Seminars

In a letter dated December 13, 1907, the Philadelphia based physician Dr. S.A. Sterrett Metheny (1869-1921) provided information on an Arabic manuscript he was intending to sell to Joseph Rosengarten (1835-1921), a patron of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Metheny reported that he had acquired the manuscript in Syria from the Presbyterian missionary M.J. Easson (1841-1907) in the mountains around Latakia (Lādhiqīya), Syria. Easson had purchased the manuscript for thirty dollars from a Turkish soldier. He had told Easson that twenty years prior “he had captured the manuscript in the house of a sheik, during a punitive expedition to the Ansyri mountains which lie to the east of Latakia.” Metheny’s letter was addressed to Morris Jastrow (1861-1921), professor of Semitic languages and librarian of the University of Pennsylvania, and the physician questioned Jastrow’s judgment that the manuscript was not of great importance. “I rather am inclined to think the Ansyri MSS are much rarer and harder to obtain than you […] think. I tried repeatedly to get them when I was out among them, and I do not know that my father ever saw any but Mr. Easson’s, and he labored as a missionary to them for thirty three years.” Over a century later, it is now clear that Jastrow was mistaken and the physician’s assessment quite correct. The text in question is Manhaj al-ʿilm wa’l-bayān wa-nuzhat al-samʿ wa’l-ʿiyān (“The path of knowledge and clarification and the bliss of hearing and witnessing”), a doctrinal treatise ascribed to the Nusayri sage Muḥammad b. ʿAlī ʿIṣmat al-Dawla (d. c.1050). Modern Nusayri bio-bibliographers in Syria have written that the work is lost, and it is not mentioned in recent scholarly treatments of Nusayri doctrine and ritual. It is likely that, at present, Easson’s manuscript (UPenn Oversize Ms. Codex 43; http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscodex43.html) is the Manhaj‘s only extant copy; it is now available in a critical edition by David Hollenberg and Mushegh Asatryan (The Nusayri Path of Knowledge, Leiden 2024). This paper will consider the codicological and paratextual evidence pertaining to Ms. Codex 43. There is strong evidence that Ms. Codex 43 was produced as a group effort by a community facing difficult circumstances in the village of Makhus in Latakia in the middle of the nineteenth century. This presentation demonstrates how evidence within a manuscript can provide social-historical evidence for the period of its assembly and first readers.

This talk examines the history of a once-popular procession in which the severed arm of Vyāsa—the storied author of the Mahābhārata—was paraded through villages and cities throughout southern India. As a sacred figure for some, Vyāsa’s desecration provoked ire and occasional violence until 1945, when the Bombay High Court outlawed the practice. The talk focuses on three turning points. The first is an early modern Sanskrit poem titled Praising Vyāsa, Condemning the Apostates (Pāṣaṇḍakhaṇḍanavyāsastotra) written by Vādirāja Tīrtha (c.1550–1610), a popular intellectual, poet, and the first known writer to weigh in on the question of Vyāsa’s arm. The second is a genealogy of analogues of divine dismemberment in the Mahābhārata, Purāṇas, and Śaiva didactic writings. And the third is the circuitous course that Vyāsa’s arm cut through courts in British India. Collectively, these turning points provide not only a genealogy of a religious controversy; they also remind us that figures like Vyāsa belong not to epic antiquity, but to a present in which gods and epic heroes are refigured (or disfigured) as points of political struggle.

This talk looks at the political importance of poetic production by kings in the Islamic east in the late medieval period by considering what kings aimed to accomplish through the production of their own divans. Focusing on the Turkic poetry of Burhan al-Din of Sivas (d. 1398), a Sufi and qadi who ruled eastern Anatolia for nearly 18 years, it contextualizes his divan in the convergence of Sufism and political power that marked the post-Mongol Islamic east. This talk will end by looking at how the divans of other kings, chief among them Isma'il I (d. 1524) of the Safavids, responded to and abrogated the poetic choices of Burhan al-Din.

Anyone arriving to Oxford by train will pass through Frideswide Square. Visitors will quickly learn that Frideswide was an early English princess and abbess who became the patron saint of the city and university in the later Middle Ages. They are less likely to learn how this woman became a figurehead uniting Oxford’s town and exclusively male gown. The answer lies in a series of twelfth-century mishaps: a mismanaged foundation of a religious community, a Sicilian book-hunting expedition gone wrong, and an assassination. These seemingly unrelated threads come together in the journeys of a writer and regular canon, Robert of Cricklade, and his efforts to recreate a pilgrimage cult to an early English saint at St Frideswide’s Priory, an Augustinian community founded around 1120 out of the remnants of earlier foundations.

The topic of religious ecstasy has been largely suppressed in the academic study of religion, for the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. The search for ecstatic experience in modern society has migrated into such areas as war, politics, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, psychedelics, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. The loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. Writing in the fields of religious studies, psychology and anthropology must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Writers need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.