The Construction of Space(s) and Identity(s) in Medieval Literature: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a Case Study
Mourad EL FAHLI
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Christendom, Cultural Interchange, Europe, Heathendom, Identity, Infidels, Representation.
This paper examines the engagement of medieval literature in the construction of identities, particularly those of Europe and Muslims. While the former is represented as a unified Christian space, the latter is depicted as an external threat that endangers God’s plan and kingdom. Hence, medieval literature distinguished two opposing spatiality’s namely Christendom and Heathendom. Such spatial configuration deliberately overlooked internal schisms and antagonisms that characterized medieval Europe and instead opted for an ideal utopian vision, which has its origin in crusading discourses that emphasized unity in the face of “infidels.” To examine these issues, the paper takes as an example Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which is considered by many as one of the most influential medieval literary works. Medieval ideological othering has-ad still- shaped understandings and configurations of the various contacts between West and East and between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The paper further enriches the discussion by a focus on cross-cultural interchange that informs Chaucer’s oeuvre, particularly the influence of Medieval Arabic scientific studies on his conception of lovesickness. Such interchange paradoxically problematizes the western condemnatory attitude towards Islam.
The Pact of Memory: Interpretation and Identity in the Biblical Source
Cláudia Andréa Prata Ferreira
Original title: O Pacto da Memória: Interpretação e Identidade na Fonte Bíblica
Published in Mirabilia 3 (2003)
Keywords: Identity, Judaism, Memory.
Interpretation of the biblical and rabbbinic texts in the Jewish Tradition. We understood the biblical and rabbbinic texts as being a project of construction of the memory. That memory, built literarily starting from an oral tradition and writing, evidences the singular relationship between the human and the divine and it tries to legitimate in its speech the idea of a Religion and Tradition of the Book. That memory constitutes, then, the essential element in the project of construction of the individual or collective identity of the People of the Book (in Hebrew, Am Ha'Sefer). We established the relationship memory and religion tends as central element the Hebrew word zikaron " memory". The originality of the present project is elencar a group of elements us which the construction and formation of the identity and memory are articulated in the Judaism tends as referencial the sources ju-daicas, in particular, produced them in language hebraica. Memory, Language and speech in the narrative, interpreting the specific case of the hebrew biblical narrative and the rabbinic narrative: we privileged the biblical and rabbinic sources, pillars of the Jewish faith.
