Ways of Knowing
Hostile Attitudes against Muslim and Christian Subjects in the Pre-modern Mediterranean
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luigi Andrea Berto
Between the seventh and ninth centuries Muslims conquered vast areas in the Near East and the Mediterranean that were predominantly inhabited by Christians. This phenomenon was repeated in the Late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early Modern Era by the Ottomans, who occupied what remained of the Byzantine Empire as well as vast areas of the Balkans and of Eastern Europe. Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, Christians created an analogous situation, by taking possession of territories that were mostly inhabited by Muslims (the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and, for a little over a century, a region corresponding roughly to modern-day Israel and Lebanon). The goal of this study is to examine the various forms of hostility towards subjects not professing the rulers’ religion. Moreover, it shows that there were not relevant differences between what Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross experienced in the pre-modern Mediterranean.
Tasso’s Allegorical Landscapes as Nostalgia for Ecological Stability
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Motyka
In his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, Torquato Tasso sets forth allegorical landscapes representing various aspirations of the human mind. In the Allegory of his poem, Tasso explains that he has attempted to draw the mind of a mature man striving to achieve existential equilibrium. In my interpretive reading of the poem, I compare the representations of two women that confound the linearity of that strife for inner balance. These women stand for contrasting drives within this landscape of the mind: the first one, Erminia, embodies a positive influence, the second one, Armida, incarnates destructive temptation. Erminia, a Muslim princess, falls prey to an overpowering and hopeless love for the Christian knight Tancredi. After some peripeties to locate and save the injured Tancredi, Erminia takes refuge in a forest far from the busyness of the court or the battlefield. Armida, a Muslim sorceress, lives on an enchanted island she has artificially created via black magic. There she holds Rinaldo, the right-hand man of the commander of the Christian army, prisoner. This landscape is a completely artificial paradise where idle pleasures are the sole end of existence. By analyzing these two landscapes, I argue in my paper that Tasso’s representations of nature allegorically point to two competing poles of the human psyche: 1) longing for reintegration into an ecologically balanced environment, far from passionate entanglements, and (2) desire for a self-conceived artificial paradise where the individual may disregard communal ecological concerns.
Seeing is Believing: Medieval Liturgical Ceremonies with the Use of Articulated Figures View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christophe Chaguinian
The Bible is one of the canonical texts of Western literature. During the Middle Ages when literacy was low, and only a minority could read the Bible, the masses learned its narratives thanks to paintings and sculptures. These artifacts are plentiful in our museums and churches. But the biblical stories, particularly the life of Christ, were also disseminated by means of colorful liturgical ceremonies that reenacted these events with the use of articulated sculptures. For instance, in German-speaking lands the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem was celebrated on Palm Sunday with a statue of Christ on a donkey that was pulled through the city. On Good Friday, some churches commemorated Christ’s burial by unnailing an articulated figure of Christ from a crucifix and placing it into a sepulcher. On Easter, a statue of Christ was sometimes placed on the sepulcher to signify his resurrection. And on Ascension Thursday, the same statue was in some churches pulled through an opening in the vault to represent his ascension. These medieval liturgical ceremonies all but disappeared after the adoption in 1570 of the Roman rite as the universal liturgy of the Catholic Church. In this paper, I discuss these little-known practices that contributed to the dissemination of the biblical story among the laity.
Do the Walls Really Talk?: An Investigation of the Communicative Agency of Modern Office Architecture and the Contribution of Spatial Theory to New Knowledge in the Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jonathan Peck
This paper explores the ‘meaning’ of modern office architecture, discussing the communicative and constitutive agency of glass walls, workstations, atriums, and other architectural features in shaping workplace culture, boundaries, social norms and power dynamics. It is based on my PhD thesis, which analyzed bank workers in a major commercial property in Melbourne, Australia over a five year period. I present the underlying theoretical basis of the thesis, which drew on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial conceptualizations and the investigative techniques of Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) practitioners; a multidisciplinary hybrid that, I argue, offers great potential to understand the way we ‘read’ and interpret our physical environment. I present a critical appraisal of existing literature on communication and space and explain the scope of my own research, which concluded that features such as glass office walls and atriums do in fact have agency beyond the symbolic or representational; that they actively contribute to the daily invention and reinvention of power, and that their sense-making agency is best observed and analyzed from the combined perspective of spatial and CCO theories. With the post-COVID workforce still reluctant to return to the office environment (in Australia at least), seeking to understand the constitutive agency of office architecture is both topical and timely. Academics, architects, and HR practitioners who have read my thesis have found my approach useful for observing spatial assumptions.
