4 p.m.
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Lecture Abstract
The last century and a half of scholarship on the unique history referenced above has been characterized by the acrimonious debate between two diametrically opposed perspectives on this late antique Armenian historian and his oeuvre. The former represents a reverential, traditionalist view that evolved in the Middle Ages to inscribe the author in what became the mainstream narrative of the origins of Armenian literature. The other, by contrast, manifests the results of the rigorous critique of a self-consciously modernist approach of the turn of the 20th century, keen to distinguish itself from the other side’s adulatory perspective in wielding the new analytical tools of the comparative method. The latter uncovered a series of data (historical, geographical, etc.) incompatible with the writer’s accepted 5thcentury dating and speculated on the propriety of assigning an 8th-9th century date more germane to realia and terminology encountered in the text. Hence the title’s second component as an extreme encapsulation of this outlook.
This lecture seeks to escape the binary opposition of the earlier approaches, each problematic in its own way, and forge a new path to investigate the question, building on research in related fields over the last two decades to construct a novel contextualization for the writer and his history, situating them within their broader intellectual milieu rather than atomizing the specific details at issue and pursuing the work in isolation. It will attempt to define the sub-genre to which the writing belongs, ascertain the author’s fundamental goal, determine its genealogy and precedents, illustrate its continuity of engagement with other contemporary scholarly projects, and lightly sketch its subsequent influence, which in this case was both protracted and transformative into the modern period of Armenian nationalism.
Speaker’s Bio
Peter Cowe is a Distinguished Professor, Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies, and Director of the Center for World Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include late antique and medieval Armenian intellectual history, the Armenian kingdom and state formation across the medieval Mediterranean, Muslim-Christian dialogue, and modern Armenian nationalism. The author of five books in the field and editor of ten, he is the past co-editor of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. Currently, he is working on a monograph on the reception of Hellenic paideia in Armenian culture. A recipient of the Garbis Papazian award for Armenology, he has been inducted into the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan, and awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Russian-Armenian University of Armenia.