Healing Dust and Printed Cures: Technologies of Protection in Medieval Islam

Medieval pilgrims often carried away tokens of the sanctuaries and shrines they visited. In the Islamic world, pilgrims to the holy places of Arabia seem to have been presented with an array of possible souvenirs. These included metal bowls, paper scrolls and tablets of dust and earth engraved or stamped with potent words and images. Among them are printed amulets that offer the earliest evidence for block-printing outside of China.

These materials conveyed the blessings of place, but were also believed to offer protection from misfortune, or even to cure ailments ranging from stomach pain to snake bite. Straddling the boundaries between memento and medicine, some were worn close to the body, while the texts and images that others bore were washed or dissolved in liquids to be consumed by drinking. Professor Flood will explore this intimate relationship to the body, which highlights a paradoxical relationship between technology, protection and mass production in the medieval Islamic world.
 
Finbarr Barry Flood is founder-director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. He has held fellowships from the University of Oxford, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In spring 2019 he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, while in autumn 2019 he delivered the Chaire du Louvre lectures at the Musée du Louvre on the theme Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies, accompanied by a book of the same title. Previous publications include The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000), Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, (2009), and the 2-volume Blackwell Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (2017), co-edited with Gülru Necipoğlu. He has recently edited and introduced the volume There Where You Are Not: Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata (2019).