URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2016_Melissa-McCarthy

Debunking Periodization Shining a Spotlight on Secularism written by Bruce Mason

Kathleen Davis first became interested in medieval studies when she took a graduate course at Villanova University in Old English language and literature. “I was intrigued by the beauty of the poetry but even more by the language, which is strangely like and unlike English,” says Davis, a professor of English at the University of Rhode Island (URI). “The history of the language is fascinating. Unlike the Romance languages such as French and Italian, English first came to be written in the Roman alphabet though acts of translation, literally between the lines of Latin, as in the beautiful page from the Lindisfarne Gospels.” (pictured left) Her early scholarly studies began

English authors, from the 8th through the 10th century, established cultural and political authority as well as a sense of national identity through translation, which both associated English with the broader world of European Latinate culture and at the same time set it apart. Davis’s investigation into translation studies was at first part of her scholarly activity on medieval texts and culture. Through this effort, she became interested in translation theory itself, a field Davis says was experiencing growing pains in the late 1990s. She found herself becoming particularly interested in the importance of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to translation theory. “Derrida was not well understood

Deconstruction and Translation in order to bring the work of Derrida and similar philosophers into the mainstream of translation studies.” In her latest work, Periodization and Sovereignty, Davis explores why many people associate the terms medieval and Middle Ages with a period characterized by dark ages of intellectual and artistic inferiority. “The attitude that the Middle Ages was intellectually inferior – or even barbaric – came from the process of Europe’s colonization of other parts of the world such as Africa, South America and India,” she explains. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans defined themselves as on the cutting edge and defined those they colonized as ‘backward’ and as living in the past that Europe had left behind. They identified this past

with her dissertation at Rutgers University. She focused on how

by many translation scholars at the time,” she states. “I wrote

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