CMES Colloquium: Classical Revival and Literary Culture in Fifteenth-Century Mount Lebanon

In the fifteenth century, rival Maronite and Jacobite clergy members became engaged in a fierce race to control Mount Lebanon. As part of their proselytist strategies, they sponsored local scholars to embark on a quest to compile ancient and medieval texts from libraries in Syria, Egypt, and Northern Italy. Their efforts turned their once isolated mountain into the site of a new literature at the crux of the cultural forces of the early modern Mediterranean. They translated and studied Syriac, Latin, and Italian science, history, and hagiography, Greek and Zoroastrian wisdom, and works of world literature like the Story of Ahīqār. They composed a new style of Arabic poetry that combines Muslim epic, Syriac music, and European historiography. They studied Syriac linguistics and produced Syriac texts for the first time in decades. In this talk, I provide an account of the rise of a new literary culture in Mount Lebanon. I argue that this period witnessed the first expansion of Arabic popular culture into the rural Christian Levant, forming an important background for the Christians’ role in Arab modernity and the Nahdah. I also follow this culture’s export to Renaissance Rome during the early 1500s, where it came to form an important source for early Orientalist scholarship.