exploring the continuity
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The aim of this conference was to create a space of discussion concerning the transcultural dimension of the Mediterranean understood as a region defined, in the first place, by the phenomena of exchange and circulation of ideas. The Mediterranean crossroad between Europe, Middle East and Africa, fully established already at the end of Antiquity, takes a new shape at the brink of late Middle Ages and early Modernity. The proposed approach is to identify the spheres of interference between the Islamic and Christian worlds (contemplated in their plurality and mutual inter-penetrability). Tracing a relation between culturally locatable origins and the hypothetical transcultural consequences of such processes of interference, we might come to important conclusions, valid not only for the history of ideas as an academic discipline, but also for the contemporary perception of the shared Mediterranean heritage.
The transcultural hypothesis the organizers would like to propose as a discussion topic deals with the aspiration of transcending the cultural and confessional division, undoubtedly predominating in the Mediterranean world during the contemplated period (that may be taken as broadly as going from the 11th to the 17th century). Many European and Mediterranean figures, such as Ibn Arabi, Ramon Llull, Guillaume Postel or John Dee appear to have fallen in the temptation of moving into the interstices between the culturally established and delimited orthodoxies. By what spiritual and intellectual means did they attempt to inhabit those unstable zones? Did they leave behind any blueprint of a non-hegemonic universalism that might be recuperated in our times, helping to build a harmonious future of the region? Is there a diagram of transgressive relationships across the plurality of cultures, denominations and intellectual traditions to be read in the variegated Mediterranean heritage? “U źródeł śródziemnomorskich uniwersalizmów. Sprawozdanie z sesji „Transcultural Mediterranean: in search of non-orthodox and non-hegemonic universalism(s)”, Tours, 30-31 maja 2018”, Kultura – Historia – Globalizacja, no 23/2018, p. 181-185. ISSN 1898-7265
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umbilicus mundi |
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Under the label "Mediterranean studies" I put a transhistorical kind of reflection on the crossroad of religious credos, trade routes, ideas and civilisations. What I'm interested in is the complex cultural and intellectual interplay in the region; the Mediterranean studies, in my personal view, consist in analysing the phenomena of circulation. I treat them essentially as a branch of the history of ideas, quite a central one in my perspective.
My Mediterranean is a region of constant interpenetration between the Arabic-Muslim and the Romance-Christian elements, without forgetting other contributions, such as, for instance, the Berber presence, the specificity of the Balkans, the Turks, the opening toward the Central Asia, the connectivity of trans-Saharan roads. It is a region of major cultural complexity, unique in the scale of the planet as a space of exchange and creative encounter. The sea and the territories distributed on its shores form a great umbilicus mundi. As a consequence, the Mediterranean perspective is absolutely at the core of my whole intellectual project. As such, it cannot be reduced neither to my interest in Romance cultural heritage nor to any form of Islamic or Orientalist studies, on which I'm also spending a lot of my time, but which I treat as quite a separate, subsidiary circle of topics. No need to add that I'm interested in Mediterranean studies in a very large chronological perspective. Across the last decade, I was trying to approach the Mediterranean specificity through a wide range of topics that may appear, at the first glance, as totally unrelated. Nonetheless, the Mediterranean journey of Adelard of Bath, leading to a book dedicated to falconry, and the Oriental project of Guillaume Postel, leading to a grammar of Arabic, are in fact closely connected in the same project of Arabica studia that, largely due to maverick individuals on the margin of institutions and orthodoxies of their times, constituted a transmission belt bringing new ideas to Europe for several centuries, from late Middle Ages and the dawn of the Modern Age. The aim of putting in evidence such connections is still in front of me, as I slowly progress towards my own Summa Mediterranea that I see and work for as one of the culminating books of my entire academic career. For a long time, the reality was very distant from such grandiose aspirations that the term "Mediterranean" implied for me. For nearly a decade (2006-2016), I was teaching in a program of the so-called "Mediterranean civilisation" at the University of Warsaw, constantly clashing against the dominant Islamophobia, characterising both the faculty and the Polish society in general. What they (both students and professors) wanted to imagine, think about and study was a sort of relaxing and attractive continuation of Antiquity, that might eventually reach, let's say, the contemporary Spain, but determined to ignore the sheer existence of other cultural elements in the region and the whole range of problems related to them. No wonder that I ended up by resigning, while my colleagues continue there, discussing such topics as the Mediterranean landscape (sic!). During my Varsovian years, I also collaborated with the Orientalist faculty, but overall, in any of these academic circles at the time, the study of the 19th-century travel writing was one of the highlights. The research project dedicated to a travelogue of the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, in which I also participated, was typical for that range of interests. That is of course very modest for me, very far from what Mediterranean studies may and should be. The reader should thus understand how, in this context, my vision of the area was experienced as something personal. Although, objectively speaking, my understanding of it is not, most probably, as idiosyncratic as I once believed. Quite naturally, my Mediterranean studies got quite a new impetus as soon as I found myself out of Poland. In 2017/2018, I was a Marie-Curie fellow in France, working on a project dedicated to the search for Adamic language, the primary, ideal speech of the humanity. This topic exemplifies fully what kind of research I would gladly put under the Mediterranean label. The medieval and early-modern speculations on Adamic language (lingua adamica, the tongue spoken in the Garden of Eden) are related both to the question of paradisaical origins of man and the essential unity of the human kind. According to some medieval and early-modern authors, the primordial speech was first of all a divine language, the tongue in which God addressed Adam; according to others, Adam appeared as its inventor, playing a crucial role as the “nomothete” (the name-giver). Be as it may, according to the biblical narration, this primordial language had been lost in the episode of the “confusion of tongues” (confusio linguarum) as the result of the sacrilegious attempt of constructing the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). Since the early Middle Ages, the question of the primordial language formed a cross-road between the Christian thought and the traditions of the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, that tried to answer it in their own way. The Islamic thought created its own notion of suryāniyya, the oldest human language, as well as the spiritual language common to angels and some chosen saints; some of its letters and words are contained in the Quran; some traces of this tongue were also supposed to be found in the early infantile speech. These speculations provoked a reaction among the Jewish theologians and thinkers, who defended that Hebrew, not Arabic, was in fact the language of Adam. This opinion was partially shared in the Christian context, contributing to the development of the study of oriental languages and later on, to the birth of the early-modern philology. This aspiration can be exemplified already in the second half of the 13th century with the figure of Ramon Llull, and more fully, in the endeavours of the 16th-century polymath Guillaume Postel. The author of Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis (1547) believed that Hebrew is an indispensable tool for the perfect understanding of the Holy Scriptures, but also much more than this: the language of mystical unity of man and God, as well as the key binding together all the things in the created world. The hypothesis of its possible recuperation, be it by some chosen individuals, communities or the humanity as a whole, became an important nexus of the Utopian thought that, starting from the recuperation of the “proper”, primordial speech, progressed toward more and more generalised visions of restitution. Recuperating the paradisaical condition, man might become able of creating a perfect, universal society and a single state of global dimensions, offering peace, justice and stability to everyone. The search for the Adamic language, a fascinating historical topic in itself, is still subsidiary for my forthcoming project of "Poetics of the Void", dealing with even larger outlook, leading to the contemporary Utopia, if we want to think in these terms, of the transcultural becoming of man. |
from landscapes to seascapes |
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The mention of "maritime humanities" often makes people ask if I pretend to study dolphins. That is not exactly the idea. Undoubtedly, maritime humanities, as a transdisciplinary area of studies, deal just with humans. Nonetheless, human condition is understood, in the aftermath of the reflection of Hans Blumenberg on the maritime nature of modernity, as a destiny connected to the sea. Yet obviously, the maritime history of European imagination did not start with the great explorations of the 15th and 16th centuries. Also the premodern period, especially late Middle Ages, created their own images and believes related to the sea, the risks of a maritime travel, as well as the other people to be encountered on the opposite shore.
Different seas create separate, distinctive sets of concepts and symbols, their specific seascapes. Just to give an example, the Mediterranean as the southern frontier of Europe was associated with the great divide between Western Christianity and Islam. As an imagined space, it was conceptualised through the lens of pilgrimage and holy war, negotium crucis. It contributed to the development of a significant, coherent set of rules, principles and values associated with the Crusades (that influenced the subsequent, early-modern maritime endeavours of the Europeans, including the conquest of the New World). At the same time, also other, suggestive or even haunting images of the sea were produced, just to mention the strange cartographic fantasy produced by Opicinus de Canistris (1296-1353), an Italian priest and mystic who inscribed in the outline of the northern and the southern shores of the Mediterranean the figures of a man and a woman: Adam and Eve at the moment of committing the original sin. The expanse of water was conceptualised as Diabolicum Mare, the Satanic Sea leading to the fall of the mankind. On the other hand, the Black Sea was almost an exclusive domain of the Byzantine empire till the fall of the Constantinople. Meanwhile, the Byzantium remained essentially a land power that in time ceded the control and the exploitation of the sea to the Mediterranean maritime states, Venice and Genoa, who helped to revive the commerce that had been thriving in the Antiquity. Apparently, it was, to a greater degree, a “neutral” space of trade instead of war, especially if we compare it with the symbolically and ideologically charged conflict as the Crusades. Nonetheless, the images of alterity to be found on the opposite shore might still be troubling. The Barbarians inhabiting the northern and north-eastern shores of the Black Sea were a constant preoccupation. Also the haunting, macabre factor of the imagination was present, since it was from Kaffa, a city the Genoese purchased in the late 13th century from the Golden Horde, that the great pandemic called the Black Death entered Europe in 1347. On the other hand, the early-modern Atlantic perspective is naturally proper for someone who comes from the area of Portuguese studies. Since the beginnings of my academic career, I was reading texts that reflected a maritime horizon, the lure of new discoveries, the bitterness and misery of catastrophes on the African shore compiled in História tragico-marítima by Bernardo de Brito. Vertical Divider
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my essays in maritime humanities"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. "Perspektywy humanistyki morskiej. Rekonesans" ["Perspectives of maritime humanities. Reconnaissance"], Kultura - Historia - Globalizacja, nr 20/2016, s. 135-143. ISSN 1898-7265
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