the search for ​Adamic language
and the emergence of transcultural aspiration
​in the Middle Ages and early modernity

Marie-Curie fellowship 2017-2018

LE STUDIUM Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies, the SMART LOIRE VALLEY Programme's Fellowship; Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665790; duration: 12 months (1.09.2017-31.08.2018).

Vertical Divider

During the Middle Ages, the belief in the existence of a primordial tongue spoken in Paradise spread across cultural and religious denominations around the Mediterranean (among Jews, Muslims and Christians). This perfect language was supposed to be lost in the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. Nonetheless, in all those contexts and across the divisions, some people dreamt of going beyond their « cultured » condition to explore their common participation in the universal intellect and to speak the language of angels (locutio angelica).

Increased mobility and new contacts established in the early-modern period, both across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, brought a new hope of reconstructing the common language of the humanity against the « confusion » of Babel, leading to the recuperation of the unspoiled condition of man and of the world (restitutio omnium in the thought of Guillaume Postel).

Nowadays, the search for Adamic language stands for the interrogation concerning not just the hypothetical pre-cultural origins, but more importantly, the post-cultural becoming of man, exploring the perspectives of non-hegemonic universalism and opening a new chapter of transcultural humanities. ​

The medieval and early-modern speculations on Adamic language (lingua adamica, the tongue spoken in the Garden of Eden) are related both to the question of paradisical origins of man and the essential unity of the human kind. During the Middle Ages, the belief in the existence of a primordial tongue spoken in Paradise spread across cultural and religious denominations around the Mediterranean (among Jews, Muslims and Christians). This perfect language was supposed to be lost in the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. Nonetheless, in all those contexts and across the divisions, heterodox individuals dreamt of going beyond their « cultured » condition to explore their common participation in the universal intellect and even speak the language of angels (locutio angelica). What is more, increased mobility and new contacts established in the early-modern period, both across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, brought a new hope of reconstructing the common language of the humanity against the « confusion » of Babel, leading to the recuperation of the unspoiled condition of man and of the world (restitutio omnium in the thought of Guillaume Postel). Nowadays, the search for Adamic language stands for the interrogation concerning not just the hypothetical pre-cultural origins, but even more importantly, the post-cultural becoming of man, exploring the perspectives of non-hegemonic universalism and opening a new chapter of transcultural humanities.

The aim of the project consisted in introducing a historical perspective into the state-of-the art reflection on transcultural perspectives in the present-day humanities. This aim has been achieved, in the first place, through the textual analysis of the works of the French heterodox thinker Guillaume Postel, as well as the historical context of his activities, that permitted to evaluate the weight of transcultural transgression and the inscription into the political projects of his time. A special attention has been paid to the stakes and implications of his Oriental project, implying both philological work of Postel, such as his grammar of Arabic, and his activity related with his participation in the French embassy to Turkey.
The stake of the project was to put in the limelight the early-modern origins of the universalist ideas, concentrating on the unfalsified aspect of translocal / transconfessional / transcultural collaboration in pursuit of a crucial, common intellectual cause that in the early-modern epoch was epitomized by the recuperation of the primordial language of the humanity. The aspect focused has been the relationship between the problem of the lost primordial tongue and the valorization of intellectual activity beyond the cultural frontiers as well as the idea that the lost path of truth (via veritatis perdita) can only be found through the confrontation with otherness. The charismatic figure and the writings of Guillaume Postel exemplify a coherent line of thinkers that are to be found not only in France, but even more importantly in the Iberian Peninsula (Llull, Barros, Vieira) that saw the necessity of transcultural and transreligious dimension in their intellectual activity.
The central hypothesis of the project concerned the early-modern emergence of the transcultural aspiration, i.e. the desire of crossing the cultural frontier in search of intellectual or spiritual accomplishment. Such terms as “transculture”, “transculturation”, “transculturality”, “transcultural” (writing, comparativism, etc.) have already entered the current language of humanities; nonetheless, the predominant optics associate the transculturality with the present-time conditions of global mobility. This is why it has been crucial for this project to treat transculture as a phenomenon of the past and study it in a diachronic perspective: as a tradition forming a consistent stream of ideas binding together not only the European, but also the Mediterranean history of ideas. What is more, this Mediterranean and Iberian phenomenon finds its global projection in the aftermath of the European maritime discoveries.
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Apparently marginal topic, such as the search for the Adamic language and the idea of generalized restitution (restitutio omnium) through language, defended by Guillaume Postel, served as a way of retelling Euro-Mediterranean and global transcultural past. In this context, the aim of my project was to introduce the historical perspective into the emergent field of transcultural humanities. The projected impact of this research is thus to cross the boundaries of the discipline in the narrow sense, such as the Renaissance studies, in order to open new interrogations in the reflection on the perspectives of the global (trans)culture.
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