Doing Literary History in the Medieval Mediterranean

The last decade or so has seen an explosion of interest in “Mediterranean Studies.” A half century after the original publication of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949), scholars in a number of disciplines have once again found the Mediterranean a productive category of analysis, as evidenced in a proliferation of conferences, edited volumes, journals, and study centers. In the field of Medieval Literature, on the other hand, “Mediterranean Studies” has found much less purchase. Taking that asymmetry as a point of departure, this paper explores the different ways “Medieval Mediterranean Literature” might be conceived; how it would relate to the study of the medieval Mediterranean in other disciplines; and what linguistic, thematic, and theoretical modifications or challenges it would offer to the field of literature as currently configured. Time permitting, I will explore three overlapping categories of texts: those whose literary transmission exemplifies the circulation of people, goods, and ideas in the Mediterranean (thereby challenging the way literary canons have, since the nineteenth century, been constructed around “foundational” texts taken as unique to their national traditions); texts that themselves thematize circulation in the Mediterranean through the travels of their protagonists, often bringing to the fore a maritime world of merchants, sailors, and pirates (in counterpoint, for example, to the knights and hermits populating the literatures of northwestern Europe); and texts that cluster around significant Mediterranean historical events, such as the War of the Sicilian Vespers and its aftermath. Throughout, I will emphasize both the reformulation of questions that a medieval Mediterranean frame provides to literary study, and ways of working towards a greater integration of the fields of history and literature.