1) Stephen Smith (Department of History)

Topic: Patron Saints and Devoted Partners: Modeling Pilgrimage in Muscovite Russia

Abstract:

Though pilgrimage has been well studied in recent years, the histories and theories of pilgrimage in medieval and early modern Christian cultures have focused almost exclusively on the Latin Catholic tradition.  Few, if any, studies have investigated pilgrimage in the Russian Orthodox context.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians developed a pilgrimage tradition distinct from the Latin tradition.  In contrast to the international nature of Catholic pilgrimage, pilgrimage in Russia was limited to holy sites within her own borders.  Moreover, while Catholic pilgrimage became a means to attain or assure salvation by the High Middle Ages, Russian pilgrimage remained exclusively associated with miracles, which could be seen and experienced in the corporeal world.  Finally, though the travel experience was a crucial component of the Latin pilgrimage experience, it appears to have played little part in the way in which Russian pilgrims interpreted their own religious practice. In this presentation I will explore the nature of Christian pilgrimage by comparing the medieval and early modern Russian and Latin versions.  The differences between Latin and Russian Orthodox pilgrimage provides us with an important window through which we are able not only to understand how Russians and Latin Catholics saw their relationship with the spiritual world, but also to understand the nature of Christian pilgrimage itself.    

Location: 3154 Angell Hall/ Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: September 28, 2006.

2) Daniel Hershenzon (Department of History)

Topic: Countering Captivity, Contouring Slavery: Trajectories of Enslaved Captives in the Early-Modern Ottoman Empire

Abstract:

Between 1530 and 1780 the number of Europeans enslaved by Maghreb Muslims almost equaled that of Black Africans enslaved in the Atlantic world. More than a million Spaniards, Italians, French and north Europeans crowded the North-African Barbary regencies. Rather than a ‘social death,’ as one scholar has defined slavery, their enslavement implied initiation into new social relationships in the Maghreb and employment in variety of labors. Enslaved Europeans became part and parcel of North-African Muslim social reality.
In spite of the magnitude of this phenomenon, early-modern sources silenced it. Inquisition priests, as well as members of the Mercedarian and the Trinitarian orders, whose mission was to liberate captives, articulated the phenomenon as ‘captivity,’ rather than as ‘slavery.’ An examination of the sources relating to the presence of Europeans in the Barbary kingdoms reveals, however, a phenomenon that can neither be reduced to nor described in mere military terms – prisoners of war – or religious terms – captives, martyrs and redemption. By focusing on the life of Diego Galán, a Spaniard who was enslaved for ten years in the Ottoman Empire, the paper aims at reconstructing masters and slaves’ relationships and the social, cultural and occupational trajectories of slaves in the Ottoman Empire. An analysis of the lives of Europeans in the Maghreb employing the category of slavery, a category that denotes a social tie, will illuminate the institution  of slavery and will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empire, west and east.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: October 11, 2006.

3) Danna Agmon (Anthropology-History Program)

Topic: An Uneasy Alliance: French Jesuits and Catechists in India

Abstract:

 In the late seventeenth century French Jesuits arrived in India and joined their Portuguese, Spanish and Italian brethren in an attempt to claim the subcontinent for Christ. In this they were assisted by Indian catechists – local Christians who were employed as interpreters and religious intermediaries. Beginning with an examination of a catechist rebellion which took place in Madurai in 1700, this paper attempts to unravel the nature of the struggle that took place between one French missionary and three of his catechists. Moving back from this dramatic event, I examine the day-to-day interactions between Jesuits and Catechists, and explore the multi-layered sets of expectations held by the missionaries. Based on a reading of letters written by the French Jesuits, the paper offers an account of the intimate relationship between the two groups of men. Although catechists are mentioned in the Jesuit letters only in passing, and then in mostly positive terms, I argue that this relationship should be understood as both central to the Jesuit experience in India, and as one in which the missionaries exhibited a muted anger, even violence, toward the catechists. Therefore, the catechist rebellion should not be understood as a rupture, but rather as an extreme instantiation of the tensions and conflicts common to Jesuit-catechist relations.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/Time: 5:00p.m./Date: October 25, 2006.

4) Rossitza Schroeder (Art History)

Topic: On the Margins of the Byzantine Church, or How Images Facilitate the Crossing of Boundaries

Abstract:

This presentation explores the role of images and architectural articulation in stimulating transformational experiences and facilitating contact with the holy. The talk concentrates on monastic churches in late Byzantium (1261-1453) and the monumental programs of their subsidiary spaces—nartheces and ambulatories. While scholars have attempted to tie the images in these spaces to orchestrated liturgical rites, I argue that they served as means of mediation and were backdrops to communal and individual experiences in preparation for the encounter with a higher and more sacred reality revealed through the Eucharistic liturgy in the church naos.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/Time: 5:00p.m./Date: November 9, 2006.

5) Jason Barrett (History)

Topic: Submission and Consent: the Rationality of Jeffersonian Evangelicalism

Abstract:

This paper examines the social space created within evangelical churches by Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state in post-Revolutionary Virginia.  It discovers in these churches – in their liturgical, baptismal, disciplinary, proselytizing and administrative practices – an attempt to recreate miniature republican polities, but ones designed to permit and even nurture transgressive cultural interactions.  Interracial conversion, communion, and disciplinary practices were insulated from the demands of racial caste by the boundaries which Jefferson sought to establish between religious opinion and political reason.  The rationality which evangelicals evoked in
their conversion and membership rituals – the surrender of their will to God, their abandonment of the flesh for the spirit – idealized the transcendence of the republican paradox of civic virtue and a release from the psychological demands of racial caste.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/Time: 5:00p.m./Date: November 30, 2006.

6) Lee I. Schlesinger (Anthropology)

Abstract:

This talk questions notions of religion and secularism by interpreting a building and the expression of some beliefs in a Maharashtrian village (western India). The building, whose construction began in the early 1980s, includes the village council hall (gram panchayat) and a temple (mandir) for Lord Ram. The beliefs, expressed in 1996 by a formally uneducated Maratha farmer/shop-keeper, reveal his understanding of dharma and articulate thoughtfully the confusions and values composing devotional (bhakti) practices and ideas in the region. Examining a multi-purpose building together with a multi-faceted devotional discourse, this ethnographic study attempts to revive and extend Durkheimian theoretical insights on the structural links between social organization and collective representations. The presentation finds an intimate yet indeterminate bond of society, morality, and deity in one particular historical and cultural situation. Acknowledging this differently formed possible structure or identification, the talk concludes by proposing a logical alternative, or alternate logic (based on inclusion more than exclusion), with which to shape a more adequate understanding of these villagers’ concerns and values. Methodologically, the presentation experiments visually with modern art (oil paintings by the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko), mapping, and photographs to attempt an efficient and perhaps appealing way of communicating a large amount of rather complicated ethnographic data along with one or two somewhat contorted ideas.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/ Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: December 6, 2006.

7) Brian Nathaniel Becker (History)

Abstract:

My research examines, in the context of the Genoese island colony of Chios (1346-1566), the ways in which categories of ethnicity were produced and contested.  The creation and affirmation of such categories on Genoese Chios were so prevalent that few scholars have failed to comment on the presence of many different, well-defined ethnic groups living in this eastern Mediterranean commercial entrepôt.  Yet scholars also note the apparent stability and serenity of social hierarchies on the island.  What were the economic, social, and cultural bases for the ways the Genoese rulers of the island accounted for who was "Genoese," and what made them distinct from other inhabitants of the island, namely the indigenous Greek and Jewish populations?  What were the processes of ethnic interaction between these different groups, and how did these interactions reinforce, alter or breakdown concepts of group identity?  In what physical spaces did these interactions occur, and what can this tell us about the nature of these interactions and relationships on the island?

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/ Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: February 5, 2007.

8) Wojciech Beltkiewicz (History)

Topic: Non Semper Eadem:Lev Krevza and the Creation of Continuities in Uniate Sacred History

Abstract:

From the first moments of the Protestant challenge, a narrative of continuity and constancy was one of the chief rhetorical weapons wielded by the post-tridentine Catholic Church.  In his recent work, Simon Ditchfield demonstrated that various Italian diocesan authorities, like Cardinal Cesare Baronio, took it upon themselves to compose sacred histories of their dioceses in the hope of cementing a legacy of continuity reaching back to the apostolic era.  Far from Italy, Lev Krevza (1569–1639), a Ruthenian and Greek Catholic Uniate, adopted these very Catholic Reformation tools in order to defend the legitimacy of his own ecclesiastical entity.  This paper argues that in imitating this genre, Krevza also adapted it to suit the circumstances at hand.  In light of the recent Union of Brest with Rome (1596), coupled with a series of historically disuniate metropolitans, Krevza could not claim an unbroken line of apostolic succession of the Kievan Metropolitanate.  Instead, he stressed a narrative of "partly suppressed unity," which extended as far back as the conversion of St. Vladimir of Kiev and the baptism of the Rus'.  As will be demonstrated, Krevza broke with earlier Roman Catholic apologists of Orthodox union with the Holy See, affirming a distinctly Ruthenian narrative of sacred history of the Kievan Metropolitanate.  In the process, he carved out a historical niche that situated the Ruthenian Church as Rome-oriented and independent of Byzantine ecclesiastical polity, even if not always fully in union with the Holy See.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/ Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: February 19, 2007.

9) Scott DeGregorio (Humanities)

Abstract:

The thought of connecting Anglo-Latin/Old English spiritual writings to later English medieval vernacular texts rarely seems to dawn upon the experts who work in these areas.  Indeed, terms central to the later tradition, including "affectivity", "meditation" and "mysticism", may seem to be out of place when used in conjunction with the earlier evidence.  But should that be the case?  Why have the spiritual traditions of Anglo-Saxon England been excluded from the paradigms of spirituality that guide research in late medieval devotion?  This paper will attempt to cross the "border" that separates these scholarly fields.  It will attempt an explanation of how this state of affairs has come about by summarizing and critiquing the dominant scholarly paradigms that have created it, and, by exploring the concept of "affectivity" in a selection of Anglo-Latin and Old English materials, will argue for a rapprochement between the early and later phases of written spiritual traditions in England.  By bringing these hitherto separate textual traditions together, this paper concludes that Anglo-Saxon devotional writers can, and should, be studied through the same frameworks commonly deployed by scholars of later medieval spiritual literature. 

Location: 3154 Angell Hall/ Time: 4:30p.m./ Date: March 26, 2007.

10) Esra Birinci (Near Eastern Studies)

Abstract:

This paper analyzes the conquest of Egypt by Selim I and its consequences for the 16th century Ottoman Empire. In addressing the question: "What is the role of the conquest of Egypt in Ottoman self-perception, history and historiography?" the author first uses the works of Inalcik, Fleischer, Hess, Hodgson and others to build a historical context of the times of Selim I. She then examines the Selim Sah-name of Idris-i Bitlisi (a prominent example in the Selimname literature) which provides invaluable information about the times and conquests of Selim I. Through this analysis, the author hopes to be able to help explain how the Ottoman Empire was transformed from being a former "ghazi" state to being a "world empire.” 

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/ Time: 5:00p.m./ Date: April 2, 2007.

11) Hans Hummer (History)

Abstract:

Hans Hummer's lecture will examine the patterns in early medieval documentary evidence, their implications for understanding the use of documentation among the laity, and the relationship between "survivals" and the political transformations between late antiquity and the Carolingian era. 

Location: 1014 Tisch Hall/ Time: 4:30p.m./ Date: April 9, 2007.

12) Jason von Ehrenkrook (Near Eastern Studies)

Abstract:

Josephus’ writings depict a rather tumultuous relationship between Jews and figurative art, especially statues. For the most part, the many depictions of conflict with sculpture – e.g. the eagle affixed to Herod's temple, the busts of Caesar attached to Pilate's military standards, and the near erection of Caligula's statue in the temple – are simply taken at face value as evidence that Jews during the Second Temple period interpreted the commandment against idolatry as a prohibition against any form of figural representation, regardless of context or function. I aim to complicate this picture a bit by shifting attention away from the referential value of these so-called aniconic narratives to their rhetorical function. Using his Jewish War as a test case, I wish to consider the poetics of idolatry in Josephus, the way in which these aniconic narratives are uniquely shaped to contribute to larger rhetorical themes within each of Josephus’ main compositions. More specifically, I argue the following theses in this paper: 1) sculpture in this text functions as a kind of mapping device, as a means of constructing or imagining a (sacred) territory; and 2) the resulting sacred map, which is actually patterned after perceptions of statuary that were prevalent throughout the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, represents not the Jewish struggle against the forces of “paganism” or “Hellenism” but Josephus’ own attempt negotiate identity and navigate the complex cultural and political terrain of Flavian Rome.

Location: 3200 Angell Hall/Time: 5:00p.m./Date: April 18, 2007.

SAVE THE DATE:

May 11, 1.30pm, Sangren 2204, Western Michigan University
Self-Perception and Construction of the Other in the Mediterranean
Session 309 at The 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI. Organized by RIW "Boundary Crossing and Cultural Exchange" sponsored by Rackham Graduate School and the Medieval and Early Modern
Studies Program at the University of Michigan