Body as Text/Text as Body: Embodied Knowledge Transmission in Sixteenth Century Morocco

Abstract

The stories told about the battle of Wādī al-Makhāzin (August 4, 1578) reveal a major crisis of information for all involved in the event. At the very center of that epistemological crisis were the three warring kings. Even as new leadership gradually wrested the Western Mediterranean out of chaos, there remained a nagging sense that the knowable rested on shaky footing. This article explores one way in which a Maghrebi chronicler of this event contemplates the difficulty of protecting and transmitting reliable knowledge in a broad Mediterranean context. Ultimately, he promotes a theory for the conservation and transmission of knowledge reliant upon the functional interaction of enlightened leadership and information incorporated within situated human bodies.