interest in the Islamicate contexts and the perspectives that open "from the opposite side" in the encounter of civilisations permits to inscribe my studies in the new aspiration of non-eurocentric, global history of ideas.
The object of studies in this discipline is what remains after the delimitation of various other specialised fields, such as history of philosophy, of literature, of art, etc. Typically, a historian of ideas deals with beliefs and world views (such as that of a 16th-century Italian miller, presented in the famous Carlo Ginzburg's book The Cheese and the Worms), scientific concepts, and more generally, the ways of human thought.
Personally, what attracts me toward this discipline is that it covers all the heterodox viewpoints that stand at the frontier of what is culturally defined. My history of ideas is a history of cultural transgression, be it in religious rituals and liturgies, culturally defined classes and categories (friend and enemy, ours and theirs, domestic and foreign, belonging and non-belonging, etc.), recognised genres of thinking and writing. The research that I realised deals with some specific topics, such as the idea of the unspoiled, pre-lapsarian language (Adamic tongue, the languages of angels). I am also interested in the conceptualisation of otherness across the religious divides in the Mediterranean region, as well as the permeability of such divides. This research deals primarily with the medieval and early-modern thinkers, such as Ramon Llull or Guillaume Postel, transgressors of the cultural and religious divides, such as Anselm Turmeda, later known as Abdallah at-Tarjuman, and the scholars converts of the beginning of the 20th century, such as Titus Burckhardt. The interest in the Islamicate contexts and the perspectives that open "from the opposite side" in the encounter of civilisations permits to inscribe my studies in the new aspiration of non-eurocentric, global history of ideas.
my essays in history of ideas
"From crux transmarina to Portuguese maritime expansion: a globalisation of the Mediterranean", Analele Universităţii Bucureşti - Seria Istorie.
The aim of this article is to present the continuity between the Mediterranean project of the crusades and the conquest of the New World at the level of the general patterns of imagination and the strategies of justifying and legitimizing violence. Old arguments were adapted to a conflict with new adversaries under novel conditions (maritime exploration and expansion). The question raised is to know in what measure the Europeans recycled the pre-existing categories and in what measure they created new ones, specific for the New World. I argue that the strategies of legitimization put into practice at an early stage of globalization reflect even older mentalities and ideologies, such as Christianized paradigms of Roman imperial rule. Early-modern global imagination reverberates with an echo of the medieval Mediterranean one.
The aim of this article is to present the continuity between the Mediterranean project of the crusades and the conquest of the New World at the level of the general patterns of imagination and the strategies of justifying and legitimizing violence. Old arguments were adapted to a conflict with new adversaries under novel conditions (maritime exploration and expansion). The question raised is to know in what measure the Europeans recycled the pre-existing categories and in what measure they created new ones, specific for the New World. I argue that the strategies of legitimization put into practice at an early stage of globalization reflect even older mentalities and ideologies, such as Christianized paradigms of Roman imperial rule. Early-modern global imagination reverberates with an echo of the medieval Mediterranean one.
