By Arezou Azad, Principal Investigator and the Invisible East Team
Today, in the popular imagination, the vast and pivotal region that stretches from eastern Iran to Tibet, known as the Islamicate East, is notorious as the cradle of terrorism, violence and war. And yet, during the half millennium that followed the coming of Islam (8th to 12th centuries CE), this same region witnessed a mixing of cultures and religions that was both unique in itself and extraordinarily influential upon neighbouring societies (a pluralism and dynamism that is captured in the term “Islamicate” and in the image of lapis lazuli as the prized gem traded from Badakhshan, Afghanistan). One cause of this apparent contradiction is the lack of any single, coherent research programme dedicated to the study of the Islamicate East. Moreover, the field appeared to lack the sources for such a study — until now.
Local texts from Afghanistan’s Bamiyan and Ghur regions in this time period have recently become publicly available. They include documents, letters and literary fragments that were written by local Jewish and Muslim traders, business people, clerics, mothers and fathers, poets and rebels. They attest to an array of relationships, of coexistence, cooperation, and conflict between people of different religions in the 11th to 13th centuries CE. Several hundred more local texts from the medieval Islamicate East found in parts of the modern states of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the wider Central Asian region (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Khotan in China) have also not yet been analysed for their historical content.
The new Invisible East programme at the University of Oxford’s Oriental Institute brings the medieval Islamicate East to the forefront of historical research by studying these local texts. The programme is funded for the next five years (2019-25) with a core staff of seven researchers funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and European Research Council (under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Grant agreement No. 851607). The research projects are part of the Invisible East programme directed by Senior Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Arezou Azad.
Specifically, Invisible East involves the transcription, translation and analysis of these texts, most of which reflect everyday, local use – such as, receipts, personal letters and legal opinions – while others are literary in nature. The initiative incorporates a range of languages, including Early New Persian, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, Bactrian, Khotanese and Pahlavi, and sheds new light on the political, financial and legal infrastructures at the granular level, historical writing, linguistics, and cultural and religious diversity in the medieval Islamicate East.
The core goals of Invisible East are:
• To understand the roles played by different stakeholders (political, religious, legal, financial) in the construction of multicultural communities and societies across the Islamicate East;
• To ascertain how texts and material culture help us understand relations between Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, and other faiths in the Islamicate East; and
• To establish how the Persian language developed and interacted with other languages (Arabic, Hebrew and others) in the multicultural Islamicate East.
Invisible East will also result in valuable new resources designed to support further study at a variety of levels, including a digital corpus.
The Invisible East team currently includes researchers Tommy Benfey, Pejman Firoozbakhsh, Zhan Zhang, and AHRC co-investigator Hugh Kennedy. Another post-doctoral researcher is currently being recruited. The Programme Coordinator is Neil McCartney.
To get in touch, please write to: invisible_east@orinst.ox.ac.uk. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @invisible_east, and look out for more posts from our project here on the OMS blog.
Three nuns hand a letter to a messenger. Illumination in the Matutinale of Scheyern, Germany, 13th century. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 17401 (1), fol. 16r (61r) (BSB).
Medieval anchoresses and nuns in enclosure also provide a good example of how to maintain relationships without meeting in person. Despite digital communication tools we all have experienced that it can be quite difficult to feel a real sense of community without in-person encounters. So which strategies for coping with social distancing can nuns who only had pen and paper at hand teach us?
Symbolic communication
Conversation also was considered a risk for enclosure: A window, once probably covered with fabric, that allows visitors to speak to the nuns (speaking window). Convent of the Poor Clares in Pfullingen, Germany (Wikipedia commons).
Medieval nuns who chose enclosure to approach the divine through contemplation, developed ways to ensure that families and friends would not forget them – and to show that their prayers benefited society. One of the most effective ways was to develop letter writing to an art form, and overcome distance by imbuing the words with transcendent symbolic meaning. This involved a balancing act: Theologians frequently warned that letters could be disruptive and let the loud, mundane world into the convent. After all, letters were always associated with secrecy, individuality, physical presence, and material goods. St Jerome, for example, carried letters with him and talked to them like to his friend,[1] and St Augustine considered letters to enable greater intimacy than would be possible when the person was physically present but silent.[2]
Many sources reveal how nuns crafted letters in conformity with their rules. Important evidence can be found in the letter books from the Benedictine nuns of Lüne, the largest cache of female writing from late medieval northern Germany.
First Strategy: Virtual Encounters
The passage about gold and silver in letter book Hs 15, Convents Archive Lüne, quire 27, fol. 8r (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel / Kloster Lüne)
The nuns drew on the imaginative potential of letters to overcome distance and to build a sense of community with their families, friends, and other convents, for example, by sending saints as envoys: “Since we are related, it would be appropriate to come to your wedding feast. […] Yet God has chosen me to my own wedding, and he planted me in this earthly garden of paradise. […] So, I wandered around the heavenly fortress of Jerusalem and asked all the dear saints to come out for you.”(Lüne Hs 15, quire 28, fol. 2v). Depending on the recipient, these can be different saints: Mother Mary shall be the merciful host; St Michael shall ensure that only the best things happen to bride, groom, and their guests; St Matthew shall help them to keep their worldly wealth without striving for it too much; St John shall bring their offspring blessing; and St Anne, St Catherine and St Ursula with her 11.000 handmaidens shall always be companions in time of need (Lüne Hs 15, quire 27, fol. 6r-8r). These imaginary envoys could also carry elaborately described symbolic gifts: e.g. pearls and gemstones of a golden necklace, described and interpreted as the virtues and blessings that shall adorn the recipient’s soul (Lüne Hs 15, quire 28, fol. 14r-quire 29, fol. 1v). The nuns argue that, because of their vow of poverty, they cannot afford those expensive gifts, but send a letter instead: “We wish to ask from you that you receive it with the same love as that with which we have written it. If we could have written it in gold and silver, we would certainly have done so. Therefore accept our goodwill as a token” (Lüne Hs 15, quire 27,fol. 8r).
Second Strategy: Sending Gifts (and Unicorns!)
A little unicorn depicted on the so-called Christmas Tapestry, one of the impressive tapestries the nuns of Lüne embroidered in the 15th century (Restaurierungswerkstatt, Klosterkammer Hannover).
A little unicorn depicted on the so-called Christmas Tapestry, one of the impressive tapestries the nuns of Lüne embroidered in the 15th century (Restaurierungswerkstatt, Klosterkammer Hannover).
In other letters, real gifts became metaphors as the nuns interpreted and explained the details. Such gifts ranged from books and devotional pictures to little jugs, dresses, or even two young unicorns. The sender advices the recipient to build a fence around the pasture and to heighten it soon, because “the unicorns jump around so merrily” (Lüne Hs 31, fol. 82r). While it remains unclear what the real gift might have been, the unicorn was a symbol of purity, virtue, and of chaste love, which could only be tamed by a virgin. Thus it became an allegory of the incarnation, in which the virgin was equated with Mary and the unicorn with Christ. The gift for the nun could have been toys, an animal shaped gingerbread, a pastry model, or an embroidery of the creatures.
Third Strategy: Showing Empathy
The empathy palpable in those exchanges is also expressed directly whenever the nuns ask about the wellbeing of a friend in another convent: “I would like you to tell me that you are feeling better. Otherwise I cannot find peace”(Lüne Hs 15, quire 9, fol. 5v). This is also manifest in their deep sympathy for a mourning mother: “I understand that you are in pain and distress, because love is always deep between mother and Child.” The recipient shall soothe her heart to prevent “falling ill with excessive melancholy and tears”, and think of Mother Mary, who had to witness the cruel death of her son. To her she may confide her suffering, for Mary “knows from experience how a grieving mother feels” and will comfort her (Lüne Hs 30, fol. 39v). The nuns also do not hide yearning for their fellow sisters in neighbouring convents: “Give my greetings to the crows and ravens. When I sit here in my cell and hear the crows sing and see the ravens hopping in the snow, I think of my beloved sisters in Lüne” (Lüne Hs 31, fol. 158r). By verbalizing their empathy, the nuns connected emotionally to their social network, and this connectedness enabled them to resist in times of crisis. The nuns survived the Black Death as a community – and the Reformation, for them an even deadlier threat, alive and kicking now in the 21st century.
Fourth Strategy: Crafting words
A nun (sister Elspeth Stagel) writing at a lectern. Illumination in the sisterbook of Töss, Germany, 15th century. Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg, Cod. cent. V, 10a, 3ra (Wikipedia commons).
A nun (sister Elspeth Stagel) writing at a lectern. Illumination in the sisterbook of Töss, Germany, 15th century. Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg, Cod. cent. V, 10a, 3ra (Wikipedia commons).
The nuns in Lüne valued their letters to such a degree that they copied and kept them in their convent’s archive. In this way, they served for continuous edification, to encourage remembering the social network, and to provide examples for teaching the novices how to write. The skill of conveying not only information but also emotion is one that can only be acquired by continuous practice; it was, and still is, an art to write letters that are clear and do not allow for misunderstanding. When communicating through written words alone, appropriate wording is of vital importance. Not surprisingly, the twelfth century saw the invention of letter writing manuals, when societal structures were becoming increasingly complex and demanded expert networking skills. These manuals offer examples of wording for all sorts of situations, so that the message is understood as expected and a close relationship can be established, even if you do not see or hear each other.
Therefore, when we feel lonely in the enclosure of our homes, a carefully written letter can comfort us. The search for the right words can bring order to one’s thoughts. It sends the mind on a journey to another person in a different place, and also provides the recipient with an individual, physical sign of company. So, why not make the effort for a friend and go on a journey of the mind yourself?
Dr Lena Vosding is a postdoctoral researcher working at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. In her book, she examined the Lüne letter books in terms of form and function. To learn more about the project, the letters, the nuns and their current counterparts in the convent, see the six L.I.S.A. episodes about Lüne Abbey:
Episode 1: Lüne Abbey (the history of the convent and its current inhabitants), 08/19/2020
Founded in 1172, Lüne Abbey developed into a prosperous religious centre for the Lüneburg region. The Benedictine nuns formed a strong network with other convents in Northern Germany and joined an influential reform movement in 1481. In the 16th century, they transformed into a Protestant community after a prolonged struggle with the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The project ‘The Nuns’ Network’ explores this phase of change and reform in the 15th and 16th centuries, examining the significance of the Abbey and the communication strategies of the nuns based on letter books. These contain almost 1800 letters providing information about pastoral care, debating devotion and theology, and giving insight into daily life in the convent. The letters also highlight the role of rhetoric and learning for women living in strict enclosure.
Episode 2: The Letter Books (the materiality and content of the manuscripts), 08/26/2020
Among the numerous treasures of Lüne Abbey, the three letter-books are one of the most significant holdings. Into the three hefty tomes, the nuns copied nearly 1,800 letters and accounts from their correspondence during the 15th and 16th centuries. They offer an insight into the nuns’ lives from their own perspective. Particularly revealing are the arguments surrounding the Lutheran Reformation; the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg finally succeeded in nominally turning the convent into a Protestant community – but the women documented their arguments and preserved the record of it to this day in their Abbey.
Episode 3: The Role of Women (on the high esteem in which nuns were held), 09/02/2020
The Lüne letters give in-depth insight into the special role of women in religious orders. In medieval society, women were subordinate to men, being in the munt (under the guardianship) of their fathers and then of their husbands, only as widows gaining full control over their legal affairs. This was different in female religious houses. The prioress and other office holders took on a variety of significant roles for the community, and it was a high responsibility to lead the monastic community consisting of several hundred people. The esteem for religious women was based particularly on their status as brides of Christ (sponsae Christi), at the side of the highest king, leading to a elevated rank in the medieval hierarchy. This position was an obligation but also a source of pride for the women as many of the letters show.
Episode 4: The Editing (on the complex process of making the letters accessible), 09/09/2020
Editing the letter books from Lüne Abbey is a complex process which relies on the regular exchange between the team members in Düsseldorf, Oxford and Wolfenbüttel: the letters need to be deciphered, structured, commented upon and encoded to make the networks of the nuns accessible again. The edition allows full and fascinating insights into the knowledge structure, the communication and the rhetoric of the nuns. But the letters reach beyond that: private and personal aspects of the life of the women in the convent become visible and relatable, 500 years after they were first written down.
Episode 5: A Key Finding (on the learning of the nuns), 09/16/2020
An important part of the editing process is the commentary contextualising the style and content of the letters. A key finding is how scholarly learning and oral culture meet and mix in the letters, showing how the nuns operated on an equal footing with the learned male clergy. In a letter accompanying a gift of wine for the Provost, the young nuns for example show off their Latin learning – with more than a bit of self-deprecating humour. Such a letter could be read out aloud e.g. at a convent feast and thus re-enter the oral sphere of the monastic setting.
Episode 6: The General Interview (on the international collaboration), 09/23/2020
The last part of the series the two Principal Investigators, Eva Schlotheuber (Düsseldorf, History) und Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford, German Literature), in form of an interview talk about the genesis, challenges and perspectives of the Lüne letters project. What is the knowledge basis required to work with medieval letters and what challenges does the interdisciplinary collaboration between history and German Studies face; how is the project charting new territory? The exchange between the two investigators also focuses on new methodological approaches, the fascination of the letter books and the important question whether the letters could be considered private. And above all – what is the message of the letters for us today?
(Or Why Yersinia pestis is a Good ‘Model Organism’ in These Pandemic Times)
By Monica H. Green
This short essay is a companion to, and summary of, a lecture of the same title given by Monica H. Green in Oxford on 16 March 2020. You can now watch the video of the lecture on the Oxford Medieval Studies YouTube Channel.
Planning for the following presentation was done in early January 2020, before almost anyone had a clue that the world was about to be immersed in a new pandemic event. Originally meant as a presentation to Byzantinists, the talk was reframed to capture the essence of the larger work I have been doing the past 24 years to reframe the history of infectious diseases in a global framework of analysis. Although still focused on the history of plague (the main disease I’m working on at the moment), my central argument is that an evolutionary approach to the history of infectious diseases gives a powerful new way to understand pandemics past and present, and hopefully a way to avert similar events in the future.
The linchpin of all this work are new ways the biological sciences are contributing to the investigation of disease history. These contributions are of several kinds, but the most important have come from genetics. These function at two levels. First is phylogeny, the work of constructing “family trees” showing the evolutionary development—the “familial” relations—of microorganisms. Everyone will likely have noticed the phylogenetic trees published almost daily for the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Here’s the one from 9 February, showing genomes just sequenced in England:
SARS-CoV-2 has only been around since about November 2019, so far as we know right now. But prior to its arrival, there have been major diseases circulating around the globe for centuries. Tuberculosis, for example, although almost certainly originating in the eastern hemisphere, was present in the western hemisphere (the Americas) for at least the past 1000 years.
The present talk focuses on the story of plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The talk focuses on summarizing the ways in which genetics—by reconstructing the evolutionary history of the pathogen—has told us things about plague’s history that we never previously had an inkling of. It has told us how deep plague’s history with human populations has been (back to the Late Neolithic). It has suggested how broadly plague may have spread in the past (across the Eurasian steppe in the Bronze Age; throughout east, central, and western Eurasia and even into Africa in Antiquity and the Middle Ages). Here’s the latest phylogenetic tree of Yersinia pestis, with the major pandemic events marked:
Source: Zhemin Zhou, Nabil-Fareed Alikhan, Khaled Mohamed, Yulei Fan, the Agama Study Group, and Mark Achtman, “The EnteroBase use’s guide, with case studies on Salmonella transmissions, Yersinia pestis phylogeny, and Escherichia core genomic diversity, Genome Research 30 (2020), 138-152, fig. 5. Labeling: M. H. Green, 2020.
Note the shaded areas: the Neolithic transition; the Justinianic Plague; and the Black Death. Historians have known for generations of the latter two events, of course, because we have eye-witness testimony of both events, as well as many other kinds of evidence. What is stunning, however, is that we also now also have aDNA for those events. “aDNA”—the other new kind of evidence genetics has put on the table—is short for “ancient DNA,” molecular fragments that have been retrieved from people who died of the plague. This has been pieced together fragment-by-fragment, allowing us to understand how those strains of Y. pestis compare to modern strains (all the non-shaded circles on the tree). That comparison, in turns, allows us to make inferences about where the different historical strains circulated, and begin to investigate what animal species hosted them.
But telling the story of a one-celled bacterium is only part of the history we need to reconstruct. How was the disease transmitted over such long distances? Why at particular times, but not others? Getting the “human” part of these stories connected to the history of the pathogen is the work that historians now need to do. The present talk, therefore, gives a sketch of what we know about plague’s history and what questions are currently being investigated. In the question-and-answer session at the end, we covered a variety of topics, some having to do with the specifics of plague’s history (especially the many questions we still have about the Justinianic Plague of Antiquity) but also the urgent questions we face in the present day, faced with a pandemic event that gives every sign of being as cataclysmic for its implications on world history as the Black Death of the later Middle Ages.
Humankind has faced pandemics before. We don’t know nearly as much as we should about them, however. There is much to do in making better sense of pandemic events of the past and in better understanding what they might teach us to better face an uncertain future.
Sources for more information:
I’ve written up a teaching guide about the “new genetics paradigm” which explains in more detail what has happened in genetics in the past couple of decades and why it has been so transformational for our “pandemic thinking.” This and information on my other publications on plague can be found at the following link: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Plague-Studies.
Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine and health. Follow her on Twitter @monicaMedHist and get in touch at mhgreen@asu.edu.
To celebrate the life and work of Professor Peter Felix Ganz on the centenary of his birth, Oxford medievalist extraordinaire, scholar and ambassador of Anglo-German relationship, a group of Oxford colleagues, friends, former students and family was talking about his scholarly legacy and memories of his life. The event was life-streamed on Tuesday 3 November, 6:30-8pm, via youtube. We would welcome further tributes and memories; please send them Adam Ganz.
Schedule
Introduction – Adam Ganz
Peter Ganz as a German Medievalist – Henrike Lähnemann and Nigel Palmer
Peter Ganz as Mentor – Bryan Ward Perkins
Peter Ganz and Jacob Burckhardt – Nicolette Mout
Peter Ganz as Colleague – Andrew Kahn, Nicholas Cronk, and further Oxford colleagues
About Peter Ganz
Peter Felix Ganz (Mainz, 3 November 1920 – Oxford, 17 August 2006) came to the U.K. in 1938 as a refugee, having been held in Buchenwald concentration camp after Kristallnacht, as he and his family were considered Jews under the Nazi laws. He started to read German at King’s College London, but was soon interned on the Isle of Man. During the war he served first in the Royal Pioneer Corps and then in the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (The so-called Secret Listeners), listening to captured German Prisoners of War. He was part of the team at Farm Hall listening to the German nuclear physicists including Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn as they heard news of the atom bomb at Hiroshima.
He concluded his studies at King’s College London (PhD 1955). After holding lectureships in London, he came to Oxford in 1960 as Reader in German and subsequently Fellow of Hertford College. He was a pioneer of widening participation, part of the small group of Hertford fellows who encouraged applicants from schools who did not usually send pupils to Oxford. In 1972 he was appointed Professor of German and became a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. In 1985 he retired to take up the position of Resident Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and an honorary professorship at the University of Göttingen (until 1988). His wife Rosemary (with whom he had 4 children) died in 1986. His second marriage to me, a Dutch historian, led him to divide his life between England and the Netherlands.
The subject of his first book (1957) was the influence of English on the German vocabulary, 1640-1815. His interests soon broadened. He edited a number of medieval texts, of which his edition (1978) of Gottfried von Straßburg’s masterpiece Tristan became the best-known. His Oxford inaugural lecture on Jacob Grimm’s Conception of German Studies (1973) showed his own commitment to the study of language in combination with historical investigations. He wrote on Paul Celan, admired Bertolt Brecht, and loved Theodor Fontane. He did not mince his words, though, if he happened to dislike certain literary figures – a fate that befell Thomas Mann. His teaching reflected his exceptional range of interests.
He was instrumental in bringing together the results of Anglo-American and German medieval scholarship through lectures, conferences, and joint publications. With Werner Schröder (Marburg) he set up the Anglo-German Colloquia for German Medieval Studies still the most important forum for the exchange of scholarship in medieval studies between Britain and Germany. He was awarded the German Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz in 1973. Twenty years later he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
At the Herzog August Bibliothek he founded an international work group for medieval studies. Among its aims were the modernization of the catalogue of the library’s vast medieval manuscript collection and the reconstruction of medieval religious culture in Lower Saxony and beyond. The many visiting fellows found in him a kind, but nevertheless quite challenging interlocutor. The reinvention of the Herzog August Bibliothek as a research centre for European cultural history must partly be attributed to his efforts. The current close collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the HAB through the Polonsky German project would not have been possible if it had not been for this well-established link.
In the seventies he developed an interest in the life and works of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). He greatly admired Burckhardt for his independent and rigorous scholarship preferring synthesis over narrativism. Ganz devoted his Göttingen inaugural lecture to a rather tongue-in-cheek treatment of Burckhardt’s ambiguous relation to academic society. His edition of Burckhardt’s lectures, Über das Studium der Geschichte (1982), is a masterpiece, and in 2000 the second edition was included in the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe of Burckhardt’s works. His edition of Burckhardt’s medieval lectures was still unfinished at the time of his death.
***
Further reading: Nigel F. Palmer ‘Ganz, Peter Felix’ in ODNB. The blog post was first published by TORCH in November 2020. Picture: Peter Ganz at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel 1986
What’s a medievalist to read, watch, and listen to in lockdown? What resources can the Internet offer us to brighten our days, teach us new things, and keep us in touch with one another and our work? This is a crowdsourced list of podcasts, videos, blogs, and websites for your delectation and edification, first written up by Karl Kinsella in March and updated for the autumn.
You can check out Oxford-based podcasts here http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ (just search for ‘medieval’…or indeed anything you’d like, there are lots of interesting things there.)
The livinglibrariespodcast.co.uk is highly recommended to help you virtually explore Oxford’s libraries while you’re stuck indoors.
On your Podcast app, search for ‘About Buildings + Cities’ by Luke Jones & George Gingell. They have a wonderful episode about John Ruskin to sate any desire you might have to learn more about medievalism!
Last term’s OMS Lecture on knights and their armour by Tobias Capwell is up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpGh3zFlS38, and have a browse around the rest of TORCH’s YouTube channel as well!
The broadcaster OcTele has just produced a documentary on The Oxford Trobadors, including the performance of some beautiful 12th century songs, Xavier Bach on the history of the troubadours, and lots of spoken Occitan: https://www.octele.com/Oxford-trobadors_fiche_3750.html
