Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 26 May 2012
Royal Holloway, University of London
11 Bedford Sq
London WC1E 6DP

The Department of History Royal Holloway University of London presents:

Medical Prognosis in the Middle Ages

This is the first gathering of this kind of experts on medieval medical prognosis. While scholarly work has been carried out on certain examples of the wide range of medical prognostics extant from the Middle Ages, there has to date been no gathering of experts in the field, nor any focused collection of papers devoted to this topic.

Medical prognostics ranged from high-end, learned methods, such as the Hippocratic-Galenic ‘Signs of Death’, astrological predictions, uroscopy and sphygmology (pulse-reading), to ‘occult’ practices, such as divination (the interpretation of signs) and ritual magic, through to ‘popular’ experiments, such as the practice of throwing a piece of lard at a dog and working out the fate of the patient depending on the dog’s reaction. Therefore, prognosis was far from the territory of the educated physician alone. It was carried out by people from a broad range of social backgrounds.

As well as being experts in the field, the speakers chosen for the day work on a broad range of topics and all are expert in the relevant manuscripts. The keynote speaker, Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute, has worked on a vast array of Latin, Greek and Arabic prognostic devices, most notably astrology and divination; Linda Erhsam Voigts of the University of Missouri is an expert in Middle English scientific texts and will present on Bernard de Gordon’s De prognosticatione; Peter Jones of Trinity College, Cambridge will give a paper on fifteenth-century practitioners’ use of prognostics; Tess Tavormina, Professor of English at Michigan State University, who has published widely on medicine in medieval English literature, will present on the prognostic content of Middle English uroscopies;  Sandor Chardonnens, who has worked on Anglo-Saxon prognostics, will turn his attention to the use of late medieval English astrological manuscripts; and Luke Demaitre of the University of Virginia, who has researched many aspects of medieval medicine, including learned prognosis, will present on Bernard de Gordon’s translation of a geomantic treatise.

As well as these eminent speakers, Sophie Page and Bill MacLehose, both of UCL, will chair two of the day’s panels. Sophie works on magic, astrology and natural philosophy, and Bill on medieval medicine. Their contribution to the day will be invaluable.

The two organisers will also be involved in presenting on the day – Jo Edge will give a paper on her PhD research into The Sphere of Life and Death in late medieval England, and Peregrine Horden will offer closing remarks

Programme:

10.00         Welcome and registration

10.30    Keynote address:

Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute) – Medical and Astrological Prognosis in Abu Ma’shar

11.15        Tea and coffee

11.30    Panel 1: Astrology

László Sándor Chardonnens (Radboud University Nijmegen) – The Sygne of Man with Pottes’ and other Zodiacal Names in the Vernacular in Medieval English Medicine

Glen M. Cooper (Brigham Young University) – The Possibility of a Scientific Medical Prognosis: Medicine and Astrology in Four Medieval Thinkers

12.30        Lunch

1.30    Panel 2: Uroscopy

Laurence Moulinier-Brogi (University Lumière Lyon 2) – William the Englishman’s De urina non visa and its fortune

Tess Tavormina (Michigan State University) – Prognosis v. Diagnosis in Middle English Uroscopic Texts

2.30    Panel 3: Divination

Jo Edge (RHUL) – The medical context of the Sphere of Life and Death in late medieval England

Luke Demaitre (University of Virginia)  – Archanum de reductione geomancie ad orbem: Another Side of Bernard de Gordon?

3.30    Tea and coffee

3.45    Panel 4: Prognosis and the English Medical Practitioner

Linda Voigts (University of Missouri-Kansas City) – Bernard of Gordon’s schort & profitable tretis vpon Þe pronostikis: A useful survey of ways to predict the outcome of illness

Peter Murray Jones (King’s College Cambridge) – Practitioners and Prognosis in the Later Middle Ages

4.45    Round table

5.30    Drinks reception

Event date: 6 March 2012             
Windsor Auditorium,
Royal Holloway, Egham

Royal Holloway Department of History

Hayes Robinson Lecture

Professor Catherine Hall (UCL):  Displaced histories: memories of the slave trade and slavery

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Introduction by Professor Paul Layzell (Principal, Royal Holloway) .

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Vote of Thanks by Dr Sarah Ansari (Head of Department, History, Royal Holloway)

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Hayes Robinson Lecture

Each year in March a distinguished international historian is invited to give the Hayes Robinson lecture, in celebration of History at Royal Holloway. The lecture series was re-launched in 1992/3, under a benefaction from the estate of Margaret Hayes Robinson. She was a congenial and inclusive Head of Royal Holloway’s History Department (1899-1911) in the days when higher education for women was still being pioneered; and it is appropriate that, one hundred years later, her legacy is being used to bring people together to enjoy the latest historical research, presented in accessible style.

In 1996, it was decided that the success of the lectures merited publication, and Natalie Zemon Davis launched the pamphlet series with a characteristically zestful study of impostors. As Prof. Penelope Corfield, former Hayes Robinson organiser, has commented: ‘The series is intellectually diverse, lively, and wide-ranging – in a true reflection of the interests of Royal Holloway’s History Department. We are delighted that the entire published series are now available

Event Date 28 February 2012
Windsor Auditorium
Royal Holloway University of London

Inaugural Lecture

Professor Jonathan Phillips (Department Of History) – Saladin: Life and Legend – From the Medieval Age to the 21st Century

This lecture will review Saladin’s career and look at how his reputation was formed and preserved over the centuries, considering the influences of his legacy in both the Islamic world and the West.

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Event Date: 21 February 2012


McCrea 219 Royal Holloway
University of London

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research seminars 2011/2012

Professor Rafe Blaufarb (Florida State) - Pirates in the Carribean

Professor Blaufarb studied at Amherst College, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1996.  He is the author of The French Army, 1750-1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester, 2002), and Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Refugees and Exiles on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 (Alabama, 2005).  He has published articles in the American Historical Review, Annales, H.S.S., French Historical Studies, French History Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, and Annales historiques de la Révolution Française.  He has received fellowships and research grants from the NEH, Mellon Foundation, Camargo Foundation, as well as a Bourse Châteaubriand.

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Event Date: 17 January 2012


McCrea 219 Royal Holloway
University of London

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research seminars 2011/2012

Professor David Abulafia (Cambridge) in conversation with Professor Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway) and Professor David Cesarani (Royal Holloway) about his acclaimed new book The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean

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Event Date: 22 November 2011  - 17:30


McCrea 219 Royal Holloway
University of London

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research seminars 2011/2012

Gilbert Ashcar  (SOAS)
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

Dr Gilbert Ashcar, whose paper will discuss issues raised in his 2010 book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (described by critics as ‘a bold attempt to avoid partisanship’).

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Event Date: 4 October 2011
McCrea 219 17:30
Royal Holloway University of London

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research seminars 2011/2012

Dr Nicholas Draper (UCL)
Compensation for slave-owners: individual, state and nation in British Emancipation

The paper will discuss the relevance or otherwise of the historic process of compensating slave-owners to current debates about reparations and restitution. Based on a major ESRC-funded project, it touches on numerous issues – not least of which is the role of the historian in public debate and public policy.

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Event Date: 9-10 September  2011
Royal Holloway, University of London

Contesting Shi‘ism: Isna ‘Ashari and Isma‘ili Shi‘ism in modern South Asia

Shi‘a Muslims constitute a significant, though indeterminate (perhaps c. 15-20%) minority within South Asian Islam, making South Asia one of the world’s most

significant centres of Shi‘a population. Moreover, the historical associations of Shi‘ism in many parts of South Asia with historic ruling dynasties and/or wider Indo-Persian cultural traditions mean that Shi‘ism has had social, cultural, political and intellectual influences in South Asia out of all proportion to the enumeration of the religion’s formal adherents. Nevertheless, for too long scholarly attention has tended to focus on Shi‘ism in states such as Iran or Iraq, casting South Asia to the peripheries of the Shi‘a world.

This conference aims to address this gap in our understanding by focusing on various aspects of Shi‘a Islam in modern South Asia, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. It will

illustrate the relevance of Shi‘a Islam to understanding South Asian Islam’s engagements

with modernity, reform, rationality and notions of the individual self. In doing so, it will contribute to current academic debates on the diversity and dynamism of religious traditions within South Asian Islam, while adding considerably to our understanding of Shi‘ism as a world religion, with significant and autonomous manifestations in various global regions, rather than one primarily directed from perceived ‘heartlands’ in cities such as Najaf or Qom.

The panellists, to be drawn from diverse academic disciplines, will analyze in various ways the dynamics of religious, social and political change in Shi‘a societies in modern South Asia, and their contributions to debates on identity formation within Islam. Speakers are invited to consider ideas of Shi‘a influence on or interaction with Indo-Islamic cultures and societies more widely, or to assess contestations within or between Shi‘a communities themselves.

For the colonial period, for instance, participants are invited to consider the responses of the Shi‘a to the encounter with colonial rule. One may consider, for instance, the various aspects of religious change occurring in the period, such as the expansion of Shi‘a madrasa education, growth of a culture of theological polemics and the historical trajectories of particular Shi‘a ritual and cultural practices, for instance matam (self-flagellation), and majlis-i-‘aza (sermon-gatherings for the remembrance of the Imams). Others may consider social change among the Shi‘a ashraf (nobility) or development of new Shi‘a communitarian identities, each of which were in some sense facilitated by encounters with the new technologies and knowledge systems embedded in the experience of colonialism.

Post-independence, papers may additionally focus on the strategic adjustments of Shi‘a clerics and secular elites to ensuring the preservation of their religious rights (and rites) in the overwhelmingly Sunni state of Pakistan and ‘Hindu’ India. Shi‘a concerns and political campaigns, regarding such issues as permissions to take out ta‘ziya processions during Muharram, the applicability of fiqh-i-Ja‘fariya as a separate code of Shi‘a personal laws, and a separate curriculum for religious studies in public schools, are all themes that can be considered as a basis for the understanding of Shi‘a responses to state management of religion or, in some cases, the perceived Islamization of the state.

A particular aim of the conference will be to combine analyses of the Isna ‘Ashari Shi‘a and those of the Isma‘ili Shi‘a. These two communities, each influential in their own right in parts of the subcontinent, have always been discussed in isolation from each other in scholarship; this conference thus opens the possibilities for a meaningful comparison of their experiences as religious confessions and minority communities. Equally, the conference welcomes reflection on the relationships of the South Asian Shi‘a with those in the wider world: for instance, ideas of clerical internationalism tying the Isna ‘Ashari Shi‘a of north India, Hyderabad or Karachi to Iraq or Iran, or the links between the Isma‘ili Shi‘a of South Asia and their co-religionists in East Africa and elsewhere.

With themes of the ‘Iranianization’ of global Shi‘ism and the growth of Shi‘a-Sunni sectarianism at the forefront of contemporary academic and media discussion, this conference will allow the opportunity for meaningful analysis of transitions and contestations internal to Shi‘a communities. It will permit a greater recognition of the historical influence of Shi‘ism within South Asian Islamic cultures and societies more broadly, and will evoke a vision of modern South Asian Shi‘ism as existing at the centre, rather than the margins, of the wider Shi‘a world.

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FRIDAY 9TH SEPTEMBER

Introduction by Justin Jones .

Keynote Address: 

Francis Robinson
Reflections on the Shi‘a in South Asia and the wider Muslim World.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Session I

Michel Boivin
The Isna ‘Ashari-Isma‘ili divide among the Khojas around 1910: exploring forgotten judicial sources from Karachi.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Ian Williams
Shared and disputed symbols within Twelver Shi‘ite and Ahl-i-Sunnat traditions of Islam: an examination of theological constructions and devotional practices among leaders and adherents from nineteenth century South Asia to the contemporary U.K.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Tahir Kamran
Sufi shrines, electoral politics and sectarian violence in Punjab: a case study of the dargah of Siyal Sharif.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Session II

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Ludovic Gandelot
Isma‘ili Aga Khani religious and social identities, as seen through Sultan Muhammad Shah’s firmans at the beginning of the twentieth century.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Soumen Mukherjee
Of ‘religious and social welfare’ and ‘progress of the community’: religious inspiration, leadership and idioms of welfarism among Shi‘a Imami Isma‘ilis in twentieth century South Asia and East Africa.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Bashir Damji
The Khoja Isna ‘Ashari communities of East Africa: from newcomers to flag-bearers.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Session III

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Sajjad Rizvi
Establishing the principles of the faith for a new Shi‘ite polity: the theology of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Justin Jones
Khandan-i-Ijtihad: authority and transition in a family of Shi‘a ‘ulama in Lucknow, c.1850-1950.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Ali Khan
Local nodes of a trans-national network: a case study of a Shi‘a family in Awadh, 1900-1950.
AUDIO NOT AVAILABLE

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Session IV

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Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
Third-wave Shi‘ism: Sayyid Arif Husayn al-Husayni and the Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Hasan Ali Khan
The role of the Auqaf Department in redefining Sufi and Shi‘a built heritage in Pakistan.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Saleem Khan
The Shi‘a dominance of the legal profession in British India: a study of the lawyerpoliticians of Bihar.
[AUDIO HERE]

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images from the conference:

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Event Date: 8 March 2011 17:30
McCrea 219

Royal Holloway Department of History

Dr Paul Quigley (University of Edinburgh) – The American Civil War and the International Boundaries of Citizenship

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Event Date: 22 February 2011 17:30
McCrea 201

Royal Holloway Department of History

Professor Vivian Nutton (University College London) – Galen, from Byzantium to Basle

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