Books by S.J. Pearce
Edited Volumes by S.J. Pearce
Journal Articles by S.J. Pearce
Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture, 2024
This article explores the research and ideologies that go into writing contemporary knitting patt... more This article explores the research and ideologies that go into writing contemporary knitting patterns that engage with medieval textual and geometric motifs with the goal of better understanding the intersection of political, religious, and esthetic values in contemporary knitting practices. In particular, the article focuses on versions of and writings about a sock pattern based on Egyptian, Mamluk-era (13th-16th centuries) socks. Further, the article explores the ways in which the authors of the patterns and related essays engage with, speak about, and try to replicate the context from which the originals emerged while also grappling with what to do with God’s name or patterns that resemble it being placed on footwear. The theoretical concepts of medievalism and queer time aid in the explication of how modern meaning is created from medieval knitted garments.
Sunshine, Cucumbers, Mothers, the Dawn, Speed, Bacon, Pears, Walnuts, Mice, Beached Whales, Paper Tigers, Arabic Texts, Romance Words, and the Bottom of the Ninth Inning: Revisiting the Kharja Debate of the 1980s La corónica, 2021
The present article reviews the series of studies on the muwashshaḥāt and
the kharajāt (strophic ... more The present article reviews the series of studies on the muwashshaḥāt and
the kharajāt (strophic poems and their final couplets) that appeared, in conversation with each other, in La corónica during the 1980s. This series of articles was foundational in the study of these poems in the English-speaking world, representing a hashing out of the role of bi- and multilingualism in Andalusi literature. Vituperative as they were path breaking, the articles represent an important turning point in the historiography of medieval Spain.
postmedieval, 2022
Reading The Moor's Last Sigh in light of Salman Rushdie's sources' seeks to shed light on the lit... more Reading The Moor's Last Sigh in light of Salman Rushdie's sources' seeks to shed light on the literary and historical sources that were used by Salman Rushdie in the course of writing about Islamic Spain, or al-Andalus, in his 1995 novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, and to explore the ways in which those sources help to shape the narrative. In addition to transcribing and publishing the archival record of Rushdie's personal bibliography of al-Andalus, the article particularly engages with his sources for the legends of the much-mythologised mercenary soldier Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, also known by the epithet el Cid. By doing so, the present study offers a more expansive, historically-contextualised reading of the titular 'last sigh' gesture that goes beyond its usual situation in the context of the surrender of Granada in 1492; and it also argues for the special centrality of women readers as figures within the novel, a contention that can be amplified through a source-critical reading of the novel and the scholarship and literature that form its textual substrata.
Medieval Encounters, 2020
*Please note that even though the thumbnail is showing gibberish code, if you click "download" th... more *Please note that even though the thumbnail is showing gibberish code, if you click "download" the PDF will save correctly.
Postmedieval 6:2, 2015
Not an abstract, but a brief note: The call for submissions to the 2nd biennial Camille Prize (ht... more Not an abstract, but a brief note: The call for submissions to the 2nd biennial Camille Prize (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/03/announcement-2014-biennial-michael.html) was framed in such a way that I saw it as an opportunity to begin to sketch out some ideas that I was beginning to percolate last summer. That's how I've always conceived of this essay; for a lot of reasons, when I submitted it I genuinely never thought that it would see the light of day. With that said, please read this with the understanding that it is, essentially, pages from my notebooks. Because of the preliminary nature of the work and because it the Camille Prize essay asks for a short piece (4-6,000 words), there is a lot that should be in here that isn't but that will eventually be developed in future work. Ultimately, though, I'm really grateful that the Camille Prize folks and Postmedieval editors saw the forest for the trees (or where the forest will eventually be for the saplings).
La Corónica 43:1, 2014
A man in possession of a strange, esoteric and rare medieval manuscript written in an indeciphera... more A man in possession of a strange, esoteric and rare medieval manuscript written in an indecipherable old language is approached by a literature-loving friend who beseeches him to make the incredible text accessible by translating it and adding a suitable prologue. It was once a widely-read and -regarded text, but now, owing to social, religious and intellectual controversy, most of the copies have been destroyed -burned or sold for rag- but this hardly matters as so very few people would have been able to read it in its original language, anyway. The man gives in and labors away translating – or does he? The manuscript tells a story of books and death; and when you read it, you hardly know where its own contours end and where they begin to infiltrate the simulacrum of life that it refracts and sends up as much as it represents. Who, exactly, are the translator, the narrator, and the friend? Sword and lance, or paper and pen? The literary and the literal bleed.
O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you?
You’re wrong.
Cultural History 3:2 (2014): 148-69
Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and ... more Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the dawn of modernity, a single exemplar is identified as having been written by a woman. Modern scholarship concerning this poem has primarily been interested in it as a unique and curious artifact of a woman writer working in Hebrew. The present article will reconsider that poem in light of documents in the Cairo Genizah that deal, from a documentary perspective, with the same concerns and activities that the poet treats in verse, specifically the ways in which women supported themselves financially in the absence of their husbands. This study will argue that the work of the supposed Andalusi Hebrew poetess reflects economic and social realities faced by women in Muslim Spain and more broadly in the Mediterranean society documented in the Genizah. The exchange of personal effects between the woman depicted in the poem and her husband stands as a literary comparison for records of similar exchanges and calls for both a more historicized reading of Genizah poetry and for studies of this poem that move beyond the question of the poet’s gender.
The present study bears out an early twentieth-century suggestion that the twelfth-century Andalu... more The present study bears out an early twentieth-century suggestion that the twelfth-century Andalusi physician, translator, merchant and lexicographer Judah ibn Tibbon quoted directly from the Iḥyā' 'ulūm al-dīn, the theological magnum opus of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, in the ethical will he wrote to his son Samuel. In addition to demonstrating, through a consideration of lexicographical evidence, that a sentence from that summa was indeed quoted, in Hebrew translation, in the text of the ethical will, the present article will set that quotation into its context as a part of the Tibbonid drive toward literal, word-for-word translation from Arabic into Hebrew. It will further consider the signifijicance of the authorial decision by Judah ibn Tibbon, who fled Granada for Provence following the advent of Almohad rule in Iberia to include, alongside Andalusi sources, direct quotation from al-Ghazālī, a text that formed part of the intellectual underpinning of the Almohad movement.
Book Chapters by S.J. Pearce
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia, 2021
Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 5, 2021
Jews living in the Islamic world during the medieval period had access to a great variety of lang... more Jews living in the Islamic world during the medieval period had access to a great variety of languages and frequently used several, depending upon the social, cultural, religious, or economic context in which they operated at any given time. But as these languages came to be used within Jewish communities, they developed idiosyncrasies in relation to the particular religious culture in which they grew up and came to form variants that were clearly distinguished from the variety used in non-Jewish communities. 1 While medieval Jews living in Islamic lands used standard varieties of their languages outside of the Jewish community, they also used specific Jewish varieties when communicating with their coreligionists. Over the years, scholars have debated whether there are enough reasons to use the term "Jewish languages" to describe the written and spoken variants used by members of Jewish communities. The purely linguistic arguments seem insufficient to some philologists to justify distinguishing different linguistic systems. 2 These objections aside, the prevailing opinion is that from a sociolinguistic perspective, Jews often used a particular form of language ("sociolect," "ethnolect," or "religiolect") in intra-communal contexts. 3
His Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror, 2020
The Extreme Right and the Revision of History, 2020
Since Washington Irving's embassy to Spain (1826Spain ( -1829 and his subsequent publication of s... more Since Washington Irving's embassy to Spain (1826Spain ( -1829 and his subsequent publication of stories and essays collected under the title Tales of the Alhambra, 2 American readers, artists and politicians have imagined and drawn inspiration from the medieval period of Spain's historybefore Spain was Spain, as such. Anglophone 3 fascination has continued through the contemporary period, often standing as a proxy for domestic issues, even in the United States, a country with no medieval national mythology of its own and a fraught contemporary relationship with both Spanish and Arabic, the modern languages that are the heirs to the languages of culture and state in Spain's Middle Ages. A proliferation of popular writing shows the appetite for medieval Spanish culture and history. 4 It also finds its way into political discourse, where it is held up as an aspiration of tolerance on the political left and an Islamic dystopia on the political right. 5 As any other societies of any other time and place, those of the Iberian Peninsula during the European Middle Ages were neither clearly one thing or the other: not a Boschian hellscape, but nor a garden of earthly delights. But as the peoples and places of medieval Spain enter contemporary Anglophone political discourse, the extreme right has seized upon the dystopian side of the coin in order to assail the scientific study of history and promote a presentist, anti-intellectual agenda that uses medieval history to promote its ideals for the modern world.
Conferences by S.J. Pearce
10AM-el taller Reads Together Ana Laguna (Rutgers) discusses her book, Cervantes, the Golden Age,... more 10AM-el taller Reads Together Ana Laguna (Rutgers) discusses her book, Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain (Bloomsbury, 2021), in conversation with Nick Jones (Yale) and Christina Lee (Princeton). Chaired by Jordana Mendelson (NYU). A Password-protected digital copy is available available on our website. 1PM-Graduate Student Research Showcase Open call for graduate student research roundtable with feedback provided by New York-area faculty. Enrollment will be limited to four students on a first-come, first-served basis and preference will be given to New York-based students.
This lecture series is an open, public component of the spring 2021 course, “Pandemic Literatures... more This lecture series is an open, public component of the spring 2021 course, “Pandemic Literatures,” SPAN-UA 461/MEIS-UA 518/COLIT-UA 852-2, which is open to NYU & consortium undergrad and grad students. The syllabus is available here: https://tinyurl.com/spanishflusyllabus. Register at this link for the series: https://tinyurl.com/spanishflulectures or scan the QR code on the poster.
el taller @ kjcc is a new, non-hierarchical intellectual community in the Inter-University Doctor... more el taller @ kjcc is a new, non-hierarchical intellectual community in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium designed to foster humanistic inquiry and collaboration relating to the arts, literatures, cultures, and histories of the Iberian Peninsula with no limits regarding periodization or language choice. el taller is hosted by the KJCC at NYU and will feature virtual and in-person workshops, lectures, and summer programming.
Our first annual Summer Institute program took place this year from July 20-23. Recordings of the roundtable and Q&A sessions are available on our web site: https://wp.nyu.edu/eltaller/video-archive/ Stay tuned for further programming!
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Books by S.J. Pearce
Edited Volumes by S.J. Pearce
Journal Articles by S.J. Pearce
the kharajāt (strophic poems and their final couplets) that appeared, in conversation with each other, in La corónica during the 1980s. This series of articles was foundational in the study of these poems in the English-speaking world, representing a hashing out of the role of bi- and multilingualism in Andalusi literature. Vituperative as they were path breaking, the articles represent an important turning point in the historiography of medieval Spain.
O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you?
You’re wrong.
Book Chapters by S.J. Pearce
Conferences by S.J. Pearce
Our first annual Summer Institute program took place this year from July 20-23. Recordings of the roundtable and Q&A sessions are available on our web site: https://wp.nyu.edu/eltaller/video-archive/ Stay tuned for further programming!
the kharajāt (strophic poems and their final couplets) that appeared, in conversation with each other, in La corónica during the 1980s. This series of articles was foundational in the study of these poems in the English-speaking world, representing a hashing out of the role of bi- and multilingualism in Andalusi literature. Vituperative as they were path breaking, the articles represent an important turning point in the historiography of medieval Spain.
O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you?
You’re wrong.
Our first annual Summer Institute program took place this year from July 20-23. Recordings of the roundtable and Q&A sessions are available on our web site: https://wp.nyu.edu/eltaller/video-archive/ Stay tuned for further programming!
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”