Islamic Heritage in Europe
Scientific Coordinators: Elena Paulino, Borja Franco, Antonio Urquízar and Elena Díez Jorge
Venue and Date: University of Granada, Granada (Spain) – January 14-16, 2020
Link to the Training School program
Training School call:
Over the past decades, there has been a growing interest among scholars in analysing how the Islamic heritage in Europe has been perceived, described, preserved, erased, negotiated or transformed in different areas of Europe, from medieval to modern times. However, those debates seldom crossed the borders of regional approaches. The aim of this training school is to discuss those issues from different and complementary perspectives, including art history, but also philosophy, history of science or anthropology, and to question the traditional regional narrative through a comparative examination of Islamic monuments in a wider Mediterranean perspective. It will also include a critical discussion of different scholarly backgrounds across Europe, including (but not limited to) the historiography of the different geo-cultural spaces and their strategies of making of their past. It intends to transcend the historiographical essentialization of Spain as “the place” of the Islamic past in Europe and to include other regions, as the Balkans or Greece. It will discuss how the European imaginary has dealt (and is still dealing) with having an Islamic past and how it has conditioned various historiographical debates regarding where those regions fit in Europe.
Main objectives of the activity: a) To use the discussion about Islamic Heritage in Iberia to bring up a debate with a Pan-European perspective.; b) To compare artistic and social trends between the different territories; c) To develop a student network on Islamic European Heritage; and d) To promote a dialogue between junior and senior scholars.
Panel 1: Islamic architecture in Europe. Chair: Elias Kolovos (Greece). “The world rejoices in a new popular faith: the cult of heritage” (David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, 1998). However, can this be true in the case of the Islamic heritage in Europe? This panel aims to launch a debate about the Islamic heritage in Europe, discussing around the terms “dissonant heritage” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1995), or “negotiated heritage” (Macdonald 2009) or “mnemonic intrusions”. The scope of this panel includes Iberian Peninsula and Italy, but seeks to go beyond them, pointing out attention toward the Balkans or Greece as emblematic areas for European heritage monuments.
Panel 2: Islamic material culture in Europe. Chair: Antonio Urquízar (Spain). This panel intends to foster the methodological exchange among PhD candidates working on topics related to the reception of Islamic material culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. It will discuss the circulation of Islamic objects in Christian Europe, production of Islamic objects in Europe, Islamic objects as trophies, Islamic objects and luxury in the European courts, changes of use in the religious context, hybrid material culture, Christian material culture of Islamic tradition, Islamic material culture and the European idea of Art, representations of Islamic objects in Europe, narratives on Islamic objects in Europe.
Panel 3: The image of Islam in the Visual culture. Chair: Valentina Živković (Serbia). The panel will launch a discussion of two basic ways of showing Islam as otherness in visual arts. One form is common and simple: to analyze the explicit use of symbols of Muslims. The second type refers to the non-explicit display that needs to be interpreted from the point of view of iconology (both concepts were explored in Changing the Enemy, Visualizing the Other: Contacts between Muslims and Christians in the Early Modern Mediterranean Art, ed. G. Capriotti and B. Franco, Il Capitale culturale Supplementi 6, 2017). This shrouded meaning given to pictorial narratives and sacred images was often followed by the formation of mental images in literary and religious narratives. The aim of this panel is to identify to the challenges of researching these topics, as well as to create a methodological framework for this research in a broader background of cultural history.