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“Vernacular Encyclopedism in the Mediterranean: The Case of Meir Aldabi’s Sh’vile Emunah”, with Uri Zvi Shachar,  Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

Wednesday, February 26, 12:30 p.m.
Hagstrum Room 201, University Hall

(Kosher lunch will be served – please RSVP by Friday, February 21)

The thirteenth century marks the beginning of the age of encyclopedism. Compendia seeking to encapsulate knowledge on the world in its entirety were penned and copied in large numbers. They employed a unifying and universal vector reflecting impulses that the western Church cultivated. Alongside major works in Latin, however, encyclopedias in local languages began to appear in the second half of the thirteenth century. These vernacular projects, in their turn, voiced the presumption of local identities and languages offering an authoritative claim on culture. Drawing on diverse materials these encyclopedias devised narratives of intellectual entanglement and became interreligious contact zones. It is in this context that this talk will examine a particularly fascinating compendium, entitled The Paths of Faith [Sh’vile Emunha], authored by a Jewish scholar who emigrated from Iberia to Mamluk Jerusalem in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Uri Zvi Shachar teaches in the Department of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is also a member in the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters. The current year, however, he is spending at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He specializes in the History of cultural exchange between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Late Middle Ages. His book, A Pious Belligerence Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. Most recently is essay, entitled Dukus Horant – The Codicology of a Mediterranean Epic, has just appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Speculum. He is currently working on his second monograph, provisionally entitled The Fountain of All Knowledge: A Mediterranean Epistemology of Vernacular French.