ABSTRACT
In Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Lawrence Grossman writes that “the desire to imagine other ways of being modern” has fueled his interest in the Levantine society of the Middle Ages (2002:268). He cites Maria Rosa Menocal, who describes it as “the first full flower of modernity” (2002:44). Grossman outlines the Levantine society as one of “tolerance,” of “translators rather than proselytizers,” and of “constant articulation among dif erence” (2010:268). It was both “religious and scientific,” and “pluralistic (encompassing Arabs, North Africans, and Europeans, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics).” Grossman's aim is not “to romanticize” or to “hold it up as a model of what we might become” but to reflect on concepts of a “multiplicity of modernities” (ibid.) and to hold these against the model of “Euro-modernity.”
