Spectral Sea ─ Mediterranean Palimpsests in European Culture

From the dawn of ancient civilization to modern times, the Mediterranean sea looms in the imagination of the people living on its shores as a space of myth and adventure, of conquest and confrontation, of migration and settlement, of religious ferment and conflict. Since its waters linked the earliest empires and centers of civilization, the Mediterranean generated globalization and multiculturalism. It gave birth to the three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—religions of the book, of the land and of the sea. Over the centuries, the Mediterranean witnessed the rise and fall of some of the oldest civilizations in the world. And as these cultures succeeded one another, century after century, each left a tantalizing imprint on later societies. Like the ancient artifacts constantly washed up from its depths, the lost cities and monuments abandoned in its deserts or sunk beneath its waves, Mediterranean topography and culture is a chaotic present spread over a palimpsest many layers deep.

No region grappled more continuously with, nor was more deeply marked by Mediterranean culture and history than Europe. Europe’s religions, its languages, its learning, its laws, its sense of history, even its food and agriculture, all derived from Greek, Roman, and—in the Middle Ages—Muslim and Jewish cultures. The essays in this book lay bare the dynamics of cultural confrontation between Europe and the Mediterranean world from medieval to modern times. One momentous result of this engagement was the creation of vernacular languages and the diverse body of literature, history, and art arising from them. The achievements of the arts reveal—to borrow a geological metaphor—the grinding tectonic pates of Mediterranean cultures and languages butting up against pre-existing European strata.

Stephen G. Nichols is James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Medieval Academy of America, his Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography received the MLA’s Lowell Prize. He holds an honorary Docteur es Lettres from the University of Geneva and is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. He received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2008 and 2015. He’s published 25 books, most recently From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age.

Joachim Kupper is Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Literatures at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany. He has published literary, historiographical, and philosophical texts from Homer to the twentieth century. He won the Heinz-Meyer Leibnitz prize as well as the Leibniz prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is currently working on a network theory of cultural dynamics (European Research Council Advanced Grant). He is a corresponding member of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences/Leopoldina as well as of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Andreas Kablitz is Professor of Romance Philology and Chair of the Romanisches Seminar of the Philosophische Fakultat of the Universitat zu Koln. He is also the director of the Petrarca-Institute, member of the editorial board of the Romanistisches Jahrbuch and of the academic committee of the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung. In 1997 he was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 2007 he was to the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). In 2010 the President of the Italian Republic named him Commendatore of the Ordine della Stella della Solidarieta Italiana. Although his recent research interest focuses on Dante, his publications cover a wide range of topics from French, Italian and English literature, particularly, Petrarch, Tasso, and other Italian and French Renaissance authors as well as Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, and Oscar Wilde. He has also written on Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein.