Date/Time
Date(s) - 31 Mar 2015
6:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
754 Schermerhorn Extension, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Columbia Medieval Colloquium Presents:
Carolyn Dinshaw (NYU)
“Paradise Lost, Regained, Refracted: Saint Brendan’s Isle and the Optics of Desire”
March 31, 6.30pm: IRWGS Seminar Room, 754 Schermerhorn,
The history of Saint Brendan’s Isle traces a curious history of desire. In the early medieval Navigatio sancti Brendani the Irish saint journeys over the sea towards the west, sailing for seven years but eventually finding “the Promised Land, which God will give to those who come after us at the end of time.” Brendan’s island was not only the Promised Land but also the Garden of Eden, the end of time fused with the beginning. Appearing on medieval mappaemundi, this Paradise defied the physical laws of nature; Brendan found it, but even he could not access all of it. A perpetual enticement and a perpetual frustration, it beckoned and it receded.
Tudor apologist John Dee used Saint Brendan’s voyage as evidence for Elizabeth’s I’s claim to northern lands and the New World. Four early modern expeditions set out to find Saint Brendan’s Isle – to determine if it did indeed exist – but all ended by failing to find that Land of Promise. By the end of the eighteenth century it was concluded that this illusory landmass might well have been but atmospheric refraction – a mirage, even a specific kind of mirage, a Fata Morgana, an elaborate distortion that appears in vertical stacks, shifting and changing. This optical phenomenon – depending not only on heat and light but also turbulence – could explain well the perceived comings and goings of the elusive Isle of Saint Brendan.
I look at several texts from the eighth to the twentieth centuries, including the Navigatio sancti Brendani, John Dee’s Brytanici Imperii Limites, and Tim Severin’s Brendan Voyage, as well as contemporary art, in order to trace this island and to explore the concept of mirage as apt image of philology and historical research.