EDWARD SAID, ORIENTALISM AND THE MIDDLE AGES

LUCY K. PICK University of Chicago

The papers which follow were all originally given in a series of sessions to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism at the Thirty-Third International Congress on Medieval Stud- ies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The ses- sions, organized by myself and Richard Raiswell of the University of Toronto, were designed to consider what impact Said's work has had on the practice of Medieval Studies, and how useful it is to speak of Orientalism in connection with the Middle Ages. Our hope was to use these sessions to offer a critique of Said's work by considering how Latin Christian Europe constructed images of the "outside" world during the medieval period and by asking through what intellectual filters did real knowledge about peoples and lands beyond its borders pass. What effect did these images, once constructed, have on later contact? Where was the Orient in the Middle Ages, did its location change, and how did its emerging boundaries help Europe define its notions of itself? If Orientalism is in part an academic enterprise, to what degree have medievalists been orientalists? How have we "orientalized" the past, or certain parts of the past? Said's three-fold definition of Orientalism is well known. Oriental- ism is first and foremost the academic study of a part or parts of the world designated as the Orient and thus distinguished by this desig- nation from the Occident. In its second mode, Orientalism is "a style of thought" which takes this distinction between Orient and Occident to be foundational and normative. The Orient is an imaginary cate- gory of difference against which the West can define itself. Said char- acterizes both these modes of Orientalism as having a quasi-eternal, free-floating character. Orientalism as a style of thought-"imaginary" Orientalism-- for instance, can be found as readily in the works of Aeschylus and Dante as Victor Hugo and Karl Marx, Said suggests. In 266 contrast, the third mode of Orientalism has had a historical and material trajectory. Said argues this mode came into being in the late eighteenth century as a Western tool for controlling the East. In this Orientalism, the academic tools of the scholars and the imaginitive Orientalism of the writers and theorists were wedded to the colonial aspirations of post-Enlightenment Europe. Orientalism served those aspi- rations by contributing a discourse in which the power relations between a dominant West and a suppliant East could be inscribed.' Said's Orientalism is thus articulated in part as a historical phe- nomenon, and so it is instructive to examine the place, or lack of a place of the Middle Ages within each of its three modes. The medieval period was crucial for the development of the first type, academic Orientalism. Said seems to suggest that this Orientalism can theoreti- cally exist whenever and wherever there are academics, but he states that "it is considered to have commenced its formal existence" during the Middle Ages, in the establishment of chairs of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca at the Council of Vienne in 1312.' His source for this information is R.W. Southern's Western Views of lïlam in the Middle Ages, a work which had a determinative impact on Said's conception of medieval Oriental- ism. Nonetheless, Southern himself does not give the decision of the Council of Vienne such an exalted role in the evolution of attitudes towards the Orient. Southern rather calls the founding of these chairs, "the last salute to a dying ideal. 113The failure of these language chairs to take hold marks not a beginning, but the end of a two-century long surge in academic Orientalism characterized by the translation of a large number of different types of texts into Latin from Arabic. Texts trans- lated include the works of Aristotle and his Muslim commentator Averroes, as well as other Islamic and Jewish philosophers; astronomical, medical, and other scientific texts; and works of Muslim theology and history, not least the Qur)an.4 This period also marks an upsurge of Christian

' Edward W. Said, Orientalisrn( New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 2-3. 2 Said, Orientalism49-50. Southern, WesternViews qf Islamin the A1iddleAges (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 72-73. ' '1'he bibliography on the transmissionof science from the Arabic to the Latin schol- arly world is immense. Aftcr the work of Charles Homer Haskins and Lynn Thorndike, see, for example, Marie-Theresed'Alverny's article, with its useful orienting bibliographical note, "'rranslations and Translators," in Renaissanceand Renewalin the 7h>e fithCentury, cd. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,