The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
for a discussion.) Thus the name of a conference to explore the issue is “Islam and the Medieval West,” with an intimation of the separateness of those two entities, and the title of the 1965 Spoleto conference, “L’Occidente e l’Islam nell’alto Medioevo” conveys a similar impression. No less so Makdisi’s 1976 “Interaction between Islam and the West” or Jean Richard’s 1966 “La Vogue de l’Orient dans la littérature occidentale du moyen âge.” Even Menéndez Pidal’s 1955 Poesía árabe y poesía europea, one of the best essays on the subject of the close and vital interrelations between the two poetries, has a title that might well create a quite different impression: that the Arabic tradition (and he is, of course, speaking of the Andalusian one) is not European. The same notions impinge on concepts of nationality. As I note in several other places in this book, the very use of the title “Spaniard” is implicitly defined in racial and religious terms. The Cid is a Spaniard, but Ibn Ḥazm and Maimonides are not; they are an Arab and a Jew respectively.
18. Monroe 1970, which is both comprehensive and analytically acute, is undoubtedly the best source of the two closely related issues discussed here, covering both how the Arabs and Islam have been studied academically within the Spanish intellectual tradition and how the question of Spain’s special character as a part of the European community has been shaped by Spaniards’ views on the “Arab question.” The now-classic works on the latter issue are Castro (all entries in the bibliography) and Sánchez-Albornoz [1956] 1966. The polemic is far from dead, as Sánchez-Albornoz 1973 indicates. See also Glick 1979, the introduction of which includes a concise summary of the different views on the question. Glick begins his study by noting that “History seems scarcely distinguishable from myth” (3) and goes on to note that, in the realm of dealing with the Spanish past, the problem is more than usually acute. He notes that “long after the enemy was vanquished, the Jews expelled, and the Inquisition disbanded, the image of the ‘Moor’ remained as the quintessential stranger, an object to be feared” (3).
19. There are some views that are more explicitly negative on the Arabs than Sánchez-Albornoz’s. Bertrand’s 1952 comments verge on the unquotable and include observations that Arabs are “enemies of learning” and a “nullity as civilizing elements.” Those wishing to read as vitriolic an example as any of anti-Arab prejudice are referred to pp. 82–94 of the English translation.
20. It is important to remember here how closely related were the literary and philosophical traditions of Hebrew and Arabic in Spain. In many instances it is more accurate to recall them as a single reasonably coherent tradition with two different prestige languages than as two completely separate ones. Suffice it to recall that the kharjas that Stern deciphered were kharjas to Hebrew muwashshaḥas. For the close relationship between those poems in the two different classical languages, see especially Stern 1959 and Millás y Vallicrosa 1967. It is also helpful to recall the admixture of originally Hebrew and Arabic elements in prose narrative as well. See M. J. Lacarra 1979. The melding of those traditions is evident in the text of the converso Petrus Alfonsi; see Hermes [1970] 1977, M. J. Lacarra 1980, and Vernet 1972 and 1978. Because of the prestige of Arabic as the language of letters and philosophy, Maimonides was perhaps the most noteworthy, but far from the only, Jewish writer to have used Arabic as his medium. For admixture in the textual history of the philosophical tradition, see Lerner 1974, introduction.
21. Thus, when Curtius writes his brief observations on “Spain’s Cultural ‘Belatedness’ ” (Curtius 1953:541–43) he cites Sánchez-Albornoz in support of his views. The short piece by Curtius is worth reading in any case because it reveals much in its three pages about the sort of exclusionary and negative image some of the most important Romance medievalists have had of medieval Arabic culture in Europe.
22. “Discovery,” too, is a misleading term. Stern’s famous “discovery” of 1948 is much more accurately described as an “identification.” The kharjas were not lost or unknown—they even existed in published form. It was just that no one knew what they were. The Arabists and Hebraists who had worked on the muwashshaḥas of which they are a part had no idea of what they were, because, of course, they were studying Arabic or Hebrew literature, not Romance, and they did not imagine that the literature they were dealing with, despite its geographical provenance, had anything to do with Romance. Romance scholars, on the other hand, even those Hispanists working on medieval material, would have little if anything to do with material written in Arabic even within their own geographical and chronological sphere of interest, or even, as turned out to be the case here, with texts written in Romance but preserved in either Hebrew or Arabic transliteration and embedded in texts written in one of those two classical languages. The circumstances render Stern’s identification and decipherment of these texts far more worthy of the greatest possible respect than any mere “discovery,” any serendipitous stumbling on a lost manuscript, would have been. It was not accident or good fortune but rather his accurate understanding of the cultural situation in medieval Spain that made it possible, an understanding few scholars before him had had—or at least had applied. In addition, his success is best honored as a landmark, proof of the failure of our views of and approaches to the culture of al-Andalus, of medieval Spain, to accurately identify or deal with its literature. It is a failure that has not been overcome by Stern’s discovery and that affects the study of the kharjas and other Hispano-Arabic poetry to this day. Instead, the achievement is popularly reduced to mere discovery, which many, if not most, Europeanists believe to be literally the case.
23. Alonso 1958 (in his essay “Un siglo más para la poesía española”) and Alonso 1961 (in “Cancionillas ‘de amigo’ mozárabes: Primavera temprana de la lírica europea”); also, of course, Menéndez Pidal, especially 1961.
24. O’Donoghue 1982 is the most recent example, but it would be misleading to think that that editor is particularly negligent. In fact, this anthology is remarkable for having included anything Arabic at all, and O’Donoghue takes some pride in noting what a broadening of the usual range of texts this comprises. He is certainly justified in noting that even this is an improvement.
25. See citations in notes 2 and 7 above. See also Corti 1979 for a discussion of models and antimodels in medieval culture and Bloomfield 1979 on continuities and discontinuities in the medieval world. In neither is there any hint that the Arabic cultural phenomenon might be an important example of an antimodel or that the question of alterity and sameness in the medieval period might be profitably reviewed, taking the Arab other and alterity as an informing concept.
26. To understand and accept the Saussurian dichotomy between diachrony and synchrony as meaning that the two are absolutely separable rather than separable as different focuses of analysis, is as fallacious in literary studies as it is in linguistics. For an extended and lucid discussion of this fallacy in linguistics, see Lehmann 1968. Many of the same kinds of problems explored here also come to light when concepts and terms are displaced from linguistics into literary studies.
CHAPTER TWO
Rethinking the Background
If we understand by Averroism the use of Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle, then every medieval Aristotelian, including Aquinas, was an Averroist.
—Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought
WILLIAM, CIRCA 1100
A half dozen years before the birth of William IX, duke of Aquitaine, who was to become one of the most powerful men of his time in both political and cultural affairs, there occurred one of the most famous and well-documented examples of the taking of Arabic cultural “booty” by southern French Christians.1 This was the taking of Barbastro by Guillaume de Montreuil in 1064, during which he is said to have taken a thousand slave girls, captured women, back to Provence. Even if this were an apocryphal and gross exaggeration serving to emphasize the barbarity of the Christians from the Arab chronicler’s point of view, we have little reason to assume that the courts of Provence of the late eleventh century were oblivious to the art of Arabic sung poetry that the captured women would have brought with them.
The world from which these women were abducted was al-Andalus, and they and other refugees