Karla Mallette: Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

This talk examines the tangled relations between cosmopolitan languages in the pre-modern Mediterranean. In the elite register, Arabic and Latin functioned as tools that focused thought and aided analysis. Education in the language furnished an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical formation, considered essential to engaging in public life. At the other end of the social scale, a contact language facilitated communication between people who did not share a common tongue: the Mediterranean lingua franca. Today it’s typically remembered as the language of pirates and prisoners. But pilgrims, honest merchants, and even priests and diplomats learned the lingua franca as an instrument to communicate across linguistic boundaries. “Lives of the Great Languages” studies these linguistic instruments in order to think about the strategies that language uses to transcend the boundaries that language creates – and to defamiliarize the national language system of modern Europe, which proposes the use of the mother tongue as cultural medium. 

This lecture was co-sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies at York, the Centre for Medieval Studies at Fordham, the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent, the Síncrisis research group at Santiago de Compostela and the Centre for Medieval Literature (Southern Denmark and York).