Of Body and Soul: Politics and Eschatology in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean

This seminar explores how pre-modern debates over body and soulshaped political and eschatological thought in the Mediterranean. Each panel brings Jewish, Christian, and Islamic voices into dialogue, with Dante Alighieri’s oeuvre as a recurring point of comparison. Our aim is to situate questions of embodiment, psychology, soteriology, and collective destiny in light of their historical contexts and their wider intellectual and political implications.

Panels are organized around four thematic currents — Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Mysticism, and Political Eschatology — in order to examine how body-soul anthropology, political theology, and visions of history intersected in the pre-modern Mediterranean (12th–16th centuries).

For more information: Of Body and Soul: Politics and Eschatology in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean

This event is sponsored by Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, Porter College, The Humanities Institute, the Italian Studies and the Literature Department, The Center for Jewish Studies, University of California Regents System Collaboration Funding, and San José State University Division of Research and Innovation.