The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage

208 Pages·1990·5.52 MB·English

by  María Rosa Menocal

The Arabic Role
in Medieval
Literary History
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher
The Arabic Role
in Medieval
Literary History
A Forgotten Heritage
MARIA ROSA MENOCAL
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
The excerpt appearing on p. v is taken from THE NAME OF THE ROSE by Umberto Eco
(translated by William Weaver), copyright © 1983 Gruppa Editoriale Fabbri-Bompiani,
Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A.; English translation copyright © 1983 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc. and Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc. and Martin Seeker &C Warburg Limited.
Copyright © 1987 University of Pennsylvania Press. Afterword copyright © 2004
University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Menocal, Maria Rosa
The Arabic role in medieval literary history : a forgotten heritage / Maria Rosa Menocal
p. cm. (The Middle Ages Series)
ISBN 0-8122-1324-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Originally published: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. (The Middle
Ages series). With new afterword.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Literature, Medieval—Arab influences. 2. Romance literature—Arab influences.
3. Literature, Medieval—Research. 4. Romance literature—Research. I. Title. II. Series.
PN682.A67 M46 2003
809'.02—dc22 2003065792
Designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden
"But now tell me," William was saying, "why?
Why did you want to shield this book more than
so many others. . . . Why did this one fill you
with such fear?" "Because it was by the Phi-
losopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a
part of the learning that Christianity had accumu-
lated over the centuries. The fathers had said
everything that needed to be known about the
power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to
gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of
the Word was transformed into a human parody of
categories and syllogisms. The Book of Genesis
says what has to be known about the composition
of the cosmos, but it sufficedo rediscover th
t
Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe
conceived in terms of dull and slimy matter, and
the Arab Averroes almost convinced everyone of
the eternity of the world."
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
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Contents
Preface ix
CHAPTER ONE
The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography 1 1
CHAPTER TWO
Rethinking the Background 27
CHAPTER THREE
The Oldest Issue: Courtly Love 71
CHAPTER FOUR
The Newest "Discovery": The Muwashshahat 91
CHAPTER FIVE
Italy, Dante, and the Anxieties of Influence 115
CHAPTER SIX
Other Readers, Other Readings 137
AFTERWORD 155
Bibliography 161
Index 179
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Preface
Les etymologies arabes assignees par M. Ribera aux mots troubadour . . . ne
convaincront ccrtaincmcnt personne. (Alfred Jeanroy, La pohie lyrique des
troubadours, 1934)
Accident and coincidence play as prominent a role in directing and shap-
ing an individual's work as do perspicacity and good sense, perhaps a
larger one. In the case of my own interest in how western scholarship has
structured its view of the medieval past, both accident and an aging Lady
Philology played critical roles. The story bears telling because it is pre-
liminary to the discussion that follows, and as a narrative of detection and
discovery, I believe it to be typical of the often-blindfolded search for
parts of the literary ancestry of medieval Europe that many others have
undertaken.
I began to study classical Arabic when well along in my graduate
study in Romance philology, largely as a lark. I was fortunate enough to
find the justification and encouragement for the venture from a professor
of medieval Spanish who, as a former student of Americo Castro, was
more prone to see the potential value of such an enterprise than most.
But what I had assumed to be a somewhat pedantic fling became consid-
erably more engaging, because the verb taraba—meaning "to sing,"
among other things—happened to be on the vocabulary list of the first-
year Arabic course I was taking.1 Moreover, one day the Arabist who was
teaching the course mentioned matter-of-factly that this taraba was the
root of the European word troubadour.
I was surprised both by the facility of the pronouncement and by its
apparent status of established fact in the world of oriental studies, since in
Romance philology nothing could be more remote than such certainty
about the origins of the word troubadour. I knew even then that among
Romance scholars it was a cause celebre, its origins unknown and dis-
puted, a textbook etymological riddle still assigned in Romance philol-