Onon Prize Lecture Series:
Wednesday 14 December
5.30-7.00: Lecture plus Q&A
Christopher Atwood
University of Pennsylvania
The Feminine in the Secret History of the Mongols
“The turbulent life and times of Genghis Khan and his Dothraki-like, nomadic horse lords”: such reads a recent Amazon.com blurb for the latest translation of the Secret History of the Mongols. Warlike masculinity has been central to outsiders’ conception of the Central Eurasian nomads, to the genre of epic with which the Secret History is often associated, and to the idea of Mongol nationalism for which the text is often taken as a charter. At the same time, the Secret History has become famous for its “strong women characters”, most notably Chinggis (or “Genghis”) Khan’s mother Mother Ö’elun, and his principal wife Madame Börte. Beyond these elements, however, the anonymous Secret History contains a complex vision of women’s lives and roles in the building of the Mongol empire, complex enough that one may ask “Was ‘Anonymous’ a woman in this case too?” Most peculiarly, the Middle Mongolian in which the Secret History was written has a feminine grammatical gender, one which is used in peculiar and variable ways throughout the work. Based on his new Penguin Classic translation of the work, Christopher P. Atwood will discuss the multiple types of feminine in the work.
Christopher P. Atwood (Ph.D. 1994, Indiana University) is professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches the history of Mongolia and the Inner Asian borderlands of China. His research ranges from the Mongol empire to the early twentieth century, with a focus on ethnicity, state-building, and ideology. Major works include Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades (2002), Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (2004), and Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (2021). His new Penguin translation of the Secret History of the Mongols will be published in 2023.
