Dr. Paula R. Curtis

First is @Umich’s Cameron Cross (Middle East Studies, University of Michigan) with “Grammars of Globality.” Cross is looking at a manuscript folio (Shiraz, 1341 CE) that uses a number of “grammars” to speak globally to global audiences. #DGMA19 #GlobalMiddleAges #medievaltwitter

Research on this manuscript was part of a focused exercise/research project done at the David Collection of the Royal Library of Copenhagen in considering one object and its trajectories and space.

Part of the process here, he says, is to get the audience to think globally and engage with those realities through these objects.

This folio has a story from the epic Persian poem Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) that records a world history of kingship. Cross argues that this poem gave Persianate empires (Mongols, Timurids, Ottomoans, Sadavids, Mughals, and others) a vocabulary to articulate legitimacy.

Then they're geography- incorporating Alexander romances confronting the hordes of Gog &Magog, which get adapted, translated, &widely circulated, to show that there’s an image being created of universal kingship as well as the geographic world itself (not unlike mappa mundi).

The stories of his travels also take the viewer/reader to geographies of the known world and beyond.

By using the tale of Gog and Magog, there's also an opportunity to incorporate claims to sacred landscape as well.

Then there's a grammar of eschatology- considering apocalypse and the ends of days. Alexander appearing as "he of the two horns" as in the Qur'an, engaging a framework known to Abrahamic faiths.

Of course, then there's his failure. So readers are invited to reorient themselves in a narrative of inevitability.

It's not hard to imagine that someone, entirely outside the realm of this context, could know or be told this is Alexander who appears in the tale, and tap into a share network of the imaginary and understand these grammars.

In this way, objects can carry a "portable world" with them that invite the people who interact with them to imagine themselves as a part of that.

Now we're launching into discussion, with Cathy Sanok responding and moderating. She notes that being in the world is identified with where one is and when one is. In the premodern context, there are many simultaneous answers to those questions.

She says Cross' paper offers us a way to think about the status of temporality. What about temporal orders? Each of them may create their own geographies.

Do temporalities in particular de-center the global by offering alternatives to one center? Can they be co-extensive and co-centric?

Getting too absorbed in the conversation.  @cerydel is on it.https://twitter.com/cerydel/status/1094251331555115011 …

Hansen brings up that there's an element here to think about-- they're geographically in the middle. It's quite different from contexts on either side.

Cross: Another grammar we might consider is language itself. What languages do we use in our patronage? To create an affiliation of belonging?

Sullivan brings up that we need to think about iconography more with this kind of object; coming to term with local interpretations but also what makes this scene about the subject. The image to text relationship is also interesting here- think about separations of text, framing.

Sullivan notes that there's a very clear movement of our main figure placing his horse's hoof from one world into the next, while Cross says the top of the text one sees first is the end of the story (Feeling of "Yay! We did it!"). And yet...

de Pee: It seems like the Alexander romance is already portable; it is made as such through transmission. The object itself is in someone's collection, where it's juxtaposed with textiles, ceramics, etc. Already a context of legibility that views them as interchangeable &related.