Convivium: Karla Mallette, Hang Time: Thinking about the future in the medieval Mediterranean

CMS Convivium

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Abstract

How do human beings think about, talk about, and prepare for contingency? How do we think about the future – events to come, good or ill? This talk looks to the late medieval Mediterranean to survey emergent ways of rationalizing risk. Economic historians, sociologists and anthropologists have studied the new financial products that allowed medieval men and women to protect themselves from catastrophe and to share in the risks of investments that might bring profit or loss. At the same time, new vocabulary emerged in late medieval contracts and literary works: words that stared down the future and named contingency with precision. This talk uses philology and literary history to build on the work of social scientists and to describe the strategies that medieval men and women used to bet on the future.

Biography

Karla Mallette is Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (2005), European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (2010), and co-editor (with Suzanne Akbari) of A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (2013). Her most recent book, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean (2021), won the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in Comparative Literary Studies of 2022. She has written numerous articles on medieval literature and Mediterranean Studies. She is currently Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan.