Medieval Mediterranean Technologies of 'Magic'

Catalog description

Much like us, medieval men and women sensed awe and fear, suffered jealousy and indigestion, sought protection and favour. Surviving objects, images, and texts bear witness to their experiences. In this class, we will explore places and meanings of ‘magic’ across the diverse and dynamic societies that constituted Byzantium and the Islamic and Western European polities between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries to shed light on the relations between ‘magic’, religion, nature, the community, and the self in both the everyday and in more spectacular contexts. To problematize the category of ‘magic’ as employed by historical and contemporary observers, we will read, in translation, inscriptions on magic objects themselves as well as accounts of miracles, grimoires, and lives of saints, such as writings attributed to Jabir b. Hayyan, Bernard of Angers, Ahmad b. Ali al-Buni, Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, Abraham Abulafia, and Theoktistos the Stoudite. Readings of secondary sources will be drawn from anthropology, art history, and the history of science, including texts by James George Frazer, Tawfiq Canaan, Alfred Gell, Michael Taussig, Katherine Park, Finbarr Barry Flood, and Caroline Walker Bynum. Concurrently, we will challenge the privileged position of the written word in knowledge production and dissemination through direct engagement with magical gems, block-printed scrolls, bowls, textiles, statuary, and architectural elements, many in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Utilizing the acquired tool of visual analysis, we will situate the objects accurately within their historical, literary, artisanal, and historiographic contexts and learn to explore the implications of their perceived efficacy.