The Fictive Flight of Birds: Literary and Intellectual Culture across the Islamic world and late medieval England

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This event is part of the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lectures which was first delivered in 1924, and subsequently named after the Academy’s first Secretary, Sir Israel Gollancz.

This lecture explores the currents of literary and intellectual transfer from the Islamic world into medieval England in late medieval vernacular literature. It follows the fictive flight of birds, following the course of avian imagery, language, and metaphor, as it appears in astronomical mathematics and astronomical instruments, namely the astrolabe, through to fictive and allegorical writings moving across Arabic, Latin, and Middle English.

The lecture explores how the detail of the small bird Vega associated with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe and his larger scale set of talking birds in the Parliament of Fowls can be connected, and indeed soar, across a wider medieval textual and material world, taking in not only Arabic astronomical writings but Arabic and Persian poetics and allegorical writing. It positions Chaucer in tandem with the Andalusi Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and his Aristotelian Poetics, the polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the theologian al-Ghazali (Algazel), and the Persian poet Farid al-Din al-‘Attar. It demonstrates how the intellectual transfer of Arabic astronomical knowledge can be connected to fiction, allegory, and poetics and can glide across currents that show undiscovered shapes to late medieval English literature.

Speaker: Dr Shazia Jagot

Dr Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. She has worked at the Universities of Surrey and Southern Denmark (Odense), and held a CBRL fellowship at the British Institute in Amman. She is a graduate of the Universities of Leicester and SOAS.

Chair: Professor Nacim Pak-Shiraz

Professor Nacim Pak-Shiraz holds the Personal Chair of Cinema and Iran at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching focuses on Iranian film, literature and visual culture.

Free, booking required, tickets to be released prior to the event

This lecture will be available to attend in-person and will include a reception for attendees, details to follow.

If you have any questions about this event, please email [email protected].

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