Council on Middle East Studies Colloquium: “Classical Revival and Literary Culture in Fifteenth-Century Mount Lebanon”

The Council on Middle East Studies Colloquium presents

“Classical Revival and Literary Culture in Fifteenth-Century Mount Lebanon.” 

In the fifteenth century, rival Maronite and Jacobite clergy members became engaged in a fierce race to control Mount Lebanon. As part of their proselytist strategies, they sponsored local scholars to embark on a quest to compile ancient and medieval texts from libraries in Syria, Egypt, and Northern Italy. Their efforts turned their once isolated mountain into the site of a new literature at the crux of the cultural forces of the early modern Mediterranean.