The Seminar Series
1. The Ornament of the World: Muslim Spain or al-Andalus?
María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World (2002) addresses what she deems a widespread myopia over the pivotal role played by Muslims, principally in the Muslim territories of the Iberian peninsula, in the development of European culture. Menocal’s study raises, but does not always satisfactorily address, questions posed by scholars of both Christian and Muslim traditions. In this session, we will discuss Menocal’s work; we will consider the issues raised by the geographical extent and nomenclature of the territories and the peoples under discussion, and by the notions of tolerance and convivencia (lit. ‘living together’) of the three faiths in the peninsula, North Africa, and associated territories, including the debate between Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and Américo Castro. We will also ponder the representativeness of Edward Said’s nostalgic paean to Muslim Spain, a central feature of Menocal’s 2007 lecture at CRASSH.
Notes from Session 1 are available for downloading here by clicking on the link.
2. Translatio, 1: Philosophical and Scientific Texts
In this session, we shall cover the medieval Christian notion of translatio studii et imperii, including issues of mistranslation, misadventures and the misappropriation of material, with a particular focus on the translation schools of the twelfth century. Our concern is more the evolution of a disciplinary awareness than the precise details of the transmission of knowledge: of transmission as disciplinary change, and not as philological programme.
In the 1920s, Charles Homer Haskins identified the translation activities of the Schools of Toledo and Granada as the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance.’ Perhaps because of the almost universal acknowledgement of this baptismal rite, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) continues largely to be studied by Arabists and not Thomists, for example, with the exception of Averroism, a philosophical movement recently rehabilitated by John Marenbon. Aristotle is thus saved and gratefully received from the Arabic philosophers, but little attention has been given to Aristoteles arabicus, the Arabic version of Aristotle who may thereby have been gifted to Latin philosophy. And yet as the popularity of the Latin translation by Gundisalinus of al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences announces, the organisation of the Latinate philosophical programme, of the development of the study of philosophy as a discipline, may owe much to Arabo-Islamic preoccupations and aspirations. We aim to reinstate the missing term (Baghdad) in the trope of translatio from Alexandria to Toledo.
Notes from Session 2 are available for downloading here by clicking on the link.
3. Translatio, 2: Religious Belief, Allegory, and Anxiety
Some of the issues which we shall address include the reception and dissemination of elite/non-elite materials; of the reception, and polemical appropriation of religious belief; and anxieties of influence. The texts covered in this seminar particularly exemplify misadventures and vagaries in translatio, and include the animal fables Kalila wa Dimna (itself originally an Arabic translation of a Pahlavi version of an Indian collection of fables, and perhaps rendered into Castilian by the Prince Alfonso, prior to his accession to the thrones of Castile and Leon in 1252), the Qur’an and the Liber Scalae Mahometi. This text, which has survived in neither an Arabic nor Castilian version, is a Latin and Old French version of a Castilian translation (presumably via Hebrew) of a pious Arabic elaboration of the exegesis of Qur’an 17.1, according to which prophet Muhammad ascended on the wings of Buraq through the seven heavens to the throne of the Almighty, on the way being granted a glimpse into the tortures of the unbelievers in Hell. A narration which exists in many versions in many of the languages of Islam, it has proved enduringly popular with Muslim elites and non-elites alike. During the twentieth century, these narrations became notorious when Asín Palacios argued that a version was the inspiration for Dante’s composition of the Divine Comedy, a debate which was given added urgency by the subsequent discovery of the Latin and Old French versions of the work.
Some of the issues which we shall address include the reception and dissemination of elite/non-elite materials; of the reception, and polemical appropriation of religious belief; and anxieties of influence. The texts covered in this seminar particularly exemplify misadventures and vagaries in translatio, and include the animal fables Kalila wa Dimna (itself originally an Arabic translation of a Pahlavi version of an Indian collection of fables, and perhaps rendered into Castilian by the Prince Alfonso, prior to his accession to the thrones of Castile and Leon in 1252), the Qur’an and the Liber Scalae Mahometi. This text, which has survived in neither an Arabic nor Castilian version, is a Latin and Old French version of a Castilian translation (presumably via Hebrew) of a pious Arabic elaboration of the exegesis of Qur’an 17.1, according to which prophet Muhammad ascended on the wings of Buraq through the seven heavens to the throne of the Almighty, on the way being granted a glimpse into the tortures of the unbelievers in Hell. A narration which exists in many versions in many of the languages of Islam, it has proved enduringly popular with Muslim elites and non-elites alike. During the twentieth century, these narrations became notorious when Asín Palacios argued that a version was the inspiration for Dante’s composition of the Divine Comedy, a debate which was given added urgency by the subsequent discovery of the Latin and Old French versions of the work.
Notes from Session 3 are available for downloading here by clicking on the link.
4. Law and Definition
In this section, we intend to compare some conspicuous examples of legal and legally-predicated writing in Spanish and Arabic, not with a view to scrutinising any filiation or traces of ‘influence’ nor to reflect on how legal codes and works of jurisprudence have been studied in our respective disciplines. We shall aim to stage a constructive confrontation between the materials, as an opportunity to reflect on encyclopaedism and on the various representations of providence, human responsibility and their accounts in the composition of history.
In this section, we intend to compare some conspicuous examples of legal and legally-predicated writing in Spanish and Arabic, not with a view to scrutinising any filiation or traces of ‘influence’ nor to reflect on how legal codes and works of jurisprudence have been studied in our respective disciplines. We shall aim to stage a constructive confrontation between the materials, as an opportunity to reflect on encyclopaedism and on the various representations of providence, human responsibility and their accounts in the composition of history.
Alfonso X, ‘the Learned’, of Castile and Leon (1252-84) oversaw the compilation of the first unified law code, the Siete partidas, to have force in his territories. The Partidas offer an encyclopaedic law code, and show a marked preoccupation with the need to define and control moral, theological and philosophical matters. The Siete partidas remains Spain’s most important contribution to legal history, and is occasionally still cited in cases involving residual Spanish law in the US. The Partidas show a particular concern with the limits and structures of regal power and lordship in relation to canon and civil law.
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1404) was a Muslim jurisconsult who wrote a history of the unfolding of power relations in the course of human history. Ibn Khaldun’s overriding interest lay in how Shari‘a (divinely revealed law) and Siyasa (the management of human society) intersected. In order to generate a history in which divine providence and human responsibility are given prominent roles, neither compromised by the randomness of the possible nor eclipsed by the rise and fall of dynasties, he analysed the epistemology of the khabar (the verbal or textual report of an event or occurrence) and argued that historical reports were to be restored to their appropriate ‘situations’, an ontological classification commonplace in Islamic legal thinking, according to which speech is an ethically good or bad action, and ‘good’ speech is that which is placed in its proper situation. His Muqaddimah, Introduction, in three volumes (available in English), provides achronically a meticulous series of examples of the dynamics of this approach, and touches on subjects as diverse as the Qur’an as a source of history and the classification of the sciences within Islam.
Notes from Session 4 are available for downloading here by clicking on the link.
5. Varieties of Narrativity: The Picaresque?
The Andalusis ‘borrowed’ their genres of writing from the central Islamic lands. On the periphery of the Islamic world, therefore, they developed their own textual identities, a principal feature of which is the length of their compositions when compared with their varieties in the central Islamic lands. There is a distinct possibility that this substantiality, the factuality of the length of these compositions, encouraged scholars to identify them as progenitors of Spanish literary forms, and occasioned the subsequent quest for less material aspects which they may have had in common. In contradistinction to this philological approach, we shall take Leo Spitzer’s seminal article (1940) on the poetic and empiric I in medieval European poetry as a starting point from which we shall scrutinize modes of narrativity as articulated through the first-person narrator. We shall discuss possible approaches to narrativity, including those by propounded by Booth and Genette, and may wish to consider other models, such as the chronotope.
5. Varieties of Narrativity: The Picaresque?
The Andalusis ‘borrowed’ their genres of writing from the central Islamic lands. On the periphery of the Islamic world, therefore, they developed their own textual identities, a principal feature of which is the length of their compositions when compared with their varieties in the central Islamic lands. There is a distinct possibility that this substantiality, the factuality of the length of these compositions, encouraged scholars to identify them as progenitors of Spanish literary forms, and occasioned the subsequent quest for less material aspects which they may have had in common. In contradistinction to this philological approach, we shall take Leo Spitzer’s seminal article (1940) on the poetic and empiric I in medieval European poetry as a starting point from which we shall scrutinize modes of narrativity as articulated through the first-person narrator. We shall discuss possible approaches to narrativity, including those by propounded by Booth and Genette, and may wish to consider other models, such as the chronotope.
Al-Hamadhani (d. 1007) created the craze of the maqama (a word which in Arabic denotes a prose-composition which could be delivered in one session with the reader standing up, as opposed to the normal practice of discussing religious and legal works at a majlis, a sitting), a first-person rhymed-prose narrative the events of which centre around a scallywag who usually assumes a false identity, perpetrates a misdemeanour, an imposture or an instance of petty fraud, and a dupe (the narrator) who eventually recognises the scallywag for who he really is. These events take place in a variety of regions in the eastern Islamic lands. The maqama subsequently became a speciality of the Andalusi elite.
Much more prominent in the Western tradition is Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive Son of Awake) of Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), a philosophical allegory detailing the growth and development of a boy of a desert island. After the Qur’an and The Arabian Nights, this work has been the most frequently translated work of Arabic into European languages. Many discern therein the parentage of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but few have considered that the question of the spiritual and moral obligations of an individual who has no access to any form of divine revelation was a problem much discussed by theologians and jurisprudents and that Ibn Tufayl was, like his protégé Ibn Rushd (d. 1195), providing a philosophical response to a legal problem concerning the relationship between the study of Falsafa (philosophizing based on Arabic translations of the Greek philosophical heritage) and the demands of the Shari‘a (divinely revealed law).
A third genre in which the Andalusis excelled was the risala, the formal epistle. Ibn Shuhayd’s (d. 1035) Risalat al-tawabi‘ wa-al-zawabi‘ (The Epistle of Genii and Demons) is an exercise in creating an authentically Arabic, Andalusi literary identity, by subverting the masters of style of the central Islamic lands through polyphony, quotation and ventriloquism: the genii and demons of the title refer to the familiar with which a pre-Islamic poet was thought to commune and from which he derived his inspiration.
Within the trope of influence, then, Arabic maqama and risala have been seen as the precursors of Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor (1330/43), and the picaresque novel, whose first extant representative is the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Ruiz’s Libro is a polymetric erotic pseudo-autobiography of a priest’s fourteen amatory misadventures with an eclectic admix of animal fables, bawdy tales, and serious doctrinal materials, whose sermon-prologue aligns it with clerical culture. Lazarillo takes the form of a prose confession which narrates the eponymous anti-hero’s wanderings in the first person, and attempts an explanation of his final situation.
6. Lyric, 1: Courtly Love and the ‘Circularité du Chant.’
In an important publication, Paul Zumthor identified what he referred to as the ‘circularité du chant,’ scrutinising the chanson as an isolated unit. In this session, we intend to appropriate this notion of circularity and apply it to how the love lyric and the courtly love which it informed have been read and accounted for. Thus, we shall argue, whilst the theory of the Arabic origins of the European love lyric has found few to support it in Medieval Studies, the very same (European) love lyric has been the single most determining paradigm in terms of which the Arabic ghazal (love lyric) has been construed. The Occitan tradition has thus provided the conceptual background for the ‘chaste love’ tradition of not only Andalusi but also Arabic erotic poetry, from its earliest appearance in the first decades after the death of Muhammad (d. 632) to its fully-fledged manifestations among the ‘Abbasid elite of Iraq in the ninth and tenth centuries.
In al-Andalus the ghazal was always popular with the Muslim elite. Andalusis like Ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035), Ibn Zaydun (d. 1071) and al-Mu’tamid (d. 1095) were ready exponents of this ‘borrowed’ form. In the eleventh century the ghazal was given an ‘autobiography’ by Ibn Hazm (d. 1064). A political activist and Umayyad loyalist, a literalist theologian and Qur’anic exegete, an ethicist and heresiographer, Ibn Hazm happened, during one of his periods of imprisonment, to write a treatise on love, the Tawq al-Hamama (The Dove’s Neck-Ring). Although it was not unusual for Muslim theologians of a literalist bent to find themselves writing treatises on love, the Ring is widely thought to shed light on the intimate life of al-Andalus, despite the author’s theological scruples about how his readers would construe his motives and read such a treatise as a contradiction of his religious principles. For Menocal, Ibn Hazm is iconic of the glories of the Umayyad caliphate and his treatise a code-breaker’s handbook which allows us to decode the private lives of the Umayyad elite. Ibn Hazm’s manual is thus as a guide to the reception and the reading of the Andalusi ghazal.
However, Menocal also sees it as prognostic, an anticipation of ‘those notions of love’ that were soon ‘to dominate the European sensibility’ (2002). In an instance of circularity and of paradoxical revisionism, Ibn Hazm and the ghazal have been rehabilitated (by the proponents of the Arabic theory) as the most appropriate accounts for the emergence of the verse of the troubadors and the Occitan tradition of courtly love, while the verse of the troubadors and the Occitan tradition of courtly love determine the ways in which both Ibn Hazm and the ghazal have been read and studied in the West.
7. Lyric, 2: The Kharja and the Absurdity of Disciplinarity
The Arabic literary historian Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk (1155-1211) describes the kharja as a brief piquant lyric segment which forms the basis for the construction of a formal lyric muwashshaha (in Arabic an ‘elegantly woven’ poem fabricated from a ‘tissue’ of various verse forms) despite appearing at its end. Although the language of the extant medieval muwashshahat had been identified as Classical Arabic written in Arabic or Hebrew script, scholars were baffled by the kharjas until Samuel Stern (1948) transcribed those in Hebrew as containing elements of Romance and vulgar Arabic. Castro heralded the kharja as a product of convivencia as the lived experience of peoples of different faiths. Stern’s work provoked two heated and ‘pungent’ (Armistead 1987) debates about the language, form and origins of the kharjas in which participants speak, often ad hominem, as (Hispano)medievalists or Arabists. The debate itself raises the necessity to break beyond the current disciplinary paradigms within which kharja studies have become enmeshed, and yet without the formation of a new inter-discipline whose practitioners are adequately trained for the task this remains a crucial impasse.
In this seminar, we shall scrutinise the debate on the kharjas, taken up by Menocal in The Arabic Role (2002), and the problems it raises for disciplinarity within the academy.
8. ‘The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History’: The Possibility of an Inter-discipline
In this session we will turn to Menocal’s seminal monograph and ponder whether the approach to cultural interaction which she advocates, that of the anxiety of influence, clearly borrowed from Harold Bloom (who wrote the Preface for her 2002 The Ornament of the World), helps or hinders her project to convince the discipline of Medieval Studies of the need to abandon ‘the myth of Westernness’ and to embrace the heritage of what she refers to repeatedly as ‘Semitic’ and describes as a ‘radically different foreign culture’ (p. 6). In sum, do Menocal’s chosen terms of reference ensure the rejection of her conclusions?
As a trope for charting the emergence, growth and development of cultures and peoples, influence was developed within the discipline of philology, an approach which, in a form that would be immediately recognisable to its nineteenth-century founding fathers, continues to exert a preponderant influence in the study of Arabic and Spanish. We would like to propose a move away from influence. In Islamic Crosspollinations, Montgomery advocates the adoption of a more neutral paradigm to the study of interactions, informed by the botanical metaphor of ‘crosspollination.’ This advocacy will be offered up for discussion as part of this last seminar. We propose to inquire how disciplinary change comes about. Is it incremental or abrupt — revolution or adaptation? To what extent is a discipline determined by the questions and problems raised in its past and studied in seclusion, secreted away from the questions posed by other disciplines? Does the very idea of a scholarly discipline imply territoriality, and a rigorous defense of that territory? Have the scholarly disciplines of the study of classical Arabic and medieval Spanish been articulated in terms of translatio; that is within a disciplinary trope that elides crucial terms within a trajectory inaccurately represented as (uni)linear? To what extent are the questions, concerns and agendas of a discipline proper or peculiar to that discipline?
Contemporary developments in the philosophy of science offer useful and theoretically sophisticated analogies. Is disciplinary change best accounted for according to the theories of ‘paradigm shift’ developed by Thomas Kuhn (to whom Menocal herself refers: 1987/2004, pp. 4 and 145) or is it the very paradigms chosen which, when ‘shifted’, polemicise the process of innovation and thereby signal hostile intent? Should disciplines exist in a dialectical relationship, each ready and prepared to offer up their tacit assumptions and first principles for discussion and possibly even rejection? Should we replace the customary tropes of influence and transmission with approaches based on identifications of ‘the scenes of inquiry’, along the lines proposed by Nicholas Jardine for the history of science?
The fate of Menocal’s monograph, and the resultant impasse in which our two disciplines find themselves as a consequence of recognising the justness of her observations, must surely offer an excellent opportunity for reflection upon some of these wider issues.
