The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
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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
MARÍA ROSA MENOCAL
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 Secker & Warburg Limited. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Martin Secker & 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 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Menocal, María Rosa
The Arabic role in medieval literary history : a forgotten heritage / María 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 Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated 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 sufficed to rediscover the 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
Contents
The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography
The Oldest Issue: Courtly Love
The Newest “Discovery”: The Muwashshaḥāt
Italy, Dante, and the Anxieties of Influence
Preface
Les étymologies arabes assignées par M. Ribera aux mots troubadour . . . ne convaincront certainement personne. (Alfred Jeanroy, La poésie lyrique des troubadours, 1934)
Accident and coincidence play as prominent a role in directing and shaping 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 preliminary 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 Américo 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 considerably more engaging, because the verb ṭaraba—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 ṭaraba 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 célèbre, its origins unknown and disputed, a textbook etymological riddle still assigned in Romance philology courses. I also knew that any intimations or suspicions that it was Arabic in derivation must be largely subterranean, not part of what was presented in the standard course. I thus demurred, saying only that it did not seem to me that this was the accepted etymon. The professor then suggested I might look it up and deliver confirmation or denial. I did indeed look it up, and I subsequently spent years sorting out the pieces of the puzzle, uncovering the tracks of an almost obsessive etymological search that had engaged countless linguistic and literary historians before me.
Few other etymologies,