Shirin A . Khanmohamadi

My first book, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (UPenn, 2013), considers critiques of colonial ethnographic description in order to bring into sharp relief the differences of premodern European ethnographic representation, arguing for the dialogism of European voices and gazes with those of their ethnographic objects in spaces where European description predated colonial control.  In showing a Latin Europe incorporative of the voices and perspectives of its (internal and external) others, I am also interested in highlighting the open-ended nature of European identity in its formative period.

"Extremely well written, lucidly exposed, Shirin Khanmohamadi's argument is carried by a graceful narrative and powerful close readings spanning three centuries and ranging from one edge of the known world, twelfth-century insular Britain and Wales, to the other extreme, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mongolia and Cathay. . . . A required point of reference in medieval studies and an indispensable classroom text."—The Medieval Review

"Khanmohamadi has rendered a valuable service to scholars and students of medieval travel writing, human geography, and cultural contact. She presents a clear-sighted and well-articulated vision here of the distinctive generic and discursive characteristics of medieval empirical ethnography."—Marianne O'Doherty, American Historical Review

Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe. These authors—William of Rubruck among the Mongols, "John Mandeville" cataloguing the world's diverse wonders, Geraldus Cambrensis describing the manners of the twelfth-century Welsh, and Jean de Joinville in his account of the various Saracens encountered on the Seventh Crusade—display an uncanny ability to see and understand from the perspective of the very strangers who are their subjects.

Khanmohamadi elaborates on a distinctive late medieval ethnographic poetics marked by both a profound openness to alternative perspectives and voices and a sense of the formidable threat of such openness to Europe's governing religious and cultural orthodoxies. That we can hear the voices of medieval Europe's others in these narratives in spite of such orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the productive forces of disorientation and destabilization at work on these early ethnographic writers.

Poised at the intersection of medieval studies, anthropology, and visual culture, In Light of Another's Word is an innovative departure from each, extending existing studies of medieval travel writing into the realm of poetics, of ethnographic form into the premodern realm, and of early visual culture into the realm of ethnographic encounter.

The material turn in literature together with the new Mediterranean studies and an emerging “global premodern” characterized by inter-imperial connectivity and transculturation have converged to enable a much needed critical reassessment of the character and extent of premodern Islamic/Christian encounters and their impacts upon the development of medieval European literature. Surveying the new critical landscape, this article challenges the heretofore default scholarly and popular view of medieval Muslims as civilizational and crusading enemies to medieval Europeans. I propose, instead, that it is more accurate to view the Islamicate world as we do the antique Roman one: a source of imperial desire, emulation, and appropriation for medieval Europeans.  I attempt to take measure of an Islamic inheritance of medieval Europe by presenting the Islamic world as an ambivalently desired source of cultural and imperial capital in the medieval period.  I begin with a sketch of the European desire for Islamic goods, arts, and knowledge that characterized Islamic cultural capital in the high medieval period, focusing on the watershed translations of the twelfth century and on material culture. I then turn to my primary focus on literature, to trace some of the many pathways by which encounters with Islamic culture and literature made a lasting imprint on the development of European and English genres as diverse as the lyric, the tale collection, epic, romance, and the literatures of travel. My primary focus is the Mediterranean contact zones of Spain, Sicily and the Latin Kingdom Outremer which played an outsized role in generating these novelizing appropriations and representations, but I close by attending to the widening significance of Asia beyond the Middle East in travel writing from the thirteenth century on.

Artifacts from the Middle Ages were fabricated from raw materials harvested from underneath or above the ground, from flora and fauna, rivers and oceans; sometimes they were shaped into the form of plants or animals, or they were made to evoke other natural materials. The ecological dimensions of medieval objects were thus complex and manifold and call for new scholarly analysis as the humanities become more and more strongly concerned with the environment. This essay cluster seeks to address the entanglements, super-impositions, and fields of tension between nature, matter, and material culture in the Middle Ages from a transdisciplinary perspective, providing a platform for experts of literary studies, art historians, and archaeologists to engage critically with ecologies of things and texts.
These inspiring and ground-breaking essays traverse the globe to uncover the ecological entanglements of humans with stone and water, crystal and wind, trees and animal skins.

A set of medieval European epic and historiographical narratives tell the story of the early life of Charlemagne: how, harassed at French court, Charles escapes to seek service in the court of the Muslim emir of Toledo and eventually marries his daughter.  As I show here,  in its earliest imperial self-fashioning, Latin Europe sought to establish "prestigious association" with Islamicate empires like that of the Andalusians.

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for inter-imperial translation or translatio imperii has yet to be elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of Roland fame, as an object inherited by Roland from its former royal Muslim owner. Drawing on cultural history and object-translation models derived from material and spolia studies, I read the sword’s symbolic transfer as evidence of Norman desire for and appropriation of former Fatimid imperium in Sicily.

My 2008 article (superseded by 2014 book chapter on William of Rubruck above, "Writing Ethnography" ) on the complexity of William of Rubruck's ethnographic gaze and his relative lack of power as he writes from a marginal position in the territory of his 13th century Mongol hosts. Contrast of medieval and modern ethnographic gazes.

This introduction surveys some of the major genres and authors of medieval travel writing, focusing primarily on the Jewish, Latin Christian, and Islamic traditions and on cross‐cultural interchange in medieval contact zones like the Silk Roads. World Literature scholars will find that premodern travel narratives raise many of the same questions that have long been central to the world literature discipline, without always offering familiar answers. I close with New World travel writings and their inheritance of medieval ideas.

This article finds in Joinville's late crusading narrative, the Vie de Saint Louis, evidence of past and continuing dialogues and a community of understanding between putative enemies in a theater of war. I argue that the text's mutually derived, Franco-Islamic references and syncretic customs attest to the everyday cross-fertilization and dialogue that took place in the medieval contact zone of Outre-mer irrespective of official crusading ideology emerging from Europe. I then turn to examining closely some of the Vie's many inter-confessional dialogues, showing how the cited Muslim voices of these dialogues reorient meaning within their linguistic environment, casting what Bakhtin called an unofficial “sideways glance” upon what would otherwise be monologic, Latin-Christian discourse. These unofficial, textual sideways glances both open up alternative perspectives within the Vie, and effectively cast an alternative image of the crusading endeavor itself, one in which Muslim and Christian values are mirrored in each other.

The article views Marie within the frame of insular history in order to argue that in seeking to preserve the Celtic stories of the Lais, Marie was enacting a form of ‘salvage anthropology,’ the salvage of cultural materials under threat of colonial incursion and loss, while giving expression to anxieties over her own shifting cultural boundaries.

Examines women as agents of inter-imperial contest between Asia and Europe and the Latin Christian-Islamicate realms in the premodern era. A response to Kim Phillips' CARA/MAP plenary of MAA 2020, ‘Gendering the Medieval Expansion of Europe: Men Washed Up’.