HUM 3.04 Through Others’ Eyes: Muslims and Christians after Charlemagne
This course will examine the dynamic history of the Muslim-Christian encounter. It will focus on pre-modern representations of both the Muslim ‘other’ in Europe and Europeans in the Muslim Mediterranean world. Three texts from different periods – the anonymous Song of Roland (1129-65); Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983); and Ludovico Ariosto, Mad Orlando (1532) – in dialogue with historical documents, visual materials and performative elements, will allow cross-disciplinary exploration over a wide temporal arc of the ways Muslims and Christians have creatively processed their complex interdependence. The Mediterranean basin has been a space less of boundaries than of mutual influence, as the many aspects of the sustained Muslim-Christian encounter attest.