- Friday, October 20, 2023
- 3:30 PM–5:00 PM
- Meeter Center Lecture Hall
2023 Midwest Medieval History Conference keynote talk
This plenary session is part of the 2023 Midwest Medieval History Conference, which will take place at Calvin University on October 20-21, 2023. This keynote talk is free and open to the public and the Calvin community.
To attend the full conference, there is a $104 registration fee. For more details and to register, please see the conference website.
Thomas Burman (Notre Dame University):
"Leaving the Mediterranean: Ramon Martí and the Peoples of Many Books"
The thirteenth-century Dominican friar, Ramon Martí, was the most learned scholar of Islam and Judaism of the Latin Middle Ages. His linguistic virtuosity--he knew Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic all exceptionally well--and his early works were very much a product of his life-long residence on a Mediterranean frontier in eastern Spain where he could learn from Muslim and Jewish teachers, read texts in Semitic languages, and have access to sources no one else in Latin Christendom knew, such Arabo-Coptic refutations of Islam and al-Ghazali's celebrated spiritual autobiography. Yet to understand his work fully, we have to see him as eventually leaving the Mediterranean intellectually as he was drawn more and more into northern European intellectual movements. In particular, this lecture will show that much of Martí's later work is unintelligible without recognizing that he had embraced a key strand in northern-Latin Biblical interpretation--the practice of 'extended-literal' exegesis which stressed that the Christian theological meaning of the Hebrew Bible must be evident in its literal, rather than spiritual, sense.
About the Speaker
Thomas E. Burman is Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 and co-author of The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650.
This talk is part of the 2023 Midwest Medieval History Conference and co-sponsored by the Calvin Historical Studies department. While the rest of the conference requires paid registration, this keynote address is open to the public. The Calvin community - students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends - are all warmly invited to attend.
