 I'm the Assistant Dean for Research and Education here at University Libraries, and I am very pleased to be able to present today's speaker. Before I do that, I would like to thank our Graduate Research Series Committee and Jen Harvey for making this happen in our new environment. Thanks everyone for all of your hard work. Today we are going to hear from Jeffrey McCambridge, who is a fourth-year PhD student in literary history at Ohio University. His dissertation explores the different paradigms in representing and scapegoating Islamic alterity during the literature, theology, and art of the English Renaissance. His academic interests include history, historiography, and the ways in which literature constructs and reconstructs histories and national identities. He received his MA from Ui Pui in English literature, where his thesis was on Islam in Dante's Divine Comedy. I am super excited to hear Jeff, and thanks for joining us. Jeff, and congratulations, by the way, for being our selected presenter today. Thank you. Thank you very much. I am going to share my screen so that everyone can see the presentation, and if for some reason that doesn't work, then we'll wing it. Can everyone see my screen all right? Yes, we can see it, Jeff. Thank you. Fantastic. I would like to start by saying hopefully it wasn't too difficult for everyone to find the meeting room. I would like to thank Jen Harvey for walking me through the software, which was a pretty steep learning curve for me. I would also like to thank the organizers of the Graduate Research Series. It was an honor just to be considered for this, let alone to be asked to actually participate, and hopefully what follows meets the expectations and standards of the project. I'd also like to take a quick moment to thank my advisor, Dr. Beth Quitsland, who's been very helpful and very supportive while also being willing to tell me when my ideas either aren't strong enough, lack evidence, or any other potential problems. My committees also offered a lot of useful guidance, and I would like to also extend a quick thanks to all of my peers who've been both willing and sometimes unwilling soundboards for my ideas as I try to work through some of the difficult concepts at play in the research that follows. For everyone who's helped, your valuable insights have helped me nuance my own understandings, and all of your intellectual contributions have not gone either unnoticed or unappreciated. I should probably also warn that since I'm presenting at home, the dog may make a little bit of noise like that. I apologize. I would also just like to thank everyone who's in attendance right now. I know that meeting online isn't always the most convenient and has its own complications, and I know that your time is valuable, so I appreciate you deciding to spend it here. I've never actually presented anything like this online before, so I do expect a few technological hiccups that will in all likelihood be user error and entirely my fault. When I was first asked to present this online, I was a little bit skeptical, but I soon realized the benefits of presenting this project in a digital space. For starters, this project is about representation and the creation of both physical and abstract images. So as Boccaccio indicates in the introduction to his famous Decameron, times of plague and pandemic are neither convenient nor pleasant, but they do prompt us to adapt and to discover new opportunities to connect and reconnect with people around us through new often narrative means. While the mysterious plague that destroys Christian decency and human social bonds that Boccaccio's narrator describes is allegedly originated some years earlier in the East, our discussion, which will be beginning in a few moments, is going to start a few centuries earlier than Boccaccio and about a thousand miles further west in Toledo, Spain in 1142 CE. While this central Spanish municipality may seem like a strange place to begin a discussion about representations of the Islamic East in English literature, one of the problems with a historical literary and conceptual project such as this is one of origins and location. Ideas after all travel, but before we start talking about medieval Spain and its connections to England, a favorite location for Shakespeare, I want to take a quick moment to introduce some of the origins and features of today's discussion. While the research and thesis from this project are unique to what I'm working on now, it has roots in my undergraduate work, where as a young literature student, I would often come across seemingly out of place Islamic references in the canonical works that we studied in class, not really grasping the historical or literary context and finding very little guidance in Norton anthology footnotes, which might read something like Mohamed, founder of the Islamic faith. I would ask my teachers in class about these puzzling references. My questions generally fielded responses like I hadn't thought of that before or I'm not really sure. While these responses were very relatable, since I also felt lost while reading through the topics, they showed me that these stories were doing things both rhetorically and narratively that had either been lost over time or that scholars were generally unprepared to deal with. I was confused, for example, why Chaucer would write favorably about the physician Razis in his famous prologue, which you should be able to see on the screen now, while at the same time his night of the famous night's tale was an avid and enthusiastic crusader. Or why on earth Shakespeare's King Lear would tell poor Tom that his rags must appear Persian by comparison. By the time I was a master's student, I'd become enamored with the complexities of Dante's inferno, or more specifically with his use of five Muslim characters who were spread between cantos four and 28. Dante's fondness for crusaders and militant Christians was apparent throughout the entire divine comedy, but he paradoxically placed the physician Ibn Sina, the jurist Ibn Rushd, and even more puzzling the Kurdish crusader leader Salah al-Din in limbo, along with the poet's favorite virtuous pagans. What made more sense in the context of the poem was his graphic punishment of male meadow, a name generally translated into English as Mahomet, the leader of the schismatics in Canto 28, where the pseudo prophet's body is torn, quote, from chin to where he farts, end quote. While Dante the poet does not pull any punches in letting his readers know how he feels about male meadow or his nephew Ali, whose face has also been split and whose punishments both reflect the schisms that they inflicted on religious communities and life, the poet seems ambivalent about the other Muslim characters in the work, placing them in limbo with the great philosophers. That was not the master's thesis that I'd initially envisioned, but thankfully I had a very good set of advisors. None of them, of course, knew anything about Islam or Islamic literature, but all of them agreed that my idea to write a grand study tracing philosophical concepts from Aristotle through the Persian Muslims of Central Asia, who adapted Aristotelian philosophy to monotheism in an effort to make it more palatable for monotheists, and also making it more palatable for the later Christian consumption, only to be used in theological attacks against Islam, was a multi-volume translation project that would span a career and was not a viable master's thesis. While the present project also has an encyclopedic scope, it remains much more manageable. My work identifies and elaborates on five different paradigmatic representations of Islam and Muslims in medieval and early modern English literature. Because English literature is intimately linked with continental European literature, it incorporates the literatures of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain when needed, but only as it relates back to English. Edward Said convincingly argued that the East versus West binaries misrepresented the complexities of the actual Islamic East. Writing that simplified Islamic misrepresentations characterized the Oriental peoples as superstitious, ignorant, passionate, and violent, while also creating an inverse image of an Occident as rational, intelligent, temperate, and passive, while also this Occidental society was actively expanding its empires across Asia and Africa. In this vein, post-Said scholars take a historical approach by which they rescue Islamic history from Western simplification, taking pains to show that Muslims were not the barbarians that they'd been assumed to be. And this work is very valuable. Sadly, what gets ignored in this type of study are the texts that actually generated these assumptions about the Islamic East, leaving readers with dozens of primers on Islam that sometimes accidentally reinforced the simple binaries that characterized the Middle Ages, and sometimes even the Renaissance as simpler times when the Christian West was completely ignorant of Islam. While I agree that the information produced by the Christians in Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance about Islam was generally speaking wrong, I also take this as my point of departure from most current scholarship. Instead, I argue that there were complex intellectual networks actively producing new scholarship on Islam, which was then incorporated into visual and narrative arts, and that these each supported and validated each other. I also argue that the misrepresentations of Islam as the Sarasonic faith and Muslims as Saracens happen according to different patterns that each serve different narrative functions while also responding to different cultural fears and desires. In this way, I hope to demonstrate the validity of Hamid Dabashi's thesis that the old East versus West binaries were always a gross oversimplification. But while Dabashi is arguing that the binary misrepresents geopolitical realities, my thesis is focused on the literary constructions of alterity. The value in a study like this, which identifies different characterizations of Islamic alterity, is that it highlights and nuances trends over time. Any text from my project could be subjected to a Kafkaesque number of close readings to interrogate how representations operate within the universe of the text, but that study would only be revealing about an individual work from a remote past. Instead, I prefer an intertextual and a comparative approach, because I want to know how the text operates as countertext, engaging in centuries-long conversations and the ways in which hostile Islamic alterity both drive narrative and reflect the cultures and cultural moments that produce them. Foundational to this assumption is that the Saracen on the page rarely ever reflects the real world Muslim, but is instead a projection that conflates fears, anxieties, and desires that have cultural currency in the given moment of their production. As stock signifiers, Saracens have wide use and have been adapted to respond to almost any conceivable situation. Because of the narrative flexibility allowed the literary Saracen, my project traces the most recognizable patterns in representation and in characterization. Saracens, for example, can be vile tricksters, arrogant yet dim-witted monsters, aggressive polyglot carnivores, noble savages, ugly comedic relief, or figures of monstrous beauty, and each behaves differently given the story's demands. Before I begin to elaborate on my research a little bit more specifically, there are a few things that I would like to address in terms of usage and definitions. First, I use the term Saracen to refer to fictional Muslims, and while this is not a wholly accurate usage, it helps differentiate between actual human populations and literary constructions. Likewise, I use terms like Lex Mahomet, which is the Latin term used rather than Islam when referring to the fictionalized version that exists within Western literature. Next, what I refer to as anti-Sarasonic literature in romance is not always distinct either from visual or historical writing, but instead each works together and supports each other. Much as these genre distinctions blur in the textual and material histories, the distinctions between pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Saracens are not definite, and the conflation with heathens and pagans within these texts is only recently unpacked in the scholarship. Finally, as Edward Said pointed out in his famous Orientalism in 1978, the East is often presented as an atemporal space. Because of this, we have the name of Mahomet invoked by the Romans at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Termigent, one-third of the Saracen anti-Trinity, guiding pagan Romans in old English history chronicles, and even projections of the pseudo-prophet into the future as an avatar of the Antichrist. This is why our question of origins cannot simply be something like the year 570 with the prophet's birth, 632 with his death, with the Arab and Berber fleets landing in Sicily in 652, with the Islamic colonization of Spain in 711, which lasted until 1492 with the fall of Granada, or the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241. Nor can it begin with the centuries of conflict over the Persianate territories bordering on Russia. And as I hope to show later, religious and political events in Arabia, North Africa, Central Asia, Islamic Europe, all feature in old English chronicles as well as Middle English romance and early modern drama. Showing at least some awareness, even if misunderstood, of the religion of Islam well before the Norman invasion of 1066 or the Crusades, which brought many different cultural groups into close contact. I'd like to begin our discussion in Toledo, because this was the city where Peter the Venerable commissioned his greatest work. The translation of a series of Arabic-language Islamic texts into Latin. This massive bundle of texts is collectively remembered as the Toledin Collection. The Toledin Collection was the first project of its kind and one of the few of its scope. Toledo was already a symbolic city, having been an early victory in the Reconquista and very recently violently transitioned from Islamic to Christian ruling hands while retaining its rich intellectual history. The Toledin Collection is remembered by humanists as the first large-scale attempt by the Christian West to understand Islam on its own terms. And while this is an exaggeration given the intent and use of the translations, it is important that we recognize the significance of the Toledin Collection as a whole. While the West had been aware of Islam for centuries prior, and there was no lack of information on the subject, theological or otherwise, the Toledin Collection provided an encyclopedic access to primary sources for the first time to the Latin West. Chief among these newly translated texts was Robert of Ketten's Lex Mahomet sudo profete, or the law of Mahomet, the false prophet. The first translation of the Qur'an into a European language. Its title betrays its political aspirations to discredit Islam as a false law by a false prophet. And this title, as well as the prefatory material, guided readers through the subtle evils and imitations that would follow lest they be seduced by the Sarasonic teachings. Robert of Ketten's translation would remain the exemplar for Western translations through the modern era, despite being replaced in favor of more recent editions every few centuries. For example, in 1649, Alexander Ross would English, a 1648 French translation of an earlier Latin translation of the Qur'an. Ross's edition would become the first English version to be completed, in addition that was quickly banned and became an under the table bestseller. The first English translation by a Muslim would come nearly 300 years later in the early early years of the 20th century. But it's not actually Robert of Ketten's Lex Mahomet that interests us here today, despite its obvious importance to the subject and the much needed collation and commentary of comparing it to Arabic Qur'an. In fact, our interest in the Toledan collection is not actually textual, but peritextual. Because not only does the Toledan collection claim many firsts as far as making texts available to Christian Europe, and this was a continental affair, but the Toledan collection also boasts the earliest attested image of the Prophet Muhammad generated in the West. We'll spend some time with this image because it's emblematic of centuries of theological and historical writings and its themes, motifs, implicit and explicit messages provide a hermeneutical framework for reading and understanding the texts in this project at large. As such, we can condense a lot of the textual information while also working our way through this deceptively complex image. Interestingly, the Mahomet fish monster is isolated in terms of the marginalia within the Toledan manuscript. The other leaves contain drop caps, marginal notes, and marginal glosses, but they're free of illustrations, monstrous or otherwise, despite the manuscript's generous margins. The fish monster is nestled in a biography of the pseudo-prophet that precedes the translation of the Qur'an by Robert of Ketten. In the image, we see a vermilion-red hybrid creature with the face of a man that appears to also have a fish's body. Unlike many but not all marginal figures in medieval manuscripts, the fish monster emerges from the bottom line of text and penetrates upward, displacing its own narrative and embedding himself securely in the text rather than accepting a position outside or as a framing device. He is interjecting himself rather obnoxiously where he simply doesn't belong. His presence is anomalous, it is intrusive, and it forces the Christian artists and storytellers to accommodate him in a space where he clearly shouldn't be. This is not dissimilar to the views of Christian Europeans at the time who felt that the Saracens had usurped their Roman inheritance not only in territorial Europe where they conquered both Sicily and Spain, but also the Holy Land as well as the Roman bread baskets of Egypt and Syria. The same vermilion hue that inscribes the prophet's misshapen form also aggressively circle the label, Mahomet, clearly marking the fish monster as the great trickster and usurper whose biography is now surrounding him and restricting his movements. The fish monster presents a version of the pseudo prophet's body that is misshapen unnatural and hybrid, mirroring the theological arguments put forward by Peter the venerable elsewhere in the Toledain collection as well as authors of other works such as Thomas Aquinas and Dvorjean following themes that we would find with later Reformation theologians such as Martin Luther, his disciples, and even the English John Fox. While biographical details vary by account, the core of the narrative is that the pseudo prophet was a merchant who learned about Christianity and Judaism while on trade caravans in Syria. He recognized the truth of the Lord's words and redrafted biblical stories to appeal to the licentious Ishmaelites in a bid for power. Like the fish monster's incongruent body, the Saracen heresy was also seen as composite in nature. The inverse of Christ's heavenly body, the fish monster shows the roots of the Saracen faith represented through the false prophet to be a corrupt hodgepodge emphasizing the widely believed fact that Islam was a heretical Christian sect with roots in Persian Nestorianism. Blaming the religiously diverse Persian territories coincides with a larger project of redefining the physical world that is reflected in both cartographic and literary trends co-eval with the Toledain collection, and these are things that we'll look at a little bit later. The meaning or most correct interpretations of the fish monster are contested. Elsewhere in the Toledain collection in his writings against the Saracen sect, Peter the Venerable himself describes the Saracens as a monstrous sect. It also invokes Horace's arse poetica describing the sex monstrous hybrid as a source for ridicule. And here we have a couple screenshots from the Loeb edition, which you can get through the Olden Library as a digital edition. And here Horace writes, If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here, now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favored with a private view, refrain from laughing. Much like Horace juxtaposes the lovely woman's top with the ugly fish bottom, the artist puts the relatively benign face of the pseudo-profit on the fish-sloping formless body. The relatively benign face of the pseudo-profit or the fish monster hides the dangers beneath. Like the centaur, the pseudo-profit's hybrid body shows that he and the faith that he represents exist outside of the natural order. The human, or at least human-like face, shows either the ability to reason or the imitation thereof. But the animal body connects him and his followers with baser instincts, while also violating the core principle of like produces like. Unlike the centaur, however, the pseudo-profit appears to be aquatic, making him not only unnatural, but eminently foreign to all land-dwellers. Coming back to the title of the present work, these heathen hounds we shall tame, the title comes from a Middle English adaptation of an episode of the French chanson de gueste, that for convenience will refer to as the Firabras cycle. The poem in question is titled The Sultan of Babylon, and is one of many stories about Charlemagne's defensive invasion of Saracen Spain. Much work remains to be done in collating the English and French versions of these stories to see how differently they treat Saracenic representations. In the poem, a Saracen merchant fleet seeks safe harbor during a storm off the coast of Rome, and Roman pirates relieve them of their cargo. When word of the piracy reaches the emir of Spain, emir Balin, he orders his son, a giant who sometimes has jet black skin, to raise Rome in retaliation. The giant Firabras relishes in his task, murdering the population of Rome, destroying the town, and ingloriously executing the pope while stealing holy relics from the crucifixion. When news of the attack reaches Charlemagne, the great defender of the Christian faith, he vows to both to tame the heathen hounds, as we see in line 935. The dehumanizing rhetoric is both obvious and not uncommon for Middle English anti-Saracenic romance. In the story, Charlemagne's Spanish campaign is an act of reciprocity, as well as one of defense. Charlemagne doesn't actually want to wage war with Spain, and is chastised by the angels for his reluctance to execute God's will. The alliterative appeal of heathen hounds is sonically appealing, while achieving its aim of vilifying the animalistic and dangerous Saracens who are little better than wild dogs. Perhaps coincidentally, but perhaps not, among the Saracens exist tribes of wild dog-headed men. These dog-headed monsters are often seen populating the landscapes with Saracen armies and use their teeth when they fight. While the pejorative hound was not reserved exclusively for Saracens, its association with Saracens is what gives it the insult its bite. The rhetoric and implied power dynamics of taming the Saracens is also central to the present study, where Saracens are not only animalistic or subhuman, but also wild beasts that must be subordinated by a strong militaristic Christian patriarch, like Charlemagne. The imagery is also common in Arthurian romance, as well as the stories of Alexander the Great, even though both are historically pre-Islamic. The ahistorical insertion of these Islamic Saracens in both narrative cycles is never really seen as a type of problem. Charlemagne's words that serve as the title for this present project implicate all Saracens in this animality and not just the many monsters who populate the Saracen countryside and serve as both officers and grunts in the Saracen armies. In some way or another, all of the texts in this project, medieval or early modern, attempt to tame Saracens either physically or rhetorically. Making the line, these Saracen hounds we shall tame, particularly apt as a title for the project as a whole. It now falls on us to briefly cover the narrative paradigms that I've been alluding to up to this point. Since we've already kind of worked on building a hermeneutical foundation, I'm not going to go as in-depth with these as we did with the fish monster. First is the pseudoepigraphia and the wonders of the east. Pseudoepigraphia is a genre of works attributed to authors who either don't exist or have no connection to the work. And Wonders of the East is the title assigned to an old English travel narrative that takes the reader through the Saracen east. These stories are relentlessly empirical and geographical. They count, they measure, and they order the incongruent landscapes and peoples of the east attempting to impose some sort of order on a disordered space. Generally speaking, these texts show Sarasonic territories and peoples to be primitive and disunited, though often undeservingly popular. These territories and peoples are inherently hostile as well. Like the benign appearing fish monster, this danger is not always easily recognizable and is often veiled behind a seemingly hospitable veneer. In the images that you see before you, we have one of the English John Mandeville who was the alleged author of the Mandeville travel cycle and one of the health hundigas or dogheaded monsters of the wonders of the east from the manuscript available at the British Library. In the Middle Ages, the east rested comfortably at the top of European maps, closest to Eden and God. This was a logical designation. The east, after all, was in the middle of a cultural and economic golden age, as well as being where the sun rises, bringing God's light into the world. The European north, on the other hand, is where the light is mute, if I can appropriate a phrase from Dante's Inferno. However, the shift of the heart of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome also shifted the center of the world and provided an opportunity to reorient the map so that it no longer privileged the Orient. In the following centuries, maps were drafted with the north on top. This redefinition is closely associated with the age of discovery. Shifting global power or at least narratives of power in favor of the north or Europe coincided with the rise of the English language romance in the late Middle Ages and continued well into the English Renaissance. While these traditions have endured for centuries, we simply don't have the time to discuss enlightenment and post-enlightenment representations of or dismissals of Islam and Muslims or the further changes in maps. But before we move away from these maps, if you take a close look at the map to the left, you'll see a tiny face at the top, some feet at the bottom, and hands to the left and right. The the body that's inscribing the earth and laying its foundation is the body of Christ as he becomes the cornerstone of all of the earth. What we have very interesting here in the Epstorff map is that Jesus' head is actually resting very comfortably in eastern territories in non-Christian lands. This comes right before that cartographic shift to move north to the top of the map. Then the other one, the Hereford mapomundi, is another very famous map which has the east on top. At the very the circle at the top is Eden and then there's God right above it, putting God closest to Asia and Asian territories. The second paradigmatic representation of Islam and Muslims in English literature is one of imitation reciprocity in the clash of civilizations. While the clash of civilizations narrative of east versus west has been well explored, what is often unspoken is the reflective nature of Saracen empires in English romance. Saracens live as a satirical inversion of the Christian normal. Societies are organized along similar lines, but Saracens don't seem to understand the ethical or social limits they clumsily imitate. The danger here is what Freud and others have labeled the uncanny, something hauntingly familiar yet alien and hostile. These Saracens have powerful empires, worship an antitrinity of Mahomet, Termigent, and usually Apollon, often translated Apollo, and but Apollon is sometimes replaced with Jove. And these Saracens jealously seek to annihilate the Christians and usurp their claims to territorial and spiritual authority, providing a long-standing, unchanging, and often a historical enemy. Third are the secret Saracen infiltrators. One of the puzzling features of early modern theater is the imperative to swear that one is not a Turk as a way to attest one's own honesty. Here I argue that centuries of appropriating Saracens as a heretical Christian sect gave the fictional Muslims a problematic interiority for the English Christian audience. While Saracens have never existed and there were no significant Muslim populations in England at the time outside of a handful of ambassadors and the occasional merchant, the scapegoating of Saracens created a unique narrative problem by the 16th century. Since Saracens were inherently untrustworthy, liars became Saracens in Turks, almost as if by accident. And everyone must be careful lest they fall victim to Sarasonic behaviors. Hence the need to continually testify that one is not a Turk. This shift is also seen in the transition of the meaning of the word termogen, which in the Middle Ages referred to a Saracen god, but was used on the early modern stage to refer to boisterous or loud women. The Islamic comparison was used to shame women into behaving according to certain codes. As with the hounds we discussed earlier, termogen gets its pejorative bite through its association with Islam, but here it also serves not only to feminize the Saracen religion, but also to indicate that it's bad at being feminine. The fourth narrative paradigm is the grand and stately Turk, a uniquely early modern development that celebrated the grandiose though often confused rhetoric of the Oriental despot. These despots demonstrate opulence and indulgence and are severely punished for their actions, often being shamed and dismembered on stage. Unlike medieval romance, these stately Turks were played by actors on a stage, giving them a frightening physicality, while limiting their conquests to the Elizabethans stage. While equally as in constant, the snarling Saracen emirs were replaced with the eloquent Turkish sultans, the invogue representation of Islamic alterity in early modern England. While showing the geopolitical power of the automite, these plays also mitigate this anxiety by celebrating the automite's incompetence and downfall. Not surprisingly, Reformation writers associated the decadent Turk with the indulgent Pope, vilifying both in the same stroke of a pen. And fifth and finally, we have the useful Saracen. This is a grossly underexplored aspect of criticism, which often celebrates the Saracen convert while overlooking his narrative utility in discrediting the Saracen peoples, their culture and faith. The useful Saracen exists because of a problem in representing Saracens as bloodthirsty monsters who will stop at nothing to destroy Christianity. Romance overpowers its Saracen characters while making Christians meek and defensive. Meek and defensive armies do not win invasions, and Christian military prowess cannot overcome the vastly superior Saracen numbers. At best, most anti-Saracenic romance leaves both sides at a mutual disadvantage. While this disadvantage intensifies the drama of the story and raises its stakes, it impedes a resolution. Faith in God boosts Charlemagne's armies from time to time, but battlefield victories come often from useful and tokenized Saracens, who are able to fight their own kind without the ethical restraints placed on Christians. Rather than force the Christians to mimic Saracen savagery, these stories weaponize a Saracen against other Saracens, allowing for a last moment Christian victory. Unfortunately, this poses a narrative problem that stories are not equipped to deal with, and that is, what do you do with a useful Saracen after the definitive battle? Victorian authors would have their noble savages walk into the sunsets of oblivion, the last of their kind, but these stories uncomfortably allow for conversion, though usually bar actual integration afterwards. Now, I want to take just a couple quick moments while I wrap up here to talk. Number one about some sources and sourcing, and then potential sister projects that could grow out of this. Number one is the availability of materials that Alden Library provides. Quite surprising, actually, I found was that the library boasts a large number of facsimile reproductions and old spelling editions of many of these works, especially the early modern works, which is eminently useful in research like this because quite often to facilitate reading for students and for popular audiences, editors will amend words and sometimes eliminate uncomfortable parts of stories. So there are a few editions of Inferno, for example, that don't have the scene where Maometto is marching or they'll remove the part where he identifies himself as the Saracen pseudo prophet, and he just becomes another kind of nameless sinner in hell. So these old spelling and older editions are useful in terms of finding what audiences were hearing or seeing at the time, especially with the drama, because it's the drama that is easier to tell how popular something actually was. With the medieval poetry, with the romance, it's a bit more difficult. We can tell usually based on the number of manuscripts that exist, but readership is different than seeing a play, especially before there's things like standardized education. The other thing that makes this research possible is all of the third party access that the library offers. So a lot of the screenshots that we've seen so far come from databases like EBO, like early English books online. The other, in terms of sister projects, what the library offers is the library special collections has an impressive amount of responses to Christopher Marlowe's Tamerlane, which is one of the earliest and the play that starts the kind of Turkish play fad in England that endures for a few centuries. And those 18th and 19th century adaptations and rewrites can actually be found in Alden, which is impressive. It's really cool. In terms of sister projects, a few things kind of down the pipeline include a study of a sixth paradigm of representation, one that's left out of this because it's a larger group in itself and that is the monstrous representations. One of the questions that we kind of need to ask ourselves while reading these stories is why are there so many Saracen giants? Another is the dogheaded beasts. They crop up in many of the romances, usually not as actual characters, so much as set pieces. But we also find men or men like creatures with skin as hard as rocks who don't need to wear armor when they rush into battle. And these are aspects of Saracen representation that have been so far unexplored or underexplored. Another potential follow-up study is one on the medieval afterlives of the pseudo-profit Mahomet, who is regularly resurrected, dismissed and then ingloriously killed in countless anti-saints lives, short poems and romances, that make him a uniquely European character. And finally, there is a need for more editions of these texts that more explicitly address how these representations are operating, both in service of the narrative of the text, as well as in relation to other narratives of the time. So with that, I would like to thank you all for your time and your patience. I've enjoyed the opportunity to share what I've been working on with you. And of course, if you're interested in anything that I've talked about today, please feel free to contact me. Jeff, could we open it up for some questions? Sure, that'd be great. Okay. If anyone in the audience has any questions, I would say it's probably going to be easiest to go ahead and type those into the chat, since we don't have a raise hand function. Okay, so we have a question from Miriam Intritor. Do the differences in representation in different editions that you mentioned reflect variation in local or regional familiarity with exposure to Islam and Muslims? Yeah, I would say so. For example, one of the most obvious differences is the way that the pseudo prophets named in the French tradition, for example, he's Mahomet. In English, he's Mahun, Mahun, which of course has Hound built into it. But we also end up with more monsters in English literature. In French, there seem to be more human Saracens. In Italian, you end up with more quick references, but you also end up with a lot of interestingly favorable references. So in Boccaccio's Decameran, there are quite a few stories that celebrate Saladin, who also shows up in Dante's Inferno as one of the virtuous pagans. Things are slightly different in the Germanic tradition, where you have more contested borders, things, borders that were directly contested, where the representations are usually much more dramatic, much more aggressive. And that's also something that you find in Spanish literature, especially since Muslims ruled Spain for a few centuries, that in Spanish stories, you have more of an emphasis on kind of the sexual promiscuity and licentious nature of the Saracen, that they're going to kind of come and steal your women. There was a very popular story of the tribute of 100 virgins. The way the story goes is the emir of Cordoba demanded 100 virgins annually. And he did this because he needed a new woman every night. And this plays into this very sexualized account of them from a Spanish perspective that's almost completely absent in English. Okay, we have a few more questions, Jeff. From Kelly Broughton, we have what are your preliminary thoughts on why Saracens are so often represented as giants? As giants? I think the giants is one of the most fascinating aspects. In terms of unformulated thesis, I would say that that Saracen giants almost always represent the excess of Saracens in term, Phyrobras, who converts to Christianity at the end. When we first meet him, he's 15 feet tall, sometimes 15 feet wide. And he's always bragging, he's always prideful. And his attitude, everything about him is just out of proportion. And he almost kind of steps out of the page and assaults you. And there's something very uncouth about being so excessive that highlights how meek and restrained Oliver and Roland are by comparison. Even when they're kind of acting out, they're not acting out in the way that Saracens are. In something like the Middle English King of Tars, where you have the marriage ceremony of the Sultan of Damascus with the princess that he's more or less abducted, the all of the Saracens have a party throughout all the streets for a week where everyone is kind of passing out drunk. They've got food hanging out of their mouths. No one does any work. Everything's just done to the excess. And I think in a lot of ways, the giant's body represents all of that excess and shows how wrong it is to be so out of proportion. Quite often the Saracens body is meant to be read like a symbol or like a text, which is why I think the monstrous representations is a rich avenue to explore, but also one that needs a lot of space to do so. Thanks, Jeff. So we've got a few more questions here that I think I can combine into one. So Michelle Jennings, Ereba Dawson, Ando, and Miriam Intritor would like to hear about your experiences working with other libraries in their special collections. And also, aside from Alden's collections, did you access any other collections in the U.S. or international? Yeah. So one of, outside of Alden, one of the biggest collections that I use is the British Library. The nice thing about the British Library is, you know, they spent so long collecting everyone's stuff and kind of hoarding it that now they've got really wonderful collections. And they've also digitized a lot of their more popular items. So a lot of the manuscript history, especially the Old English, is available in very high quality scans. So something like The Wonders of the East, which is, there's no narrative to it, but it's an account of Eastern lands where it begins saying, yeah, the settlement is X number of units from this place. And it tells you where all of these Eastern locations are in relation to each other, as well as all of the dangerous animals and monsters that'll attack you while you're there. The other database that I've found myself using quite a bit is the National Library of France. And that's where the Toledo manuscript is housed. So that proves pretty useful. There are a few others. The National Library of Scotland also has quite a few of their manuscripts scanned and also transcribed, which saves a bit of time so that I don't have to transcribe a manuscript on my own, because that can be quite painstaking, especially if the pages are destroyed. And all you can do is zoom in on a scan. But I find a lot of what I need is either available in the stacks or through some of the third-party databases that Alden kind of gives you access to, like EBO. Okay, thanks so much, Jeff. I'm not seeing any other questions. So I want to thank everyone for coming today. I know this is an unusual format for this, and I think it worked out fairly well. Jeff, I want to thank you for your flexibility in agreeing to present online. It was really, really interesting. Thank you so very much. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. I appreciate it. All right. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you.