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Calendario Informazioni Istituto Staff dell'Istituto Progetti di ricerca Pubblicazioni Biblioteca Fototeca Promotori Bandi |
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Direzioni Biblioteca Fototeca Giovani ricercatori Max Planck Fellow Max Planck Research Groups Minerva Programm Collaborazioni di ricerca Ricerca dei collaboratori |
| Western Sources of the Life of the Prophet Muhammad Michelina Di Cesare Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian theologians confronted Islam with treatises polemical, apologetic, and proselythic in intent. Among the arguments used to demonstrate that the new religion was a pernicious heresy without divine grounds, the life and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad were fundamental because of their polemical potential. In fact, since they were very far from Christian behavioral standards, Muhammad could be presented as the opposite of a holy man chosen by God to proclaim his message; instead he is shown as a self-styled prophet founder of a permissive and perverse law. Moreover, from an eschatological point of view, some aspects of his life could also be interpreted and presented as aligning with those of the Antichrist or his forerunners. The historical figure of Muhammad, worked out and endowed with Christian meanings by theologians, soon became a literary character that crossed the boundaries of doctrinal literature and broke into other literary genres. Thus, there are more than one hundred Medieval Latin writings in which Muhammad is mentioned and each of them gives different information on the Prophet's life and constructs a peculiar image of Muhammad. These texts have so far been analyzed as historical sources according to thematic and/or chronological systems, which are useful from a historical and sociological perspective but inadequate in unraveling the tangle of this voluminous and complex material. Moreover, the problem with this methodological approach is that the sources have been analyzed as if they belong to one homogeneous tradition without considering the peculiar nature of each text and its participation within a broader literary system. The assumption of my research is that, considering these texts not only as historical sources but especially as literary sources, the mechanisms and purposes of the creation of images of the Prophet in the Medieval Latin West can be better reconstructed and understood. In the early stages of my research, I have classified these texts in three groups according to their literary characteristics (literary genre and its tradition, aims, audience,...) and found that each group corresponds to a peculiar paradigmatic image of the Prophet, with its proper mechanisms of construction, meanings, origins, evolution and capacity to create specific iconographic themes. At this stage of my research I am elaborating a Corpus of Latin Lives of Muhammad, in which all Latin texts dealing with the life of Muhammad will be collected, grouped according to the paradigmatic image which they decline and accompanied by a brief introduction with an updated bibliography. This Corpus is meant to constitute a useful instrument for scholars dealing with the numerous and varied images of Muhammad that appeared in Medieval Western culture. |
Collaboratori Michelina Di Cesare |
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