Al-Andalus and España: Translatio and Tolerance
Dr Louise Haywood, Dept of Spanish & Portuguese
Professor James Montgomery, Dept of Middle Eastern Studies
Lent term 2009
Monday 2.30 -
4pm, from Monday 19 January 2009.
In Verdi’s Don Carlo, the Princess Eboli sings a Canzone del velo (A Veil Song), ‘Nei giardin del bello,’ describing how, in a garden in Granada, a Muslim king, Muhammad, sings a love song to a veiled woman, declaring that he no longer feels love for his Queen, and proposing to make the veiled woman his new queen in the Alhambra. The veiled woman of the song turns out, of course, to be the Queen, and the King paradoxically both declares and recuses his love in one and the same canzone.
Muslim al-Andalus, and its successor Christian España, are sites of contestation, where conflicting memories and narratives of identity often collide. Verdi’s Moorish king and queen are exotic and romantic, optimistically presaging what Eboli hopes will be Carlo’s recognition and avowal of his love for her and recusal of Elisabetta. They are also indices of the fate of al-Andalus, which, in the aftermath of the Reconquista, rapidly became emblematic of both possession and loss, of triumph and nostalgia.
We have identified two primary tropes in terms of which al-Andalus and España are construed as phenomena: translatio and tolerance. Other (cognate) tropes are adduced to account for them, chief among them being influence and transmission, and their study is often characterised by a circularity of reading and reasoning. We propose to consider the imbrication of these tropes and practices which characterises the current study of the literary heritage of al-Andalus and España in our respective disciplines. This pilot course will thus explore how disciplinary stagnation has become further entrenched through widespread acceptance of the ideas and theories of Maria Rosa Menocal and will investigate whether an integrated study of this literary heritage is possible.
