Visual (Inter)Changes in the Mediterranean Basin: Medieval & Renaissance Western and Eastern Illuminated Manuscripts, session at American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA) 2016 Annual Meeting, Harvard University, March 17–20, 2016 

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?
                                              ― Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001) intertwines differing attitudes and ideas from the West and East about decorative border ornamentation and representational art in order to encourage the reader to question whether or not art is idolatrous. For Pamuk, early Modern Ottoman art upholds the belief that illustrations are meant to decorate the manuscripts, not illuminate the artists themselves. This panel draws from Pamuk’s novel, as well as the works on text and image from Visual Culture scholars, in order to undertake the task of understanding and analyzing this multifaceted art form, the illuminated manuscript in the medieval and renaissance periods (roughly 9th – 17th centuries), in a comparative ‘light’. Moreover, this panel seeks to interrogate the aesthetic and theoretical exchanges between Western and Eastern illuminated manuscripts in order to examine the ‘textual visuality’ of the illuminated manuscript emanating from the Mediterranean basin. All papers that address the various aspects of the fraught and complex interactions between the Eastern and Western illuminated manuscript are welcomed.

Organizer
Nhora Serrano, Hamilton College