This panel is in honor of Kevork Bardakjian for his service to the field of Armenian Studies.
This panel focuses on the "entangled histories" of medieval Armenians and their neighbors in the Mediterranean and Near East. It has become a common assertion that medieval Armenia sat "between two worlds," on the border between the Mediterranean (Byzantine/Christian/Western) and Iranian (Zoroastrian-Muslim/Eastern) cultural spheres. This claim evokes an Armenia balanced on an imagined edge, distinct and separate from their neighbors, and faced with a binary choice in political alliances, cultural affinities, and ethnoreligious identities. Recent studies in Armenian history have complicated such a reading by demonstrating that medieval Armenians were not passive observers of larger political and cultural currents that surrounded them, but in fact participated actively in both cultural spheres by adopting and adapting manifold identities and strategies of negotiation with the "other." The broader integration of Armenians into the fabric of the Mediterranean-Near Eastern worlds, whether through the emigration of Armenians or the immigration of "others," prompted the exploration of what made Armenians similar to or different from their neighbors, in part to inscribe difference that would allow the Armenians to maintain a sense of community even in the face of close interactions with the ethnoreligious "other."
The four papers in this panel tackle this problem from different angles, each relying on a different set of sources. The first paper reads medieval English sources on Armenian princesses to investigate the descriptions of women in ways that cue conversations about identity and ambiguity. The second paper turns to hagiographies that introduce challenges to communal identities through sex and lies, offering intercommunal violence as a way to normalize the relationship between different communities. The third paper explores poetic compositions in Armenian that in their very language reveal the close ties between Armenians and their neighbors even as they promote a unique sense of Armenianness. The final paper interrogates the role of women in framing communal boundaries--the difference between Armenian Christians and Arab Muslims--in the Armenian epic Sasna Crer. The main themes of the panel include the language used to describe non-Armenians, which in turn informs the construction of Armenianness; anxieties about engagements with the ethnoreligious "other"; and gendered readings of communal identity.
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Dr. Alison Marie Vacca
For generations, the Armenian national epic was transmitted by word of mouth, told and retold in different ways that wove a variety of medieval Armenian experiences into a broad narrative of heroism and rebellion. Although it is impossible to pin down chronologically, the epic includes characters that clearly reflect Armenian memories of Abbasid rule. For example, some of the epic unfurls in Baghdad and the caliph’s henchman is Batmana Bugha, the literary incarnation of the Turk Bugha, a general in the caliph al-Mutawakkil’s army. Focused on four generations of Armenian struggles against caliphal rule, this epic fixates on the protection of Armenianness and Christianness in the face of challenges from the outside.
This paper reads the role of the women of Sasna Crer in the context of modern studies about women in the early Islamic and Iranian world. It focuses on three case studies. First, it examines how Covinar Xanum, the proverbially beautiful daughter of the Armenian king, inscribes Armenian Christian identity when she married “the pagan caliph of Baghdad.” Second, it explores the deployment of identity markers in the story of Deghjun Cam, the sorceress daughter of the King of the K‘a?k‘. Finally, it investigates the pivotal role of Ismil Xat‘un, the foster-mother of the Armenian hero Sasunc‘i Dawit‘, in mediating between her Arab son and her Armenian foster son. The stories of these three women demonstrate how gender informed the deliberations about identity, i.e., how women appear at the center of discussions about what makes one own community different from the “other.” In this process, the women of Sasna Crer reprise roles comparable to women in Arabic and Persian popular sources, such as Sirat dhat al-himma and the Shahnameh. This allows us to turn to modern studies of women in popular literature associated predominantly with Muslims in order to formulate questions we should ask of this Armenian source with the recognition that storylines and topoi jumped communal borders of the Abbasid world.
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Dr. Michael Pifer
The 12th century catholicos Nerses Shnorhali faced a crisis: how would he address his flock, seemingly scattered to the ends of the earth, in an accessible and enticing language? And how would he combat popular forms of entertainment, such as the "useless" songs and poetry that circulated in medieval Cilicia, that had no didactic value at a time when he felt Christianity under siege from within and without?
This talk will examine the large body of riddles that Nerses composed in Middle Armenian, which had only recently developed as a literary or poetic language. Nerses’s riddles are a long-neglected masterpiece of world literature, and among the earliest known poems to be composed in “vernacular” Armenian. His collection offers a tantalizing glimpse—and provides a different kind of historical source—for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean world. Besieged by Syrian armies to the east, the Mamluks of Egypt to the south, and the Seljuks of Anatolia to the west, the nobles of Cilicia entered entered into uneasy alliances with both the Byzantines and the Mongols. Nerses’s collection reflects these tensions. His audiences encountered poetic riddles on Franks and Syrians, Jews and Greeks, the prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ, all disguised and “needful of interpretation,” to paraphrase Erich Auerbach.
Although Nerses's poetic compositions in Classical Armenian depict an absolute opposition to the Islamicate world, his riddles, themselves riddled with Arabic and Persian loan words, also tell a more nuanced story. This story would have unfolded at wedding feasts and in wine taverns: boisterous affairs where riddle-reciters playfully teased, corrected, offered hints, and guided their audience to seize upon a correct reading of ambiguous, versified language. This paper will argue that such performances served as popular exercises in hermeneutics, teaching an audience to extract hidden correspondences in the Book of the World. These riddles stand at the threshold of a broader sea-change in Armenian letters: a new poetics, and a covert hermeneutics, that would spread everywhere Armenians lived.
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Dr. Sergio La Porta
In the second half of the twelfth century, in a town near the city of Ganja in the region of Arts‘akh, a young Muslim girl was infatuated with her Christian neighbor, a beautiful youth named Khosrov. Although she tried many times to entice him, he consistently rejected her advances. At the same time, the girl’s half-brother was in love with her, and unable to control himself, he raped her. When her father discovered that she had become pregnant, she, fearing for her life, told him it was Khosrov in the hopes that he would deny his faith and marry her. The father has the boy arrested and brought to court where he is encouraged to convert and marry the girl. Despite many tortures and inducements, he refuses to do so and is executed.
Khosrov’s story was preserved in a contemporary martyrology of the youth whose author reveals the anxiety such intercommunal relations engendered. The trial and subsequent execution of the young man raised tensions between the Muslim and Christian communities of the boy’s village who, according to the text, had previously lived together in relative harmony. Although the author of the martyrology foregrounds Khosrov’s fidelity to Christianity and rejection of any accommodation with Islam, he also relates how the entire community could come together around the martyred boy. He stresses that even Muslims were impressed by the youth’s steadfastness, that both Muslims and Christians came to be healed by the wood of the tree to which he had been tied, and that several Muslims witnessed the presence of a miraculous light above the martyr’s tomb. While these “proofs of sanctity” attested to by the Other are commonplaces in martyrological and hagiographical literature, this paper argues that the anonymous author’s deployment of such stock images which recognize shared religious values and practices was intended to reestablish a framework for intercommunal relations in the tense period following the acrimonious climate of the martyrdom.
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Dr. Tamar M Boyadjian
The critical objective of my paper is to examine textual representations of “eastern” princesses –specifically Armenian princesses –in medieval English literature. My goal is to bring to light how representations of Armenian princesses both reflect upon and aid in further unmasking the interconnected, transcultural world of the medieval Mediterranean world. In this paper, I will look more closely at the eastern female body, and in what ways it manifests itself across the medieval Mediterranean. I will demonstrate how these female bodies seem to function as intermediary spaces that link Europe to the eastern Mediterranean, and provide the textual framework, which allows for interfaith marriage and conversion to take place. The “eastern” female body –particularly Armenian –also stands as a metaphor of religiously ambiguity, an “otherworld,” sometimes a mythical world beyond –where our texts attempt to negotiate their multitude of fears and anxieties. I will extrapolate these points further through textual evidence and analysis by drawing from Chaucer’s poem “Anelida and Arcite”, the romance of Beves of Hampton, the didactic tect The King of Tars, Gerard d’Amiens French poem Méliacin, and the Byzantine romance Digenes Akritas.
My paper also proposes that these texts as those not only belonging to the “English” tradition, but as part of widely circulating narratives that position themselves within the larger context of the Medieval Mediterranean. This type of reading therefore further exposes the extensive intercultural contact, exchange, and acculturation between various ethno-religious groups around the Mediterranean and the in the Levant as a result of trade, pilgrimage, and the crusading battles. For example, we could examine how a popular medieval romance such as Beves of Hamtoun includes the Armenians because of historical interactions and exchanges between the English King Richard I or the Lionheart and the Armenian Prince and later first King of Armenian Cilicia Leo I, or Lewon, and Armenian Catholicos Grigor T?ay. Similarly, we can read the representation of Armenian Prince Méliacin in the 13th century text that bears the same name– a figure who scholars have suggested refers to the Cilician Armenian King Mleh or Melias in Greek –alongside the character of Melemendzis in the Byzantine romance Digenes Akritas.
