Literature Compass (2014): 1–6, 10.1111/lic3.12156
Early Globalities, Global Literatures: Introducing a Special
Issue on the Global Middle Ages
Geraldine Heng1,* and Lynn Ramey2
1
English, University of Texas at Austin
2
Vanderbilt University
Abstract
“Early Globalities, Global Literatures” introduces a selection of global literatures from premodernity
and critically discusses why the study of The Global Middle Ages serves contemporary culture
and society.
…comparative literature has not lived up to [its] beginnings. It’s been a…modest intellectual
enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe…. the literature around us is now
unmistakably a planetary system.
“Conjectures on World Literature,” Franco Moretti 54.
Before Franco Moretti’s 2000 New Left Review article admonished us to turn our attention to
the world literature around us which today has become a planetary system, a planetary system of
literatures had already existed for a millennium and more: literatures whose global themes, global
subjects, global purview, and whose global imaginary were there for all to consider. The most
famous examples are known to everyone: The Thousand and One Nights, whose provocative,
extraordinary plots cut a swathe from the Near East all the way to China, the Decameron, whose
characters tramp all over the European and Islamic Mediterranean, or Mandeville’s Travels, a 14th
century fictitious travelogue that contemplates pyramids in Egypt, a gigantic “idol” in Ceylon,
ancestor worship in Tibet, and the extraordinary sight of long-nailed mandarins in China.
Equally famed are Marco Polo’s and Ibn Battuta’s narratives of world-traversing journeys that
afford descriptions of Africa, the Near East, India, China, and Southeast Asia.
Less well known, except to specialists, are literary texts like Ibn Fadlan’s tenth-century
account of his journey from the Abbasid court at Baghdad to Russia, setting down his thoughts
on the myriad cultures of the Eurasian continent, the unsanitary habits of the Rus, and the
ghostly warriors he sees prancing in the Aurora Borealis’ curtains of light. From further east
comes the report of a Nestorian monk, Rabban Sauma, who in the thirteenth century makes
his way from Beijing to the West, where he politely, diplomatically discusses with the Curia
in Rome differences between eastern and western Christianities, devoutly visits shrines and
relics, and, most remarkably, in 1288 gives communion to the Roman Catholic King of
England, Edward I, at Bordeaux in France, during a mass of the East Syrian rite performed
by this Ongut (or Uighur) monk from the steppes, at the behest of the English king.1
Accounts of eleventh-century Norsemen from Greenland and Iceland who established
settlements on the North American coast are narrated by the Vinland Sagas, which tell of risky
voyages across the Atlantic, tumultuous encounters with Native Americans, and the birth of the
first European child in the Americas, Snorri Karlsefnisson. Extensive archeological excavation at
L’anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where an early eleventh-century Norse settlement
and artifacts were discovered in 1960, lend extra-literary support to the saga memories of
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction: The Global Middle Ages Special Issue
ocean-traversing voyages. But not all early global texts thematize far-ranging voyages.
Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi’s mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar in the fifteenth
century produced a literary narrative thematizing a city, Vijayanagar, a glittering global hub of
its time in India. Indeed, the global cities of premodernity – Aksum, Baghdad, Cairo,
Constantinople, Cordoba, Damascus, Delhi, Hangchow, Jerusalem, Kilwa Kisiwani,
Novgorod, Paris, Tenochtitlan, Timbuktu, Venice, Xi’an – make an appearance in global
narratives of various kinds, in various media.
Global literatures have been living among us for a very long time. If they are from earlier
periods, however, they are rarely known outside the academic enclaves of specialists who
read Syriac, Old Norse, Latin, or other nonmodern languages, and they do not reach a wider
audience of literary critics and scholars. Our Literature Compass Global Circulation Project
special issue on The Global Middle Ages thus attempts to fill in a lacuna in literary scholarship
that we hope, in time, will no longer exist. The long history of literature’s planetary system
needs to begin to be outlined. Some articles in this special issue examine texts in which global
subjects make their way across the world, whether in the cultural imagination, or the
historical record, or both. Other articles consider the global imaginary embedded in a literary
genre or in the particularities of language; yet others trace global themes and ambitions
enunciated in literary texts. All sketch a worldview in literature that extends beyond the
confines of a local or national imaginary.
The existence of global literatures before what we think of as the modern era should not
surprise, since globalism per se is not new to our planet – as those of us whose teaching and
research cut across deep time well know – even if globalization, as such, is arguably a
phenomenon of postmodern, post-Fordist, late capitalism.2 To pay concerted attention to
the cultures, literatures, and phenomena arising from early globalities, Susan Noakes of the
University of Minnesota and Geraldine Heng of the University of Texas in 2007 founded the
Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP) as a collaborative effort of scholars. The special issue
we introduce today represents one of G-MAP’s attempts at attention and concentrates on a
selection of global literatures that are likely to be less familiar to the readers of Literature Compass.
The Global Middle Ages Project’s purview is largely research and pedagogy, but
MappaMundi is a digital initiative that seeks to present the world 500-1500 CE and invite
interactions with multimodal data that open windows onto early globalities. The Scholarly
Community for the Global Middle Ages (SCGMA) is the name of the consortium of people
who oversee and guide these research, pedagogical, and digital initiatives, a consortium that
embraces anyone working in early globalities, and which is now international.
Our study of early globalities was instigated by an extraordinary spring 2004 learning
experiment at the University of Texas, when seven faculty members from different
disciplines and specializations came together to introduce an uncentered world across a mil-
lennium, encompassing points of viewing in Europe and Dar al-Islam, SubSahran/Sudanic
Africa and Maghrebi Africa, India and South Asia, the Eurasian continent, China and East
Asia, in a transhumanities graduate seminar called “Global Interconnections: Imagining the
World 500-1500 CE” (see Heng, “The Global Middle Ages”).
Word of this experiment spread, and a “Global Middle Ages” – transhumanities work that
asks scholars to step outside their particular discipline and specialization to engage with other
humanities scholars, social scientists, computer technologists, musicologists, archeologists,
designers, and others to make sense of an interconnected past – now appears an idea whose
time has arrived. Undergraduate or graduate concentrations on a Global Middle Ages are
gaining ground in the U.S.; in the U.K., Edinburgh offers an advanced art history degree
on the Global Middle Ages. Oxford historians in 2011 convened a year-long series of
workshops on the Global Middle Ages, had a conference to identify research objectives in
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass (2014): 1–6, 10.1111/lic3.12156
Introduction: The Global Middle Ages Special Issue
2012, and have since followed with a “series of workshops…planned for 2013–14.” Oxford’s
Centre for Global History now has a web page announcing the creation of “a UK-based
network of medievalists with interest in the global which has recently gained an AHRC
network grant.”3 In 2012, the University of Illinois convened a symposium on the
“Medieval Globe” and announced their intent to inaugurate a journal of the same name, which
they intend (to quote a conference organizer) as “the journal of record for this emerging field.”
We are keenly aware that responsibility to “this emerging field” requires commitment to
continual critical reflection on its animating terms, frames, methods, and concepts. Use of the
term, “the Middle Ages,” a Eurocentric construct fabricated by Renaissance historiographers
to name an interval of darkness between two eras of glorified empire identified by their
putative cultural supremacy and authenticity – Greco-Roman antiquity and its so-called
Renaissance – itself requires critique of its ideological freight, even if alternate names for
the past ultimately prove impractical.4 For many of us, that troublesome fable, “the Middle
Ages,” can thus only be embraced under erasure as a Eurocentric construct with little
epistemological bearing for the not-Europe cultures and chronologies of the world, and
perhaps with little bearing for Europe itself. If use of problematic concepts must continue,
for intelligibility in academic discourse – in order for us to speak and write at all – critical
reflection on that use should also continue.5
For euromedievalists, the asynchrony of temporalities across the globe importantly upturns
old tyrannies of periodization in the West, including that simple binary of premodern and
modern eras nested within a monolithic model of linear time that is the staple clone of
western academic and public discourse. Time in the West sees modernity as a unique and
singular arrival that ends the long eras of premodernity, instantiating the origin of new,
never-before phenomena: the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the
beginnings of colonization, empire, race, et alia.
Time across the globe, by contrast, produces the recognition that modernity itself is a
repeating transhistorical phenomenon, with a footprint in different vectors of the world moving
at different rates of speed. One example is China: 700 years before Western Europe’s “Industrial
Revolution,” the tonnage of coal burnt annually in eleventh-century Song China for iron and
steel production was already “roughly equivalent to 70% of the total amount of coal used by all
metal workers in Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century” (Hartwell 1967, 122; see
also Hartwell 1962). Mass-market industrial production of ceramics in Fukien/Fujien province
and elsewhere in China for export to the world also occurs centuries before similar commercial
mass production in the West (So; see, especially, chapter 8). China’s modernities-within-
premodernity guide an understanding of the plurality of time – of temporalities that are enfolded
and co-extant within a single historical moment. The example of China helps to make
intelligible to us not only premodern worlds, but also societies today around the globe, which
can seem modern, postmodern, and premodern all at once.
A view of temporalities across the globe thus affords recognition of more than a single
scientific or industrial “revolution” and more than a single geographic locale (“the West”)
as the instantiating matrix. Alternate views of history can emerge: a view of history as
producing overlapping repetitions-with-change, for example, or history as oscillating
between ruptures and re-inscriptions, as phenomena tagged “modern” or “premodern”
recur over la longue durée, each time with difference, each time not identically as before, across
the vectors of the world.
As importantly, premodern China’s past attests to the difficulty of building on scientific and
technological innovations in contexts of repeated territorial invasion and political and social
disruption. China’s example restores an acknowledgement of the role of historical
contingency – randomness and chance – as operative factors in shaping civilizational history.
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Introduction: The Global Middle Ages Special Issue
Study of the global past in deep time can thus position critical responses to the problematics of
the present – decentering tenacious narratives of a unique European genius, essence, climate,
mathematical aptitude, scientific bent, or other environmental, societal, or cognitive matrix
guiding destiny in “the rise of the West” (another tenacious foundational narrative).6
More adventitiously, our announced time-parameters of 500–1500 CE – gathering stories
from a thousand and one years, as one inspired graduate student in 2007 dubbed our efforts –
points to its own self-factitiousness, and the unstable logic of arbitrary and neat temporal
edges. Since a number of our initiatives begin earlier and end later than the millennium an-
nounced as a convenient rubric, the very implausibility of the announced time-parameters
conduces to foregrounding our auto-critique of a Europe-based periodization hedged at
one end by the collapse of the Roman Empire (c. 500 CE), and at the other by the incipience
of the so-called European Renaissance in the West (c. 1500 CE).
If global time usefully troubles and reconfigures the conventional temporalities and peri-
odicities of the West, the geographic span of the global imparts other advantages. Engaged
with points of viewing gathered multilocationally across the planet, projects on early
globalities privilege no academic discipline, no geographic region, or culture – neither con-
tinent, ocean, nor “system” – but conjure with an uncentered planet encompassing a multi-
tude of formations seen as both interdependent and discrete, dynamically transforming
themselves, and offering multiple kinds of worlding in deep time.
The study of globality avoids, thus, objections that zones are favored, like the claim that
the Indian Ocean is sidelined by Mediterranean studies (Grewal 187). The study of early
globalities, moreover, renders what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “provincializing” of Europe
as an always-already: a meta-principle that is activated ab origo by virtue of our focus on mul-
tifarious locales around the planet, in centuries before even the consolidation of “Europe”
itself as a corporate entity.
It needs to be stressed that the study of globalities by no means requires overlooking
the national. For those of us trained in particular national literatures, languages, and
histories, the investigation of globalities yields rewarding glimpses into how the national
and the global interlock, in literature, and in history. For instance, Hispanists can point
to Spain’s persecution and expulsion of Jews and Moriscos – a moment of self-purifica-
tion constitutive of the early Spanish nation – as that moment, also, in which Spain’s
global-colonial ambitions arose and began to spread its umbra across the world. As it
forcibly emptied itself of people it saw as belonging elsewhere in the world, not in
Spain, Spain under the catholic monarchs also made its governance bloom elsewhere
in the world. The spread of Spain’s national boundaries outward, in the form of
Hispanized colonies around the globe, thus affirmed Spanish national and global identi-
ties as mutually constitutive and interlocking. All this, and more, is visible in the Iberian
literature of the period (see, e.g., Fuchs).
Acknowledging the historical overlap of local and global also undercuts the fantasy that
medieval Europe was the opposite of Europe today, a continent that contains global
populations from everywhere. Early globalities bear witness to a medieval Europe that was
already contaminated by the presence of people from everywhere – Jews, Arabs, Turks,
Africans, Mongols, “Gypsies,” steppe peoples, and others – and refuses the fiction that a
singular, homogenous, communally-unified Caucasian ethnoracial population once existed
in Europe. The notion that a “white” Europe existed as a historical inheritance – not as a
concept manufactured by centuries of assiduous identity-construction – is thus exposed as
the fantasy of contemporary European politics and political factions. The study of the global
past in deep time can thus productively speak to the racial politics of the contemporary
European now.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass (2014): 1–6, 10.1111/lic3.12156
Introduction: The Global Middle Ages Special Issue
However, only a fraction of academics in the Scholarly Community on the Global Middle
Ages is made up of literary scholars. Among those of us whose purview is literature, much
work has to be done – to introduce, examine, analyze, and evaluate the many varieties of early
global literature, and to consider the forms of attention apposite to their intensive study. Our
special issue of Literature Compass’ Global Circulation Project is only a beginning: an early ver-
sion, a rough draft, of the work to come. Because much of this work on early global literatures
yet remains in the future, we have included the efforts of newer literary scholars, including
advanced graduate students, who will help to shape the future of literary studies. The scholars
in these pages conjure with a variety of languages – Latin, Malay, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Spanish,
Mongolian, Chinese, Arabic, Franco-Italian, Yiddish; they employ a variety of approaches, and
their work evinces a variety of aims and intentionalities. We commend the variety of these ef-
forts – a variety that includes a range of different scholarly styles and academic cultures – to
your attention, and we hope you will give them generous reading.
Short Biography
Geraldine Heng is Perceval Professor and Associate Professor of English, Comparative
Literature, Women’s Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
She is the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy
(Columbia University Press, 2003, 2004, 2012) and is currently completing The Invention of
Race in the European Middle Ages. Her articles have been published in a variety of journals,
including PMLA, differences, MLN, and Literature Compass. Her most recent LICO articles
were “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 1: Race Studies, Modernity,
and the Middle Ages” and “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 2:
Locations of Medieval Race.” Literature Compass 8.5 (2011). Heng is the co-founder, with
Susan Noakes, of The Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP), the MappaMundi digital
initiatives, and the Scholarly Community on the Global Middle Ages (SCGMA).
Lynn Ramey is Associate Professor of French and Resident Scholar in the Center for
Second Language Studies at Vanderbilt University. As an undergraduate, she studied
engineering and humanities, but when forced to make a choice focused on French for her
PhD studies at Harvard. Her research interests are in cultural conflict and assimilation: as
situated within medieval France, but also found in the popularity of the Middle Ages in
modern visual culture. Her publications include a book, five edited volumes, and numerous
articles, and she is currently working on a pedagogical video game designed to teach players
medieval Anglo-Norman French while accompanying St. Brendan on his fantastic voyage.
Notes
* Correspondence to: English, University of Texas at Austin. E-mail: heng@mail.utexas.edu
1
Sauma’s performance of the East Syrian rite for Edward and the taking of communion by the English king were
extraordinary in the context of thirteenth-century Europe, and in light of the English king’s intolerance for religious
difference. In thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, all non-Latin Christianities were considered heretical, and the
inquisitorial questioning of Sauma by the Roman Curia testifies to both Latin unease and the Nestorian monk’s
diplomatic gifts and courtesy. Edward I of England is remembered for his crusade in the Levant while still a prince;
his crusade ended when Muslims knifed him in an assassination attempt. No lover of religious difference, Edward used
the occasion of Sauma’s mass to pronounce on the unity of Christianity in the West. Two years later, Edward would
expel England’s Jews, making England the first country in the Middle Ages to expel its Jewry.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass (2014): 1–6, 10.1111/lic3.12156
Introduction: The Global Middle Ages Special Issue
2
Dimock adapts the term “deep time” from the physical sciences, in Through Other Continents. See Heng, “Early
Globalities, and Its Questions” for a treatment of “globalism” and “globalization.”
3
The U.K. network is called “Defining the Global Middle Ages” (see “The ‘Global’ Middle Ages: What was ‘Global’ in
the Middle Ages?” http://global.history.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=663). Differences of emphasis include the fact that members of
SCGMA question the concept of a “Middle Ages,” while the U.K. network questions the existence of “the global.”
4
At a 2007 organizational symposium at the University of Minnesota, various attempts were made to rename our collective
project, with other names being tried and considered. For instance, “Global Premodernity” seemed to some to retain atten-
tion too fixedly on modernity as the focal point of an implicitly linear temporality and suggested temporal vagueness. Some
pointed out that “Premodernity” could indicate the Bronze and Iron Age, Biblical time, and Greco-Roman antiquity all the
way through the Renaissance, which is still considered by some in the academy as a premodern era. An inspired
recommendation, by a graduate student, that we call the “Global Middle Ages” the “The 1,001 Years Project,” met with
objections from historians who felt the reference to the Thousand and One Nights added too heavy a coloration of fantasy
to the project. All attempts at naming the past pointed to the inescapability of the conceptually and politically freighted na-
ture of the language we had to use in order to participate in academic discourse. In the end, to be able to speak at all among
ourselves and to others, we agreed to continue the use of conventional terms but also continue to critique and problematize
them. These efforts at alternative naming are also discussed in Heng and Widner.
5
Susan Noakes, who codirects these initiatives on early globalities never refers to “the Middle Ages” or even the
“European Middle Ages” (a term that, even worse, implicitly extends the Eurocentric fictitious naming of time to the rest
of the world), without carefully placing quote marks around “the Middle Ages,” to ironize the term, and draw attention to
how problematic it is. Members of SCGMA are constrained of course by the shared discourse of the academic community,
and by the need to use common vocabulary in order to be understood. Nonetheless, the commitment to critique means
that we foreground the thorny conceptual and vocabulary problems when there are opportunities to do so.
6
For responses to foundational narratives like the “rise of the West,” see e.g. Goldstone, and Hart, “Explanandum.” Hart’s
Linear Algebra puts a dent in theories of a unique European genius for mathematics. China’s disrupted past, and long
history of invasion from the outside, shows the extent to which chance and historical contingency, and not a unique racial
genius or cultural essence, determines whether it is possible to build on the scientific and technological developments
of an “industrial revolution.”
Works Cited
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2000.
Dimock, Wai-Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
Fuchs, Barbara. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Goldstone, Jack A. ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the
Industrial Revolution.’ Journal of World History 13.2 (2002): 323–89.
Grewal, Inderpal. ‘Amitav Ghosh: Cosmopolitanisms, Literature, Transnationalisms.’ The Postcolonial and the Global. Eds.
Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 178–190.
Hart, Roger. The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.
———. ‘The Great Explanandum.’ The American Historical Review 105.2 (2000): 486–493.
Hartwell, Robert. ‘A Cycle of Economic Change in China: Coal and Iron in Northeast China, 750-1350.’ Journal of the
Social and Economic History of the Orient 10 (1967): 102–159.
———. ‘A Revolution in the Chinese Iron and Coal Industries during the Northern Sung, 960-1126 A.D.’ Journal of
Asian Studies 21.2 (1962): 153–62.
Heng, Geraldine. ‘Early Globalities, and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods: An Inquiry into the State of Theory
and Critique.’ Exemplaria, forthcoming.
———.’The Global Middle Ages: An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities, or Imagining the World, 500-1500
CE.’ English Language Notes 47.1 (2009): 205–216.
Heng, Geraldine and Michael Widner. ‘An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities: Envisioning Globalities 500-1500
CE.’ In Humanities and the Digital. Ed. David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson, MIT Press, forthcoming.
Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ New Left Review 1 (2000): 257–294.
So, Billy K. L. Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 947-1368. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2000.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass (2014): 1–6, 10.1111/lic3.12156