5 – 6 March 2009
THE COSMOGRAPHY OF PARADISE
The Other World from Ancient Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe
This conference will examine the theme of Paradise from various comparative perspectives, focussing especially on how in different ages and traditions, but especially from the ancient Near East to the European Middle Ages, theories about the structure of the physical cosmos have shaped ideas about the nature of “the other world”.
The notion of Paradise has received a fair amount of scholarly attention over the past few decades, but the prevailing tendency has been to study the notion within a specific ancient or medieval tradition and with respect to just one particular theme in the period. Those who seek a broader or more comparative approach, by contrast, will certainly find fairly general surveys of the idea, but these are usually centred on the Christian tradition and include little more than preliminary references to Antiquity (such as McDannell, Lang, Heaven: A History, 1988; Delumeau, Une histoire du paradis, 1992; Bernheim, Stavridès, Paradis, Paradis; Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, 1997 etc). More recently, however, comparative studies of the concept of Paradise have begun to appear: for example, Paradise Interpreted, ed. Luttikhuizen et al., 1999, which discusses the reception of the biblical accounts in early Jewish writings, early Christian apocryphal and Gnostic literature, and early and medieval mainstream Christianity; and recent scholarly investigations have also been undertaken on the transmission of geographical and cosmographical ideas in Late Antiquity (such as Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana: Les Mutations des savoirs, 2001). Against this background, the aim of this conference is to investigate further the emergence and development of the notion of Paradise from the ancient Near East to the European Middle Ages by focussing on how the relationship between Paradise and the physical universe has been understood in various traditions: Sumerian, ancient Iranian, Archaic Greek, Orphic, Egyptian, Roman, early Christian, Gnostic, Buddhist, Byzantine, Islamic, Scandinavian, Irish and Latin Western. This approach has not yet been attempted, but seems to be essential for elucidating further the notion of Paradise, defined as a perfect state beyond time and space, in so far as the historical formation of such an idea relied heavily upon a variety of temporally and culturally conditioned concepts of the physical cosmos as a finite and imperfect realm. The conference’s emphasis on the cosmographical context of the history of the idea of Paradise in the ancient Near Eastern and European traditions is intended to bring as much specialist knowledge as possible to bear on the following questions: Where is Paradise? How is it reached? How is it known about? To what extent do visions of Paradise reflect the features this world? Are different perspectives on Paradise in ancient and medieval thought independent or inter-related? The conference will not only provide an occasion for continuing the dialogue which began in August 2007 at a colloquium in Bergen on the topic of Hell (which included papers by many of the proposed speakers here), but it will also bring together a wider group of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds who can enhance this collaborative and comparative investigation of the relationship between ideas of Paradise and cosmography in history. The conference is expected to attract a substantial number of students, researchers and scholars from a variety of disciplines, not least because the topic is of enduring interest.
Speakers will include : Jens Braarvig, Corin Braga, Jan N. Bremmer, Veronica Della Dora, Mark Geller, Anders Hultgård, Dimitris Kyrtatas, Antonio Panaino, Nanno Marinatos, Michael Paschalis, Emilie Savage-Smith, Danuta Shanzer, Rudolf Simek, Einar Thomassen, Nicolas Wyatt.
Organised by Alessandro Scafi (Warburg Institute) with the cooperation of Mark Geller (UCL). For further information please contact Alessandro Scafi (e-mail: Alessandro.Scafi@sas.ac.uk).
sono commosso: you made my day
I am an artist and art historian whose work maps the boundaries of paradise, allegorical maps, femininity (the “carte de tendre”) and tropicality by means of original and “over-map” drawings of Portobelo, Panama. I am very interested in how images of Paradise can be “found” in specific places by means of drawing them from memory, as well as creating drawings based on colonial maps. Portobelo, a Spanish colony on the Carrera de Indias, became a site for fantastic mapping (late 16th to late 18th centuries) wherein the bay and surrounding land morphed into fantastic crustacean shapes, and the forts built to protect them became embodied–even flayed–creatures. There is a mystery and terror to mapped Portobelo, one my work (drawings, texts, commentary) seeks to transcribe and intertwine–not to bound, but to unleash.
I would love to take part in a future symposium or conference you lead.
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