Events

Past Event

Columbia Medieval Studies Seminar: Chris Chism (UCLA) "The Afterlives of Saladin: Romancing Islam in England and France."

April 28, 2022
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
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TBD

Chris Chism, Professor of English at UCLA

hristine Chism is a professor of English at UCLA. After completing her first book on late medieval alliterative romance, she was the recipient of a New Directions Mellon fellowship to learn Arabic and study Islamic culture. One of the aims of her current research is to illuminate the complex interdependent processes by which both medieval Islamic and medieval Christian writers come to remake their visions of the world, the astronomical heavens, the secrets of God, and human rationality. The abstract for her talk can be found below.

 

When Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub joined the lands of Syria and Egypt beneath a single Sunni rule, thus obliterating both the Fatimid and Zengid dynasties, he had to win hearts and minds as an outsider and upstart. Salah al-Din and his family were Kurds who rose to state power not through high birth and right descent but through service and military leadership.  They thus seized power from the margins and had to work in extraordinary ways to establish their rule.

 

This paper argues that Salah al-Din exerted appeal by capitalizing on three distinct areas of affective connection: 1) nostalgia for a lost but glorious past, 2) hospitality to strangers through diplomatic gift-exchanges, and 3) a sense of kinship rooted in family.  These affective features persist even within hostile English and French stories of the Sultan of Egypt.  This paper, part of a longer project on Saladin, looks at Saladin's literary shadows in three works: the Pas Saladin, and then more briefly the Middle English Floris and Blanchefleur, and the Book of John Mandeville, to argue that Latin Christian writers sometimes write Saladin and his avatars dialogically to open transactions and foster emotional community across religious lines.  So read, Saladin's preeminence becomes less a fixed exception to anti-Muslim racial hostilities than an ongoing dynamic that reexamines uncanny, deeply felt proximities between and within cultures.

 

Registration is required by the University Seminar Office. If you wish to join us for the presentation and dinner at the Faculty House, please complete this in-person registration form by no later than Wednesday April 20th. If you plan to attend online, please register via Zoom

Please note that non-CU ID-holders who plan to attend in-person are required to submit an Electronic COVID-19 Symptom Attestation Form in advance OR fill out a printed paper Attestation Form. The symptom attestation form and proof of vaccination will be checked at the entrance of the building

 

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