All Day

The Mediterranean Seminar Winter Workshop 2024, Intermediaries, Middle Grounds, Middle Sea

Royce 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles

As the theater of engagement and integration of communities originating on the shores or from the hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean region served as a dynamic center of interaction and exchange from Antiquity through early modernity. Even as it began to lose political and economic centrality, it has remained a zone of engagement of diverse peoples and cultures into the Modern era. This engagement is both the product and the catalyst of continuous dialectical processes of translation, transculturation, colonization, and syncretism across the gamut of human experience and expression: in art, literature, language, music, religion, media, material...

Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture, Guest Speaker: Ilse Sturkenboom

"On the Introduction of Chinese Decorated Paper to Iran and How it Revolutionized Manuscript Production in the Islamic World" Guest speaker: Ilse Sturkenboom (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) The fifteenth-century introduction of long sheets of brightly colored and gold-embellished paper from Ming China to Iran provided book artists with a range of new possibilities in the production of luxurious and often royally commissioned manuscripts. Colored on both sides and boasting extensive gold decoration in the form of flecks, sprinkles and whole compositions of landscape designs, various plants and flower-and-bird motives, these papers allowed for texts to be written on a completely decorated carrier...