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The fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia’s multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces
By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.
Michael Pifer is lecturer in Armenian language and literature at the University of Michigan. His publications include the coedited volume An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion.
“A highly original work that reconceptualizes Anatolian literature not just as a combination of different national literatures, but as shared modes of (re)interpretation articulated in different linguistic registers.”—Sergio La Porta, California State University, Fresno
“This manuscript is a remarkable achievement and will immediately become a go-to reference for medieval Anatolian literature. A joy to read.”—Alison Vacca, University of Tennessee Knoxville
“Kindred Voices is a work full of marvelous ‘chimeric couplings’ in which we witness medieval Anatolia through a prism never seen before.”—Rebecca Ruth Gould, author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus
“Kindred Voices adds Armenian to an exciting new trend in Medieval Studies: reading literary texts not as foundational pieces of a national tradition but as witnesses of the lively exchange across languages, cultures, and religions.”—Sharon Kinoshita, Co-founder and co-director, The Mediterranean Seminar
“Kindred Voices is a beautifully written, provocative, and masterful evaluation of the importance of poetry in medieval Anatolia. It brims with original ideas, and will continue to reach and inspire a broad readership in the years to come.”—Selim Kuru, University of Washington