Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia by Nicolas Trépanier

Author:Nicolas Trépanier [TréPanier, Nicolas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

(APPENDIX)

Sources

The primary sources I have used include the bulk of the original narrative material produced in fourteenth-century Anatolia. During the first part of my research, I combed through each one of them in order to identify the relevant passages. As will be seen below, the nature, frequency, and importance of such passages vary widely from one literary genre to another and from one source to the next. The narrative sources I have used fall into three broad categories: hagiographies and other religious texts, chronicles and epics, and travelogues and other texts. To this, one should add two more groups of sources: approximately forty endowment deeds (waqfiyyas), closer in form to archival documents than to narrative texts, as well as a significant body of archaeological reports.

HAGIOGRAPHIES AND RELIGIOUS TEXTS

While diversity may be the master word as far as the source material for this study is concerned, religious texts and especially hagiographies were no doubt the single most important type of source for my purposes. That this type of source contains a higher concentration of relevant data per page is due to many factors, particularly the format in which they are written.

Unlike modern biographies, where the general narrative gives way to specific scenes and dialogue only to illustrate a given event or personality trait in greater detail, hagiographies composed in medieval Anatolia are essentially collections of anecdotes, mostly centered on the performance of miracles or other pious deeds by a Muslim saintly figure. Because these anecdotes are used as arguments to demonstrate the sanctity of the main character (rather than as the building blocks in a general depiction of his life), they are often presented in a loose chronological order and framed by few if any generalizing narrative statements (such as “he lived there for the next five years” or “he had a good relationship with his neighbors”). These comments apply to a variable degree to the various hagiographies, but most are best described as argumentative texts seeking to prove a master’s sainthood, rather than descriptive ones giving an account of his life. This anecdotal structure makes hagiographies immensely useful for my purposes, because they impose the presence of “trivial” elements in the text: a philosopher can explain an Aristotelian principle in “the sublunary world,” but a saint who miraculously makes fruits grow in the middle of the winter has to do so in an orchard.

It is, of course, a general characteristic of medieval literature to provide little if any descriptions, and anybody hoping to find Flaubertian flourishes about the landscape visible from the kitchen window or the texture of a character’s skin in the Manaqib al-ʿArifin is bound to be disappointed. Yet the harvest is quite rich if one measures it by medieval standards. Because hagiographies have to mention some narrative “props” to allow their main character to perform miracles, and because the primary objective of the text is to convey the miracle as a believable event, these “props” have to appear realistic to the intended audience, people often living in the same or similar settings as the actors of the anecdotes, and only shortly afterward.

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