B.A., Reed College; M.A, Ph.D., Duke University
Since completing a book on late medieval alliterative romance, which explored the uses of the past in poems such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Siege of Jerusalem, and The Wars of Alexander, Chris Chism has been working on two new projects. The first, Mortal Friends: The Politics of Friendship in Medieval England, explores the stakes of friendship as it is tested in a range of late medieval texts, from romances, to court-poems, to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to Robin Hood ballads. Friendship exerts social force in late medieval literature and culture by combining heartfelt love with social resonance; it is an intensive emotion with extensive social effects. Its grip is doubly performative: it links together unique individuals in unpredictable and ungovernable ways, and – in its more programmatic resonances of fraternity, brotherhood, and fellowship – it works as a powerful basis for political community.
The second project, Strange Knowledge: Translation and Cultural Transmission in the Arabic and English Middle Ages, mobilizes the skills learned during a 2003-2005 Mellon New Directions grant to learn Arabic and study Islamic culture. Strange Knowledge explores the travails of cultural transmission and translation between Arabic and English writers, the ways that each culture responds – acquisitively, desirously, fearfully, pragmatically – to knowledge derived from culturally alien sources. The emphasis is on Arabic and (nationally) English writers whose texts seek – directly and powerfully – to know the world. Strange Knowledge juxtaposes the great eighth-tenth-century's Abbasid translation movement of Greek, Byzantine, and Pahlavi texts into Arabic with the equally avid post-twelfth-century translation of Arabic texts into Latin and English. This juxtaposition illuminates the complex interdependent processes by which both medieval Islamic and medieval Christian writers come to remake their visions of the world, the astronomical heavens, the secrets of God, and human rationality.
She has also published on the medieval Robin Hood ballads, J. R. R. Tolkien and his medieval sources, European and Arabic versions of the Alexander Romance, and the Arabic travel narratives of Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubayr.
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Medieval Literature
Medieval Drama
Old English
History of the English Language
Theories of History and Historicism
East and West in Medieval Literature
The Cultures of the Middle Ages
Modern Literary Fantasy |
Medieval Literature
Medieval Drama
History of the English Language
Theories of History and Historicism
East and West in Medieval Literature
The Cultures of the Middle Ages |
