The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
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of the West to Arabic sciences and some branches of philosophy, this appears to be generally ignored when we construe the background of our literary history, although Latin-based developments in the sciences and philosophy—many of them dependent on the Arabic tradition—are almost invariably accounted for. Studies that recognize the centrality of the Arabic tradition in some other cultural sphere or its importance in terms of political history often proceed to discuss the literary problem as if those other instances of interaction were irrelevant. Thus, Bonner (1972) notes both that there was substantial interaction between Provence and al-Andalus, and between Provence and the rest of the Arab world (because of the crusades), and even that intellectual, cultural, and material developments in those areas far outstripped those of the rest of Europe. Yet, not only does he then go on to discuss these new developments in Provence as if none of this had been the case, but the map he presents for the world of the Provençal troubadours cuts off at the Pyrenees—as graphic a representation as one can imagine of how irrelevant that world seems to be. Other explicitly contradictory analyses include Frank 1955a, which details the extent to which Arabic courtly poetry and song were a fact of everyday life at the court of Alfonso II, the rallying point of both Catalan and Provençal troubadours, but then says that, nevertheless, all of this in no way influenced that poetry, apparently assuming that such influence must be expressly and directly acknowledged in the poetic texts themselves, presumably in Arabic. A comparable position is found in Rizzitano and Giunta 1967 (see further discussion in Chapter 4). Sutherland 1956, a refutation of Denomy’s work on the influence of Arabic thought on the troubadours, includes the comment that the influence was “diffuse” and thus is not to be found in the poetry—assuming, presumably, that poetic influence is not diffuse. Bezzola (1940) asserts that one cannot continue categorically to exclude the possibility of any Arabic influence on the first troubadours, and he then proceeds to do just that through his lack of any further discussion of the influence that is in fact implicit in his presentation of the historical background of William IX. In Van Cleve 1972 the chapter on the Italian lyric is presented as if no hint of Arabic culture, poetry, or song existed there, although that chapter immediately follows one on the intellectual life at the court, which he presents as completely Arabized. A distinction is made between poetry and other intellectual life that is difficult to reconcile with the unity of such traditions in virtually every other sphere of literary study, medieval or not. This split between the general historical background and literature is also reflected in the fact that while so much medieval literature elaborates or alludes to imaginary visions of the Arab world and characters—Saladin, for example—who are clearly identified as being a part of that world, relatively few of the critical discussions of these literary phenomena are concerned with either the extent to which they might reflect (and thus be understood in terms of) an influential view of that world and those people. See Paris 1895 for an early example that is not altogether outdated in its basic approach to the subject. Even studies on the French epic (so much of which is explicitly concerned with dealings with the Arab enemy) do not characteristically discuss the relationship with the Arab world as complex and problematic, nor do they regularly adopt any more sophisticated a view of the situation than that which is depicted at the surface level of the poems. (Notable exceptions to this are Galmés de Fuentes 1972 and 1978.) Even studies on Aucassin and Nicolette—a work clearly concerned with the question of dialogue, alterity, and juxtapositions and no less clearly allusive to the Arabic world conjured up by Aucassin’s name and Nicolette’s birth—can completely bypass the issue of the Arabic world in the chante-fable. See Calin 1966 for an example of the former, even in a critically sophisticated study. See Vance 1980 for a recent example of the latter.
5. The problem is perhaps best exemplified in cases where a scholar does comparative work and/or breaches the presumed demarcations of Arabic and European scholarship. One of the most noteworthy cases of this, an extreme case but far from a unique one, is certainly that of María Rosa Lida’s work on the Libro de buen amor and its Semitic antecedents (Lida 1940 and 1959). She was severely taken to task by the respected and influential Spanish historian Sánchez-Albornoz (1979:258–75). Although few other scholars are as vitriolic as he, this specific case is worth mentioning precisely because his attack on Lida’s work makes explicit those attitudes that are in other cases covert, although no less powerful, and because it reflects certain premises that are characteristic of a considerable number of scholars working in an area that is not only marginalized but, it would seem, protective of its marginalization. Lida’s work, according to Sánchez-Albornoz, is deficient because she is not an Arabist (a Spanish Arabist, it almost goes without saying) and consequently incapable a priori of sound knowledge of the Arabic and Hebrew texts she is discussing. Lida’s impeccable scholarly credentials show just how exaggerated such a territorial attitude is, since it implies that this area is so special that others not of the same school and training have no business dealing with it at all and are incapable of working on it competently. Why is an otherwise competent scholar and reader of literary texts rendered incompetent when faced with a decent edition and/or translation of an Arabic or Hebrew text written and/or circulated in Spain or Sicily in the Middle Ages? And if we are working with deficient editions or translations, which is sometimes adduced, or if we have incomplete knowledge of the historicocultural background of such texts, why is such a situation not remedied by those who in the same breath are staking this out as their territory? Such attitudes, coming as they often do from those concerned with Arabic studies, can only contribute in equal measure with the Europeanist’s attitude of neglect perpetuating the isolation of the field.
But the criticism of Lida’s work voiced by Sánchez-Albornoz goes a step further and in some measure sheds light on the nature of the other criticism he has made. He fails to comprehend her attempt to link the Hebrew (and thus Arabic) texts of medieval Spain with a Christian, truly “Spanish” text, which in his opinion can only be understood “dentro del cuadro de la literatura occidental” (Sánchez-Albornoz 1979:264). He sees her work, in fact, as the result of her “natural devoción . . . hacia los hombres y las empresas de su raza” (Sánchez-Albornoz 1979:259). This unmistakable allusion to her Jewish background is more than casual or incidental anti-Semitism, and that is why I have adduced it here. It is a reflection of the extent to which scholars who do work on the medieval European Semitic traditions, both Arabic and Hebrew, have been no more exempt from the prejudices of cultural ideology than the medievalist community as a whole. It would be fallacious to assume that those whose work is devoted to the study of those traditions necessarily have any more positive an attitude toward the object of their study than those who reflect the prejudices of our cultural ideology in their unwillingness to recognize the existence of those texts and cultural traditions in the first place. Most important, the reader should know that such attitudes are neither obsolete relics nor views restricted to Spaniards obsessed with the Semitic elements of their own past. The reader who glances at any of the issues of the last several years of the journal Al-Andalus (before its demise and rebirth as Al-Qanṭara), at García Gómez’s prologue to the second edition of Las jarchas romances de la serie árabe, or at his lecture on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Escuela de estudios árabes de Madrid, can hardly come away with the impression that either acute territorialism or thinly veiled prejudice are things of the past in this field. Not only would one find there articles by a certain Angel Ramírez Calvente (whose identity is otherwise unknown, so this is probably a nom de plume) embodying a less-than-professional attack on Samuel Stern, who is Jewish, but also from García Gómez himself, paterfamilias of Hispano-Arabic literary studies, invectives clearly directed at Monroe, who is dealt with as an innominato. Dismissals of those who are simply “norteamericanos,” “anfibios,” “pseudo-especialistas,” or “ajenos . . . a nuestra familia” stake out the boundary lines quite clearly—and they should serve as a warning that an attempt to cross them would not be welcome, or even tolerable.
The most recently published polemics between Jones and Hitchcock on one side and Armistead and Monroe on the other serve to show, among other things, the extent to which Jones rejects arguments made by Armistead and Monroe simply because neither are bona fide Arabists according to his definition of the term (see Jones 1980, 1981, and 1983; Hitchcock 1984; Armistead 1982 and 1986; Monroe 1982; and Armistead and Monroe 1983 and 1985). Consequently Jones considers Armistead and Monroe incapable of understanding why the kharjas can only be understood as part of the classical Arabic tradition (and by Arabic