Optics of Identity and Alterity in Medieval Armenian Texts, CE 405–1045

This paper will investigate the role of the physical body in the formation and development of Armenian ethnoreligious identity from the incipience of Armenian writing in CE 405 until the collapse of Armenian sovereignty in the Caucasus c. 1045. Its source material will consist of historical (and, occasionally, pseudo-historical), medical, and legal writings from the period. The paper will explore depictions of the body as an ethnicized object in these medieval Armenian texts and will examine the literary contrast between their representations of native Armenian bodies and those of “others” both local and exogenous, specifically: Persians, Greeks, Arabs, and Turks. Each of these others is presented across medieval Armenian texts as inferior both morally and somatically. The perceived moral insufficiencies of these others—and the qualities that are written to reflect them—derive directly from their contraposition against Armenian Christendom and its customary laws and practices. These moral disparities are externalized by the authors of these texts onto the bodies of the foreign, their physical constitutions being consequently presented as flawed, unattractive, and unclean. They are, correspondingly, portrayed engaging their bodies in conduct deemed morally objectionable by these Armenian Christian authors: incest, polygamy, sexual violence, and carnal indulgence (both sexual and dietary). Among the undesirable physical attributes reportedly displayed by these others are corpulence, darkness of pigmentation, small stature, aesthetically unappealing hair (on both the face and scalp), and indelicate facial features. Armenian bodies are, by contrast, praised by these writers for possessing a tall and slender physique, fair complexion, curly hair, and delicate facial features. The paper will argue that the body—positioned as the physicalization of Armenian Christian morality—became a vital rhetorical object through which medieval Armenian writers articulated the distinctiveness of the Armenian nation amid successive waves of invasion and conquest by ethnoreligious others.