Viator

Insularity, I posit, is an unfortunately under-examined term in Old English studies. Scholars trained in Western academic traditions often evoke the term in reference to the islands of the North Atlantic to mark the ways in which veins of Christianity, and subsequently material and literary culture, developed differently in the islands than they did on the European continent. Despite the frequent evocation of insularity, there is limited scholarship that takes seriously the colonial implications of what it means to be an island. In “No Island is an Island,” Vicente Diaz (Pacific Islander) claims that “[i]slands and ‘Islanders’ are, in a fundamentally disturbing way, products of continental and imperialist thinking” (102). The North Atlantic, whether medieval or modern, does not, however, suffer from these constructions in the same way that places like Micronesia and other Pacific Island nations do. The North Atlantic, indeed, is a colonizing force that prescribes “islandness” to these other islands, while claiming a sense of insular exceptionalism for itself.

In this essay I present an analysis of traditions about Noah’s ark local to the region of Laghman (in present-day Afghanistan). Though we often imagine Afghanistan as a landlocked space, local history tells a different tale. By the sixteenth century CE, the mountains of Laghman were seen to have been the landing site for Noah’s ark: the sole earthly refuge in a drowned world, temporarily transmuted into an island by a heaven-sent flood. Following examples of Islamic textual traditions regarding the ark’s landing generally, I explore how its emplacement in Laghman during the reign of Zahiruddin Babur (d. 1530) challenged prior Persian portrayals of Laghman as a non-Muslim frontier where royal violence could be sanctioned and celebrated. I then present later narratives of the ark’s landing—recorded in the British imperial Gazetteer—that show us how the ark’s landing was further used to subvert royalist modes of thinking (and campaigning) by accenting the primordiality of Islam in Laghman.

Poetry contests known as the puys took place in northern French towns during the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Many of these contests, characterized by separate competitions according to poetic genre (ballade, rondeau, epigram, etc.), were devoted specifically to the theme of Marian praise. The procedure most frequently observed is to describe and explain a mysterious phenomenon in nature as a miracle of Mary’s grace. Two epigrams submitted to the puys in Normandy (Caen and Rouen) during the 1570s, in the Latin epigram category, describe in this way the rising of floodwaters, and their miraculous ceasing, forming “islands” protected through Mary’s benevolence. These two epigrams, by Jean Rouxel and Jacques de Cahaignes, Caen humanists and regular competitors in the annual contests, reflect a regional preoccupation with seasonal flooding. At the same time, they also allow the learned authors to demonstrate the profundity of their Latin culture both ancient and modern.

This study examines al-Ḥarīrī’s “Maqāma of Oman,” set on an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean. Its point of departure is the tension between al-Ḥarīrī’s Arabic monolingualism in the maqāmāt and his own representation of the island as a foreign, wonderous, and marvelous space marked by radical forms of alterity. The study analyzes al-Ḥarīrī’s linguistic choices to show how in al-Ḥarīrī’s mind, the unnamed island stands at the frontiers of geographical and human knowledge. As such, a sense of cartographic disorientation and temporal incognizance permeates the text, thus challenging the maqāma’s main characters’ ways of knowing. The study concludes with a structural unpacking of the maqāma’s climax to argue that al-Ḥarīrī’s creation of extralinguistic, marvelous stratagems in the story is ontologically appropriate to the maqāma’s distinct setting.

This article makes a case for the salience of premodern travelogues and ethnographic treatises for analyzing racializing discourses in premodern literature. The Alexander Romance tradition, one of the most widely circulated literary traditions in the medieval period, can arguably be read as being a part of the genre of travelogues or ethnographic treatises. The various renditions of the Romance recreate the narratives of Alexander’s journeys through distant lands in ways that racialize various groups through stereotyping descriptions. The article presents an analysis of such motifs in the episode of Alexander’s enforced enclosure of the nations of Gog and Magog as it appears in the Ethiopic version of the Alexander Romance.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English travel writing and related literary forms increasingly represented island space as insular: that is, as a self-contained and isolated form catalyzed by the myriad meanings islands bore for conceptualizations of the self and the world in early modernity. This essay works to demonstrate the productive tensions of insularity and connectivity beyond merely indexing the centrality of islands in early modern English thought. It explores the transinsular shape of literary and nonliterary writing concerned with how one comes to acquire knowledge in and about the world. I consider how Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), a report of his failed search for El Dorado in Guiana, figures the island of Trinidad as a narrative and rhetorical lens through which to effectively represent Guiana and meditate on the terms of relationality itself. I chart how a transinsular metapoetics in Raleigh, which is to say a self-reflexive use of tensions between insularity and connectivity, extends into Francis Bacon’s ideation of scientific and imaginative possibilities in his incomplete utopian fiction, The New Atlantis (1627). This analysis does not look to such productive fragmentation merely to index the centrality of islands, but to chart among the shapes of difference in early modern English island fiction a kind of transinsularity.

This essay considers the close association of whales and islands in the premodern imagination. It focuses on the literary-historical depiction of the whale-island, or the whale that is mistaken for an island, showing how this improbable but repeated pattern of misperception supports an implicit theorization of islandhood, both by scale and by movement. It further explores how the whale-island, in its crossing of ontological categories, lends itself to allegorical figuration and changes in narrative function as it moves across time and across texts.

The poetry of Juan Latino, a self-proclaimed Ethiopian humanist from sixteenth-century Granada, has recently been the object of renewed scholarly attention. The issue of Latino’s birthplace is fraught within the scholarly conversation. Although he repeatedly claims an Ethiopian origin for himself across his work, these claims are at odds with extant early sources. However, focus on whether he was born in Ethiopia or not has distracted from the discursive power with which Latino imbues the figure of Ethiopia in his verses. This study revisits references to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians in Latino’s first published volume of poetry. Through the figure of Ethiopia, Latino articulates a textual island of sorts, one whose time and geography are secondary to its functional value as an ideological refuge. Latino’s Ethiopia serves as a source for discourses capable of unsettling the overrepresentation of European Man as the Human. By appealing to Ethiopia and its inhabitants, Latino promotes Blackness as dignity, and centers it as the foundation of a different, but equally legitimate, subjectivity.

This article explores the coastal exile journeys of Cervantes’s Morisco pirates in his play Baños de Argel (1589) and Don Quixote part 2 (1615). Following the final expulsion edict of 1614 that criminalized Islam in Spain, Moriscos flooded the Mediterranean coastal zones, and many Moriscos leveraged an “island alterity” into successful careers as dissembling pirates. As opposed to Don Quixote, whose vestigial chivalry forever binds him to the dusty roads of La Mancha, Cervantes’s pirates demonstrate how passing between identities of ethnicity, religion, and gender is achieved in the liminal spaces of the Mediterranean frontier world. Specifically, this article demonstrates how Morisco characters like Yzuf and Hazén in Baños and Ana Félix in Don Quixote part 2 embody a challenge to Spain’s oppressive campaign of cultural homogeneity through their operations in and around the Iberian-Maghrebi littoral. By legitimizing these Morisco stories in text, Cervantes exposes the fragility of Spanish essentialism within post-Reformation Spain.

It is critical that the imagined space of Henry Neville’s Restoration-era novella, The Isle of Pines, is an island, a space cut off from the mainland where history and culture can unfold in different ways. The island, encountered unintentionally by “civilized” Europeans during a Dutch trading voyage across the Indian Ocean, has a previously unknown population. Rather than a new, long-established nation of islanders, however, the population are the descendants of five castaways from an English shipwreck. Viewed through the lens of the unfamiliar, these islanders adhere to tropes associated with discovery narratives; simultaneously, the islanders carry with them debased versions of Elizabethan culture, offering an alternative history of an English island. Besides the sexual license practiced by these fertile people and their vague memory of English religion, the people grapple with political instability and the unnameable problem of race. The Isle of Pines, then, allows its author to imagine a space for new social formations, even as that space carries with it elements of the old ways.

This article examines the manuscript Trezenzonii De Solstitionis insula magna and the idea of a paradise island, Solistition. We consider its conceptions in the traditions of the early medieval supernatural insularities, and in the cultural context of the Iberian Northwest, the kingdom of Galicia, during eleventh and twelfth centuries. The paper argues that this insularity is not merely theological or literary but an element that, from the supernatural sphere, composes the unseen physical surrounding space for individuals. Developing that argument, we put the source in dialogue with other contemporary productions that originated in the same cultural tradition: the map of the beato of Burgo de Osma, the map painted in the church of San Pedro de Rocas, and the popular medieval poems about San Trezon or Tersón and his liturgy. Further, by applying notions of micro- and macro-space, this research offers a new perspective on supernatural ideas and individual beliefs in the medieval Iberian Northwest.

The present article presents a reassessment of Venetian trade in the long fourteenth century, underscoring the importance of privately owned vessels in Venice. It will also show how the republic of Venice inherited and exploited preexisting networks of islands in the Eastern Mediterranean. Rather than constructing the Adriatic as “prey in the clutches of Venice,” this article will highlight the importance of islands as dots of Mediterranean trade networks, and the agency of merchants, including non-Venetian traders, within this liquid space. Drawing on unpublished commercial sources such as insurance contracts, this contribution underscores how Venetian trade was the result of the conflation of several trade circuits, rather than being dominated just by trade in luxury commodities from the Eastern Mediterranean. This in turn will question the notion of “Venetian trade,” by revealing how ships were “heterotopias” reflecting trans-Mediterranean connectivity.

The geographical discoveries of the early modern period fostered the dissemination of a wide variety of travel books, as well as an evolution of the concept of geography. Daniello Bartoli’s La Geografia trasportata al morale (1664) demonstrates both of these leanings since it narrates a fictional journey through actual locations as it devotes extensive space to the meaning of the earth’s description and human understanding. In Bartoli’s Geography, every place on earth has a lesson to teach the reader. Through an analysis of Bartoli’s text, this essay aims to show how islands are constructed as a moral lesson through the tension between essence and appearance.