A Grammar Of The Corpse
Join us to hear Dr. Elizabeth Spragins discuss her new book, A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Fordham University Press, 2023).
This lecture will propose an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. The eyewitness and the corpse cooperatively produce what Spragins terms necroepistemology: a system of knowledge grounded in and transmitted through first-hand experiences of the material dead. In this talk, Spragins will analyze the literary and epistemological function that socially and historically significant bodies serve within two texts about the Portuguese-Moroccan Battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (1578): a first-hand eyewitness account by a Portuguese veteran, and a 17th-century Moroccan chronicle that explores corpse desecration as a strategy for message discipline about the event. Reading Arabic alongside Portuguese, Spragins responds to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean studies to work beyond the linguistic limitations of modern national boundaries.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Scholars (School of Liberal Arts), Spanish & Portuguese, Middle East & North African Studies, and Tulane Libraries.
To attend remotely, please register to receive the Zoom link.
