Magic and Language in Images from the Alexander Romance

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For further information, you can contact Ugo Mondini at [email protected].

Speaker: Earnestine Qiu, PhD Student, IAKH – Princeton University

The medieval period has left us no shortage of texts concerning Alexander the Great. One of the most popular sources—composed of embellished accounts of Alexander’s life—the Alexander Romance received translation from its original Greek into upwards of twenty languages. The prose text of the Alexander Romance developed from an amalgamation of prose, rhetorical, epistolary, and poetic texts and engendered a rich variety of visual and poetic content in illuminated manuscripts, enamels, architectural reliefs, and metalwork. In this talk, we will focus on Alexander Romance images from the Eastern Christian traditions. Special attention will be paid to depictions of talking birds, overgrown crabs, and shrinking trees to examine the recurring themes of magic speech. In Alexander’s meetings with the marvelous and mythical, what is the relationship between magic and language? The composite nature of the Alexander Romance manuscripts will also allow us to ask, how can image, prose, and poetry variously represent magical encounters?

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