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CHAPTER ONE

The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography

Leave to us, in Heaven’s name, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and keep your Omar, your Alchabitius, your Aben Zoar, your Abenragel.

—Pico della Mirandola

Modern civilization’s myriad pretensions to objectivity have unfortunately tended to obscure the fact that much of our writing of history is as much a myth-making activity as that of more primitive societies. We often regard tribal histories or ancient myths that do not cloak themselves in such pretensions as less objective than our own. We are prone to forget that history is written by the victors and serves to ratify and glorify their ascendancy—and we forget how many tracks are covered in that process. The writing of literary history, the close and often indispensable ancillary of general history, is preoccupied with the myths of our intellectual and artistic heredity, and it, too, tells those stories we want to hear, chooses the most illustrious parentage possible, and canonizes family trees that mesh with the most cherished notions we hold about our parentage.

The most general, and in many ways the most influential and pervasive, image or construct we have is that of ourselves and our culture, an entity we have dubbed “Western,” a clearly comparative title. Whether it is spoken or unspoken, named or unnamed, we are governed by the notion that there is a distinctive cultural history that can be characterized as Western, and that it is in distinctive, necessary, and fundamental opposition to non-Western culture and cultural history. Few of us, even less as laymen than as scholars, have conceived of developments or tackled specific problems in the literary and cultural history of western Europe assuming anything other than that this is an appropriate model.

While the value and accuracy of such a characterization for the modern (that is, usually the Renaissance and post-Renaissance) period is for others to decide, and while it has recently been the object of intense criticism,¹ its relevance for those whose scholarly domain is further back in time, namely Europe’s medieval period, has been less carefully examined. In fact, the continued relatively routine acceptance of the clichéd East-West dichotomy for the medieval period is particularly noteworthy because medievalists have for some time been attempting to overthrow a series of other clichés and simplistic perceptions of the Middle Ages.

But this particular aspect of the myth of our past appears to be so fundamental that questioning it is not part of the various programs for the reorientation and revival of medieval studies, and its precepts continue to be part of the foundation of most studies, including many viewed as new, even revolutionary, in their approaches. What many consider to be the ravages of the new criticism have left at least this part of our old-fashioned notions intact.²

The irony is that while the Kiplingesque dichotomy, with its tacit pre-supposition of the superiority of West over East, had its grounding in the visible particularism of Europe and the irrefutable dominance of European empires over their colonies in more recent periods, the medieval situation has been characterized by many, with ample documentation, as something more resembling the reverse. A surprising number of historians of various fields, nationalities, and vested interests have described the relationship in the medieval world as one in which it was al-Andalus (as Muslim Spain was called by the Arabs) and its ancestry and progeny that were ascendant, and ultimately dominant, in the medieval period. It has been variously characterized as the age of Averroes, as an Oriental period of Western history, a period in which Western culture grew in the shadows of Arabic and Arabic-manipulated learning, the “European Awakening,” with the prince, a speaker of Arabic, bestowing the kiss of delivery from centuries of deep sleep. For a considerable number of historians, the “renaissance of the twelfth century” is a phrase that in part masks a revolution instigated and propagated by Andalusians and their cultural achievements.³

Remarkably little of the information and few of the hypotheses that have informed these views have passed into the realm of common knowledge, however. Even less so has this story—or its beginnings, the beginnings of a cultural history different from the one we are more used to nurturing—penetrated the ranks of the literary historians of medieval Europe.⁴ The resistance to a consideration of this different story of our parentage, of a displacement of our conception of our fundamental cultural lineage, is quite deep-seated. The tenor of some of the responses to the suggestion that this Arab-centered vision might be a more viable historical reconstruction for the West has occasionally been reminiscent of the reactions once provoked by Darwin’s suggestion (for so was the theory of evolution construed) that we were “descended from monkeys.” It is time to scrutinize such responses more closely and critically than we have in the past.⁵

A preconceived and long-established, even canonized, image has a great impact on research on the literary and cultural history of a period. It would hardly be revolutionary to note that its import is enormous. We operate with a repository of assumptions, and knowledge based on those assumptions, that govern what concepts, propositions, and hypotheses we find tenable. The images we have of certain periods and cultures, the intellectual baggage we carry, is an inescapable determinant and shaper of what we are able to see in or imagine for those cultures or periods of time. Those images also determine what facts we include in our histories and what texts we canonize in our literary histories, although we then use those same facts and canons to justify and enhance the history they tell. The images and paradigms that thus govern or dictate our views, the parameters of our research, are not free of political and ideological factors or cultural prejudices, although the notion that there is such a thing as value-free, objective scholarship persists in many quarters to this day, particularly in literary scholarship.⁶

But the veil of supposed objectivity is not limited to the older, explicitly historicizing philological period of our literary studies. One of the effects of the advent and popularity of American new criticism, with its emphasis on the primacy of the “text itself” was to give greater vigor to that myth of the possibility of objectivity, the possibility of considering a text with very limited or no interference from external, and possibly distorting, considerations. There is some irony in the fact that while previous historically based literary studies may have explicitly tied texts to a cultural and historical paradigm that served to explicate the text, the new criticism in most instances succeeded merely in masking the effects that such an image had on the readings of the texts. While making believe that they had somehow miraculously been eliminated from the literary worldview of the scholar, the structuralist analysis of much literature, in fact, further cemented and canonized the historicocultural images and parameters that an earlier period of criticism had felt obliged to reestablish in each piece of scholarship.

At least in principle, the older procedure could lead to a questioning and criticism of the proffered cultural views and assumptions. There is little question, of course, of the benefits wrought by that shift in our perspective, of the value of many of the precepts of a supposedly purer and self-referential analysis of literary texts. It succeeded in restoring a notion of the special qualities of literature qua literature and corrected many of the deficiencies of previous scholarship.

But the silence of much of structuralism on issues such as the relevant sociohistorical background for a self-referential and supposedly purely synchronic analysis of a medieval text only ratified, for students as well as fellow scholars, the validity of the Europeanist diachrony and social milieu that clearly informed the semantic fields of such analysis.⁷ Thus, the appearance of possible objectivity masked but did not eliminate the problem of a regnant ideological image in certain branches of literary historiography. Its dominance in literary criticism over the past thirty years has helped to preclude any direct examination of what images and paradigms we operate with and what their value and/or accuracy might be. Or it may be that it is merely coincidental that the effects of the shift away from a historical perspective in literary studies have been strongest in the precise period in which many historians and their textual discoveries (such as that of the kharjas) were suggesting that it was timely to revise our image of the past. In either case, the turning of the tide or the apparent end of a cycle makes it more critically acceptable to address the issue of our conceptual and imaginative paradigm of medieval history.

The notion that there are paradigms that govern both periods of history and bodies and periods of scholarship and that these paradigms undergo periodic revolutions has become so commonplace since the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s proposal as to make it redundant to quote Kuhn himself on the subject. It has become part of the common parlance of scholarly discourse in many areas to consider the nature and effects of such paradigms and, when they are perceived to exist, the shiftings of paradigms that signal major changes or revolutions of a “world view” or an “image.”

The paradigm that to such a great extent established our own notions of what constituted the Middle Ages was partially formed in the immediate postmedieval period, which viewed itself as a renaissance—a rebirth, if we accept the implications of the terminology—following that moribund period. The definitions of “self” and “other” that emerge during this period commonly regarded as primarily modern, both chronologically and for its formative influence, focus in great measure on the nature of its relationship with preceding periods, the classical and the medieval. It was in and through the Renaissance that the dominant position of the classical Greek and Latin worlds emerged. The concept of self, and ultimately of the Western self, would be strongly affected, in many cases completely dominated, by the emerging relationship between the modern and the classical worlds, a relationship viewed as ancestral. Out of this relationship there was derived, ultimately, the critical notion, which remains strong today, of the essential continuity and unity of Western civilization from the Greeks through fifteenth-century Italy, having survived the lull of the Dark Ages, and thence through the rest of Europe and European history. It is a notion of history formulated as much to deny the medieval past and its heritage as to establish a new and more worthy ancestry.⁸

But in this view of the world that preceded the Renaissance, the world from whose shadow it emerged, the paradigm of the Renaissance is necessarily paradoxical. A delicate balance must be maintained between sameness, in which the medievals were part of a continuum, and change, in which they were different and inferior. The depiction of the medieval world as a dark age during which the real knowledge and legitimate pursuits of Western man (those which had flourished and reached their zenith in Greece and Rome) were temporarily in hiatus, moribund, dormant, stifled, or nonexistent, became so fundamental a part of the general perception of history that it is still operative in many spheres to this day. Although certain aspects of that paradigm, primarily the impression of a formidable primitivism due to the medieval world’s divorce from the classical heritage, have been debunked (though only very recently), other vestiges of it are clearly part of the working assumptions of many scholars.⁹

Arguably, the notion clung to most tenaciously is a variation of what in Spanish literary historiography is succinctly called estado latente: Despite the overt darkness and significant breaks in the continuity with classical ancestors, the medievals were still fundamentally, if covertly, Western. It may have been a relatively dormant period, but it was nonetheless a link with those whose accomplishments did more clearly define Western culture.

Several logical corollaries are implicit in this image of the Renaissance and of how it is at once a period set apart from the medieval period, allied as it was with the Greeks and Romans in their golden age, and a period that saw the beginnings of modern western Europe. The first is the partial or complete omission of a recognition that the medieval world had included centers of learning and revival where men were conversant with the Greek heritage that was to be “rediscovered” in the Renaissance. Nor was it likely, within the limits of this conceptual framework, that one would imagine that one of the characteristics of the earlier, darker period could have been the existence of a secular humanism in open struggle with the forces of dogmatic faith. The admission of the existence of such phenomena would not only have robbed the later period of its claims to being a renascence, at least in any dramatic and absolute way, but it would also have deprived it (and us, since in great measure we continue to cling to that particular historical dialectic) of that clear-cut distinction between the two periods that is dominant in modern European historical mythology.

But the remainder of the myth, the crystallization of the concept of Europeanness and its ancestry, was largely spun out in the nineteenth century, and it played a critical role at this moment of high-pitched awareness of the particularity and superiority of Europe that came with the imperial and colonial experience and the post-Romantic experience with the Orient. This experience certainly helped sharpen the perception not only of European community and continuity but also its difference from others, or from the Other. It was an Other (and the Arab world was one of its principal manifestations) that Europe was by its own standards bringing out of the darkness and civilizing, at least as far as that was possible for those who were not European in the first place.

Thus was eliminated the possibility that the Middle Ages might be portrayed as a historical period in which a substantial part of culture and learning was based in a radically different foreign culture. To view an Arabic-Islamic component, even in its European manifestations, as positive and essential would have been unimaginable, and it would remain so as long as the views and scholarship molded in that period continued to inform our education. The proposition that the Arab world had played a critical role in the making of the modern West, from the vantage point of the late nineteenth century and the better part of this century, is in clear and flagrant contradiction of cultural ideology. It is unimaginable in the context of the readily observable phenomenon that was institutionalized as an essential element of European ideology and that has remained so in many instances to this day: cultural supremacy over the Arab world.

It is, consequently, altogether logical that part of the vision of the Middle Ages, that part that saw it as relatively backward, ignorant, and unenlightened, has by and large been eliminated, or at least substantially modified, while the structurally balancing notion of its fundamental sameness, its place in a largely unbroken continuum of what constitutes Westernness is, if anything, more elaborately developed and more deeply entrenched. It is in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period during which modern philology (as it was once called) became an academic discipline and an intellectual field, that the major additions to the general cultural paradigms for the medieval period have emerged and been codified.

The earliest addition, which was clearly marked by the imprint of Romanticism, was the bringing into focus and prominence of the “primitive” European or folkloristic constituent elements of medieval culture, raising to a level of respectable analysis the inquiry into such things as the Celtic or Germanic influences on the culture and literature of the early Romance world. The other, not so much an innovation as a rigid codification of earlier notions about the “Age of Faith,” is the elevation of scripture and scriptural exegesis as the most potent, usually the overwhelming, cultural component of the Middle Ages. In its most extreme form, this view of the power of Christian faith and its institutions is strong enough to completely eliminate most other possible cultural factors. The image was to attain its most exacting articulation in the scholarship of D. W. Robertson and the Robertsonians.¹⁰

The first of these major additions to or refinements of our notions of the nature of medieval culture highlights and enhances nonclassical but unmistakably European elements. It weaves the contributions of the cultural substratum into the story of the making of Europe and ratifies the legitimacy of that heritage as an integral part of the West. The second image, in turn, codifies Christianity, the triumphant religion of the West, as its dominant and shaping cultural force, an essential, rather than incidental, component of our cultural ancestry. Both the non-Roman substratum and the Christian superstratum are (not by accident, one might guess) elements peculiarly and characteristically European, essential ingredients in what sets the West apart from everywhere else.

While most individual medievalists have more complex and variegated views of the period on which they work than any of these simple paradigms, the paradigms are nonetheless there, and they are formative factors. To spell them out is to delimit and understand the parameters of the medieval cultural factors that are normally considered and that are normally accepted as reasonable. Thus if one’s study is grounded in the pre-Latin substratum—its mythology, folklore, or literature—or if it relies on a close reading of the Latin sermons, the Church fathers, or the Latin “foundation,” then it falls within those acceptable and canonized limits. It does not challenge the boundaries of the image of the medieval period but instead adds to the evidence for the validity of that image. Even more important, perhaps, a study that falls within the limits of those possible narratives of European history needs neither justification (as to why one would bring such texts or presumed sociocultural conditions to bear on the study) nor external, nontextual proof that the writer in question was specifically aware of the texts or other material adduced. Such studies need no apologies.

Within such contexts our paradigmatic views of the medieval period have not readily expanded to include the possibility of greater cultural polymorphism. Indeed, given the historical circumstances and cultural ambience of the formative period of our discipline, such a move would have been surprising and uncharacteristic. Nineteenth and early twentieth century medievalists could, without having radically to alter their view of themselves and their world, proceed to redefine the extent to which the medieval world was not as backward as it might previously have seemed to be. But a reappraisal of the role played by an essentially alien, Semitic world in the creation of the basic features of that same period would have involved dangerous and ultimately untenable modifications of the paradigms governing their view of themselves. While cultural ideology may often remain unarticulated—its very unconsciousness being one of its essential traits—it is no less powerful for being unspoken, and it would be naive to argue that the cultural unconscious does not play a formative role in any variety of cultural studies. An individual, even a scholar, can scarcely operate outside its bounds.¹¹

The relative paucity of material wealth, the perceived cultural inferiority, and the demonstrable powerlessness of the Arab world in the period in which modern medieval scholarship was carefully delimiting its parameters could hardly have suggested or encouraged a dramatically different view of relations between East and West. Contemporary views generated by the relative positions of the two cultures—with one eclipsing and dominating, literally shaping, the other—could not have escaped being factors in the elaboration of an image of the Arab world, even in an earlier period, that could have been, at most, marginal in the formation of our own culture and civilization. It is fruitless and somewhat misguided to be sanctimonious about such matters, to judge or condemn others by moral and ethical standards that did not exist in their own universes. But it is equally misguided to ignore the fact that such ideologies have existed or to suppose that intellectual enterprises have remained unaffected by their tenets.

Within this context, then, how surprising can it be that in the relatively short history of our discipline, not only has there been no addition to the medieval paradigm of an important Semitic or Arabic role, but also that whatever intimations of such a role had survived from earlier periods or have been introduced more recently have largely been discarded or put aside.¹² The untenability of such a notion lies not so much in the difficulty of revising our view of an earlier period of history. In and of itself, that is relatively easy to do, and historical revisionism is one of the most popular of academic pastimes. The key to the unimaginability of this particular bit of revisionism is that it would have challenged and ultimately belied the regnant worldview, requiring the reversal of an ideologically conditioned sense of the communal Western self. It requires the ability not only to imagine but to accept as plausible and admissible an image of our own civilization, at one of its formative moments, as critically indebted to and dependent on a culture that was for some time generally regarded as inferior and, by some lights, as the quintessence of the foreign and the Other.

And yet, in the past one hundred and fifty years or so there have been numerous suggestions within the scholarly community that one of the critical components in the making of the Middle Ages was Arabic and/or Semitic. The critical literature exploring and detailing such views is in fact copious. But although a certain group of historians, and the odd literary historian, has stated or reiterated the view, or some aspect of it, that one or more basic features of our medieval world was directly or indirectly dependent on the medieval Arabic European world, such perspectives have never become part of the mainstream within the community of scholars who regularly deal with medieval European studies, particularly literary studies.¹³ The Arabic component of our paradigmatic view of the Middle Ages has always remained incidental; it has never been systemic. It may perhaps account for a given, usually isolated, feature, but such a feature is literally a world apart from the cultural sets that are perceived to be integral to the general system of medieval European culture.¹⁴

The two closest approximations to a revision of such views, and what can only be described as their failure, are themselves indicative of the unflagging vitality of the paradigm. On the one hand, there has been a Europeanization, an adaptation and absorption into this paradigm, of the body of information that reveals that Arabic “translations,” particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, contributed decisively to the intellectual revival of Europe at that time.¹⁵ The impulse and need to absorb this discovery that otherwise threatened the coherence of Western ideology as imposed on the Middle Ages, was dictated in great measure by the eminence of the European historian who first called the phenomenon to the attention of a wide audience of fellow Europeanists. The mode of its absorption into the existing matrices was suggested by the title of Charles Homer Haskins’s own work, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The association between this renaissance and the later and atavistically European renaissance was inescapable. In fact, the thrust of Haskins’s argument could reasonably be construed as being that the dating of the European Renaissance was off by several centuries, that the European discovery or rediscovery of our ancestral and hereditary culture really began in the twelfth century, and that a general secular cultural revival of considerable proportions followed on its heels. But Haskins was aware of the fact that such translations were almost universally an essential feature of Arabic intellectual life in Europe at the time (both in Sicily and Spain); that many of the most influential “translations” were not at all translations from the Greek as such, but rather translations of Arabic philosophical commentaries on Aristotle, who for some centuries had been one of the philosophical luminaries in the Arabic tradition; and that the propagation and reception of such texts was at least in some measure explicable only in terms of a deeper penetration and knowledge of Arabic intellectual life in Europe, and of its far greater prestige, than had previously been adduced.¹⁶

Another failure in introducing a paradigmatically meaningful Semitic component to the European view of its own medieval period is considerably more complex and perhaps more accurately described as a success, although one of very mixed blessings and benefits. The only image of the Middle Ages that regularly admits a shaping and globally influential role for Arabs and Jews is that cultivated and perpetuated by many Hispanists and Spaniards, both medievalists and more general historians and philosophers. This exception, as far as it goes, is undoubtedly due to the fact that the seven-century-long Arab “occupation” of large parts of the Iberian peninsula is a historical fact less easily dismissed and ignored by Spaniards than by other Europeans.¹⁷ But, curiously enough, with a handful of very important exceptions, the nature of the molding influence and its effects on subsequent events and tendencies in Spanish culture and history as they are perceived by many generations of Spaniards and Hispanists is a derailing one. It was, in simplified form, a de-Europeanizing one at best and in most other cases a largely or overwhelmingly negative one.¹⁸ The most popular vision is one that might be represented by citing the eminent historian Sánchez-Albornoz, whose views are succinct, if extreme: “Without Islam, who can guess what our destiny might have been? Without Islam, Spain would have followed the same paths as France, Germany and England; and to judge from what we have achieved over the centuries in spite of Islam, perhaps we would have marched at their head” (translation, Monroe 1970:257). While few other cultural or literary historians have been as vigorous and frank as he, it is difficult to dispute the prevalence and strength of some variety of this argument.¹⁹ This and its many other companion pieces and like opinions reveal once more the firmness of the Europeanist view that the true Europe and Europeanness are not Arabic- or Jewish-influenced. What at first glance is a formative component is more accurately a deforming component in terms of the rest of Europe, the real Europe. In Sánchez-Albornoz’s view (and that of numerous others), Spain’s defects—its not being up to the standards of France, England, and Germany—are a result of the misfortune of having been de-Europeanized by Semitic influences. But is this really substantially different from the premise of those literary historians who appear to be writing the history of a country they present as fully a part of the Western tradition, one in which the existence of Muslims and Jews and their cultures might never be guessed by the innocent reader?²⁰ Do not both views express, in different styles, the same premises, that is, that Semiticised Spain is less than the rest of Europe and that Spain with those elements blotted out would be part of the European tradition? For other Europeanists, most of whom naturally enough take their cues on matters Hispanic from Hispanists, the result has often been that characterized by the notion of Spain’s “cultural belatedness” vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.²¹

Even so, one must know that the question of the effect of the Arab sojourn in Spain is hardly a matter of vital importance to most medievalists. Sánchez-Albornoz’s preoccupation with the subject is a result of his being a Spaniard, not the natural result of being a Hispanist or a medievalist. Most Hispanists and medievalists begin their study of medieval literature with the first texts in Romance and assume Latin, conceivably even Greek, to be the necessary classical languages to be learned. Hebrew and Arabic are normally considered superfluous. Even in the wake of the “discovery” of the Mozarabic kharjas nearly forty years ago, when a considerable number of Spanish medievalists actually teach these Romance refrains of classical Arabic and Hebrew poems, only a distinct minority of scholars and teachers read them or present them as part of the full poems (written in one or the other of the two classical Semitic languages) of which they are, in fact, a part.²²

Knowledge of this body of poetry and the expected subsequent awareness of the world from which it came apparently has not affected the traditional canon of Romance literary history. There is no sign of the imminent appearance on required reading lists of Ibn Quzmān, Jehudah ben-Ezra, Maimonides, or Averroes. The signs abound that even in the period after the discovery of the kharjas which was once heralded as the beginning of a “new spring” for European lyric studies,²³ only a relative handful of the details of our story have been altered or expanded, few or none of its basic premises have been modified, and its vitality is hardly diminished. Anthologies of medieval European lyric can still be published with a paltry section entitled “Arabic and Other Nonmainstream Poetry,” and it may be comprised solely of a fragment of Ibn Ḥazm’s Dove’s Neck-Ring, which would be as if in the section on Provençal lyric there were but a fragment of Andreas Capellanus’s treatise.²⁴ Prominent cutting-edge journals in literary studies can still devote entire issues to the crossroads at which medieval literary studies find themselves and include not the slightest hint that one of the problems to be addressed is that of the cultural biases and boundaries that delimit the field itself, despite the many indications of the inadequacy of the canon and its parameters that have surfaced in the last forty years.²⁵

The crossroads, turning points, or moments of crisis that medieval literary studies have faced, and faced up to, in recent years have overwhelmingly been those concerning methods of literary criticism. The choice is most simply presented as being that between the formalist criticism of scholars such as Zumthor and the classicist criticism best exemplified by the still-authoritative work of Curtius. What all this has increasingly boiled down to is the question of whether medieval literary studies, once the vanguard of the discipline of modern literary studies, will remain largely a bastion of old-fashioned, philological, historicizing study, which is increasingly removed from the critical and theoretical avant-garde. Either of the two possible answers to this question raises eyebrows and threatens those parties who have a vested interest in the dominance of one approach or another.

So far, neither answer has implied any necessary reevaluation of the very bases of our definition of the medieval period, its literature, or its salient cultural features and parameters. The compromise between the two extremes, stated both elegantly and succinctly by Poirion, is to see (and therefore presumably to analyze) the literary text as being “situated at the point of connection between the imaginary and the ideological” (Poirion 1979:406). The most reasonable critic, therefore, rejects both the dehistoricization of formalist criticism (and many of its progeny) and the devaluation of the essential literary or imaginative properties of texts, which is peculiar both to very traditional philological studies and to some contemporary new critical analysis.

But the most reasonable critic, of whatever critical stripe, might also wish to question and reevaluate his or her most basic concept of the fundamental historicocultural characteristics of the period, because such a concept ultimately affects in innumerable ways the results of the application of any method. The strength of the model or image with which we start out is paramount; at a minimum, it defines what is and is not possible, what a word or image that we “know” or “recognize” is likely to mean, or not to mean. This is self-evident if the approach used is one of the several classicist variations, since at least one of the principal objectives of such a study is archaeological, to find and establish the historicocultural backdrop of the text at hand. This linguistic, literary, and cultural backdrop informs both the questions asked and the answers given. It determines the probable meaning and origin of a word in the twelfth century, a given author’s presumed use of Aquinas or a Bernardine sermon, and the kind of assumptions we make about the relationships between a text and its society. But, as I noted earlier in this chapter, the impact of our model, this background, is scarcely less at the other end of the critical spectrum, in formalist studies.²⁶

In both cases such premises are fundamental determinants, and yet, paradoxically, it seems they are also the premises we have least frequently questioned or examined. But, given the many studies that suggest that they may be inadequate, are these not rightly among those most deserving of scrutiny, justification, and validation? One knows, or believes it to be a fair assumption, that an eleventh-century word did not denote “airplane” or “tomato,” or “relativity” in the Einsteinian sense of the word. But how have we determined, and is it a reasonable determination, that it is more or less likely that the word gazel used in Provençal could have meant what it did for speakers of Hispano-Arabic? How can we still be so certain of our assumption that the basic reading list for a budding medievalist should include Aquinas and Augustine but not Ibn Ḥazm or Avicenna? How revolutionary or revealing can the deconstruction of medieval texts be if the series of social and ideological mores or norms presumably being covertly subverted in such texts have themselves not been carefully scrutinized? The ideologically bound strictures and limits of our “common knowledge” and even “common sense” are not easily bypassed. As Stanley Fish has noted (in a discussion that was hardly concerned with the role of Arabs in medieval Europe):

I argue that whatever account we have of a work or a period or of the entire canon is an account that is possible or intelligible only within the assumptions embodied in current professional practice. Rather than standing independently of our efforts, works, periods, and canons have the shape they do precisely because of our efforts, and therefore no act of literary criticism, no matter how minimally “descriptive” can be said to “bypass” the network that enables it. (Fish 1983:357)

But even more engaging than the fact that our paradigms govern us faute de mieux should be the recognition that many of the most widely discussed critical problems of literary history and even theory, particularly as applied to medieval studies, dovetail well with an explicit exploration and reevaluation of the images we hold of the medieval period and the nature of the canon that derives from it directly or indirectly. It seems only logical that in the resurgent discussion of the dialectic of the sameness versus the alterity of the medieval period and its cultural relics, a discussion that tacitly recognizes the parallel and sometimes overlapping dialectic between self and other, we should more closely and explicitly reevaluate our assumptions and knowledge of the often-hidden Other—the Arab, the Semite, the Averroes—who stands silently behind Aristotle in the thirteenth century. Perhaps more to the point, we might ask in this context whether he really was so silent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or whether it is not instead our postrenascentist views and parlance of the period that have made him so, giving his place to others whose ancestry we find more illustrious and thus shielding ourselves from a recognition that strikes at the heart of certain beliefs about ourselves. And is the dialectic that governed the Middle Ages really or exclusively that between pagan and Christian, and between classical and modern, or is this, too, a legacy of the Renaissance view of that period and an ancillary to the colonial and postcolonial view of ourselves?

The theoretical questions of the nature of meaning, of whether it is created or received, and of the covert and self-subverting meanings of both literary and nonliterary texts, can obviously be carried out with no wider or more revolutionary a concept of the cultural and literary mores than those we already have, those explicitly canonized and triumphant in Western literary historiography. But should not the more revealing exploration of such questions be correlated with an investigation into the mores that were discarded or subsumed, damned explicitly or tacitly by the authorities of the time and the cleansing historians of later periods? Can we as medievalists afford to continue to believe that because an eleventh-century duke of Aquitaine was Christian and “European” his poetic lexicon was delimited by the official Christian and “European” ideologies of his time? Can we speak authoritatively about the repressions and subversions of his poetry if we begin by accepting as valid parameters for his universe what has emerged as legitimate and Catholic in subsequent periods of time? And are there not patent and often ironic gaps in discussions of the “anxiety of influence” that are informed only by possible influences that were and have been canonized?

Revisionism, in literary history as well as in other fields, is often unpopular. It can seem to involve the ritualized murder of cherished ancestry. This is the case no matter whether it is described in the oedipal terminology of Bloom, in the context of the notions of historical relativism and storytelling of White, or in terms that follow the concepts of discourse of Foucault.

But at this juncture it is important to clarify several issues that may make the particular literary-historical revision that I will suggest seem less dramatic and more reasonable. First, I am scarcely suggesting that the prevailing image and canon we have needs to be discarded in toto. In fact, I do not believe any segment of the canon need be discarded at all. Rather, my analysis of the ideological factors that have shaped our images leads me to believe that it is the existing canon and image that have unjustifiably discarded important figures and texts or have undervalued them or euphemized them to the point that they have lost much of the power and impact many believe they had for their contemporaries—and that in turn informed texts that we have canonized. The suggestion is not that Aquinas be removed or replaced. On the contrary, it is that we add the tradition of Averroes to it, and perhaps then begin to see the extent to which Aquinas is a response to other, Averroean texts.

In other words, I believe that the selective process of history and literary history has, in the natural course of telling the story of the victors, deprived us of an appreciation of many critical subtexts, and has in great measure eliminated or simplified and distorted beyond recognition many of the cultural forces that were catalytic in the medieval period. Thus the part of the image that I propose should be discarded is that part that has eliminated the possibility of seeing in the Andalusian world the impetus for change and that part that cannot imagine that a cultural force now seemingly alien to our own was once a part of its foundation.

My own casting of this period of cultural and literary history is itself selective, of course, and as much constrained to pick and choose facts and texts as any other. I have few delusions that it is any less a myth than those I am attempting to modify in the process, but I think it is a myth that has several advantages. The first is that it does not shy away from the concept of a mixed ancestry for western Europe that until recently has seemed largely unimaginable and insupportable. The second is that I believe that it enriches rather than impoverishes the recounting of the story we already work with, the readings of texts we have already agreed on. Thus my criticism of the existing myth is, as I have just noted, that it is insufficiently variegated to account for the medieval period and its considerably different historicopolitical circumstances, and that it is too much shaped by cultural prejudices of an era in Western ideology that although just now in its death throes in some areas is still quite powerful in the realm of literary historiography. It can perhaps now be fruitfully discarded there as well.

Notes

1. See primarily Said 1978 and some of the extended criticism and further considerations engendered by his book. Three reviews are of particular interest: Lewis 1982, whose highly negative reaction reflects much of the response of the traditional “Orientalist” academic community; Beard 1979, whose favorable reaction raises the question, among others, of the expansion of Said’s model to other areas of academic scholarship; and Brombert 1979, which is valuable because of its detachment from the Orientalist scene and the issues of general academic interest it explores. The salient points made by Said that are relevant to my discussion (and that are, incidentally, those least contradicted, even by his staunchest critics) are found in the introduction (1–28) and can be summarized as follows: that the formation of the image of the West is contrapuntal to the formation of the image of the Orient; that the dominant discourse is one of superiority “reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter” (7); that the distinction between “pure” and “political” knowledge is not an absolute and clear one and that the liberal consensus that knowledge is fundamentally apolitical “obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced” (10); that literary studies in particular have assiduously avoided discussion of the issue of political ideology shaping the structures of knowledge and have generally “avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical scholarship.” (13)

2. For two recent examples of collections of articles devoted to the pressing critical problems in medieval studies, see New Literary History 10 (1979) and L’esprit créateur 18 (1978) and 23 (1983).

3. Makdisi 1974 includes both his own statement about the “European awakening” and pertinent quotes from some of his predecessors (Lombard and Dawson are among the most important). For this perspective on the history of medicine specifically, see Sarton 1951, and from the point of view of the history of science in general, see Haskins 1924. Haskins 1927, the widely read and cited Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, is also revealing. Roughly the last half of the book deals with aspects of that renaissance that were explicitly Arabic-derived. In the area of the history of philosophy, few have underestimated the importance of Averroes. Even Kristeller, who is primarily concerned with the Latin tradition, makes serious concessions to the importance of the Arabic tradition: “As is well known, the Aristotelianism of the Arabs, and especially that of Averroes, exercised a powerful influence upon the Jewish thought of the later Middle Ages . . . and strongly affected the philosophy of the Christian West” (Kristeller 1961:28–29). He is nevertheless able to follow such an observation with this one: “If we want to understand the history of thought and learning in the Western Latin Middle Ages we must first of all realize that it had its foundations in Roman, not Greek, antiquity” (Kristeller 1961:29).

4. These generalizations about the attitudes among Romance medievalists are just that, generalizations, and they are hardly exempt from the enumeration of any number of exceptions. But even a cursory glance at the structures of our academic departments, the standard medieval canon, the sorts of courses that are (and are not) taught, requirements for degrees, general bibliographies, literary anthologies and literary histories, and so forth, all will confirm that as a rule such generalizations are accurate. It is curious that although there is widespread acceptance of the general endebtedness 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 classicists). Leaving aside for the moment the substance of the argument, Jones’s approach is reminiscent of the kind of argument Sánchez-Albornoz makes when Jones questions Armistead’s competence in dealing with an Arabic text (“I have a problem,” Jones states, “which Professor Armistead possibly does not share. . . . On principle I do not work on the Arabic texts on the basis of translations” [1983:51]). It is not difficult to understand, when reading Jones’s works, that it all boils down to the belief that the lines that have been drawn between the Arabist’s domain and the Romance scholar’s domain are appropriate ones and that hybridization is unhealthy and produces bad scholarship (even, ironically, when one is dealing with clearly hybrid poetry.) Moreover, there is here an intellectual condescension that evokes memories of Sánchez-Albornoz’s attitude toward Lida’s “meddling.” This is manifest in comments such as that cited above but even more so in Jones’s adducing the authority of “most Arabs and Arabists” to back his views, although his principal cited sources for the view that the poetry is a part of the classical Arabic tradition exclusively could hardly be considered authoritative or up-to-date on the subject of Hispano-Arabic poetry: Nicholson 1907, and Watt and Cachia 1965 (the latter of which devotes all of eight pages to the poetry of Spain but includes a paragraph-long rebuttal of the work of the major historian and critic of Andalusian poetry, Pérès.) The fact that Pérès and Monroe are the two scholars who have devoted the most attention specifically to Hispano-Arabic Andalusian poetry (Pérès 1953 and Monroe 1974 being the essential handbooks on the subject) apparently counts for less than being a mainstream Arabist who has not altered his views by attempting to understand that poetry in terms of al-Andalus as a hybrid society and in the context of Romance as well as Arabic traditions. And Jones’s condescension is such that, even in citing Watt and Cachia, he fails to cite their full opinions, as expressed in the concluding paragraph of those twelve pages: “So it was that in Spain, alone among Muslim lands, the vigorous spirit of the common people breached the wall of convention erected by the classicists” (Watt and Cachia 1965:121).

In a different sphere, it is revealing to note that the most hostile attacks on Gittes’s 1983 article on “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition” are by individuals who take her to task for incomplete and faulty knowledge when she speaks of the Arabic tradition. These letters are, in fact, primarily concerned with the accuracy of sources in pre-Arabic traditions, which Gittes has identified using the handful of sources accessible to a nonspecialist and which, in any case, as she points out, are not directly relevant to the fate of the narrative tradition within Europe.

6. Since Aristotle, the notion that ideology affects all historical writing has been an important feature of the criticism of historiography and discussions of the inherent problems in distinguishing between history and poetry. For a recent exchange and discussion of the effect of ideology on literary studies and the effect it is currently having on the profession (though in general terms rather than on the medieval sphere specifically), see Said 1983, Fish 1983, and Bate 1983. Other recent contributions to the subject are Said 1982 and especially White 1982. White makes a series of observations that are particularly pertinent to our study: Hegel “was convinced . . . that you could learn a great deal, of both practical and theoretical worth, from the study of the study of history. And one of the things you learn from the study of the study of history is that such study is never innocent, ideologically or otherwise, whether launched from the political perspective of the Left, Right, or Center” (White 1982:137).

7. Ellis 1974 gives a succinct view of the application of structuralism to medieval studies and maintains that the only difference is that of learning a different language, which is just like learning any foreign language (of which one need learn only the synchronic state and need not know any of its history). Two of the most striking and revealing cases of the pitfalls of this approach are found in Guiraud 1971 and 1978. Guiraud’s first study of the etymological structures of trobar is explicitly synchronic, but the author is hardly free either from the problems of the enigmatic history of the word or, more significantly, from what diachronic studies of that history have told him. In fact, at a certain juncture he faces the fact that his synchronic analysis of what the word means is somewhat at odds with the range of possibilities provided by the diachronic studies he is aware of, and these exclude Ribera’s proposal. In his reworking of this material in the later publication, Guiraud takes into account the possible Arabic etyma for Provençal joi and jovens in Chapter 6. (This is Denomy’s proposal [Denomy 1949], but clearly Guiraud is only familiar with Lazar’s 1964 presentation of that material.) However, still unfamiliar in 1978 with the suggested Arabic derivation of trobar, he is elusive about the problem of the apparent disjunction between synchronic and diachronic analyses, and following on the heels of his presentation of the case of jovens, this seems all the more ironic. It is also a very explicit case of how illusory it is to attempt to separate the two areas of study so neatly. For further discussion of this general issue, see note 26 below, and for different perspectives on the dehistoricization of medieval texts and studies of them, see Bloomfield 1979 and Nichols 1983. Jauss 1979 and Calin 1983 tackle the problem from the perspective of the “otherness” of the medieval period and its dialectical relationship with the modern one.

8. It is revealing to take Petrarch, as many scholars do, as one of the first explicit advocates of such an analysis of history. His role as one of the first humanists has been discussed by many, and his views on the primacy of classical studies, on the darkness of the Dark Ages, and on that entire constellation of notions are widely known and cited. It is revealing to note, and this is less often referred to, that such views were accompanied by quite virulent anti-Arabism. For a presentation and analysis of this phenomenon, see Gabrieli 1977. Hays 1968 is also helpful for understanding the relative modernity of our concept of what constitutes Europe.

9. The debunking of the myth of the darkness of the Middle Ages is certainly best exemplified by Haskins 1927, but Pernoud 1977 indicates that many of those views have never been completely eradicated, and why in her view they ought to be. Among general literary historians there is surprisingly often a notion of the primitivism of the medievals relative to the modern period, and prominent critics (see Bloom 1973) can still regard everything before the Renaissance as antediluvian. Even among medievalists, similar views are not unknown. Zumthor (1975), to take one example, is able to characterize the period and its men as incapable of autobiographical writing. A recent nonacademic perspective on the surge of interest in medieval studies and what this implies for our general perceptions of the period is Murphy 1984. See also Jauss 1979 and Calin 1983.

10. For a succinct history and extensive bibliography of the development of these views as reflected in scholarship dealing with troubadour lyrics, see Boase 1976.

11. Prévost (1972:18), inspired by Althusser, notes that people “use” ideology, but “sont également produits et mis en mouvement par l’idéologie, par ce qui fonctionne comme un véritable inconscient culturel” (emphasis mine). Evidence of the institutionalization of these general views surrounds us. General anthologies of European medieval literature do not, as a matter of course, include examples of literature written in Arabic or Hebrew, nor do they even, in many cases, acknowledge or discuss its existence as part of the general historical background. Courses on medieval literature, with few exceptions, perform the same excision. Even the very definition of what is “Spanish” literature that is implicit in the structure of courses and histories and anthologies of the literature systematically excludes what was written in Arabic and Hebrew at the same time as what was written in the Romance vernaculars. The definition of a Hispanist has rarely included knowledge of Islamic Spain from any but a rudimentary fronterizo point of view. In the often daunting inventory of languages deemed necessary tools for a medievalist, Arabic rarely figures. The respective bodies of literature are shelved in different sections of our libraries, are studied by different scholars, and are taught in different departments, even though in some cases they may come from the same place and time. A familiarity with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch is considered necessary for the truly competent French or Spanish medievalist, but even rudimentary information on the translations of Arabic and Hebrew works commissioned by Frederick II or of the Arabic poetry dedicated to his grandfather Roger is rare even in an Italian medievalist. Augustine and Aquinas are de rigueur; Averroes and Maimonides are obscure figures at best. To argue that there are and have been exceptions to such rules would hardly contradict the validity of this rudimentary outline of the general system. It is more telling that we are easily able to name the exceptions, whereas an enumeration of the instances of conformity to such norms would be a daunting task.

12. Curiously, much of the resistance to such a change in our appreciation of the Arabic role in medieval Europe comes from the area of Arabic studies as well, as indicated above in note 5. The only comprehensive and critical study of the historiography of Arabic Europe, Monroe 1970, confirms what even casual observation might well reveal: The conceptual schism between East and West (Arabic and Romance) has in turn resulted in the creation of fundamentally separate fields of inquiry, the setting up of a field that falls between two stools. (No adequate equivalent of Monroe 1970 exists for Siculo-Arabic studies, but see Bausani [1957] 1977, Gabrieli 1957, and Ahmad 1975.) The study of Arabic culture as it existed in Europe is a poor and regularly neglected relation. While often there is a certain amount of lip service paid to the heights of the cultural glory of Córdoba, little recognition of the centrality of al-Andalus in the overall contours of Arabic history can be measured through institutional yardsticks. In fact, it is noteworthy that traditionally the scholars who have studied Arabic culture in Spain have been Spaniards, and those who have been students of Siculo-Arabic matters, Italian. Further confirmation of how far from the Orientalist mainstream this area of study and its scholars are may also be found where one might least expect it. Curiously enough, it is virtually completely ignored in Said’s Orientalism. It is telling that in that wide-ranging and usually unsparingly critical review of the discourse of Orientalism, there is a virtually complete omission of both the phenomenon and the subsequent study of the history and culture of the Arabs in medieval Europe. One cannot but be struck by, and perhaps relieved at, this ignoring of the discourse of Orientalism when it has addressed the question of the Arab on European soil—let alone the further question of why scholarship in those instances has assumed that, despite seven hundred years there, the Arab never became a European and even that the territory he occupied was thus not part of Europe for that period of time! There is clearly some irony in this, in that Said would have found even more convincing grist for his polemical mill in the annals of Spanish Arabism than he found in the writings of Arabists who worked in more traditional areas of Islamic studies, areas that do not address, for example, the question of how the Arabs actually de-Europeanized a group of otherwise legitimate Europeans under their control. There is further irony in the extent to which this reveals that even Said, critic par excellence of the Orientalist discourse, is not altogether immune to what is certainly a part of that discourse—its segregation of Arabic or Arabized Europe. Part of the myth that he is attempting to demolish is ratified in his choice of texts and scholars, and his choice reflects the view that the real Europe is a Europe almost completely unaffected by hundreds of years of Arab domination, that the only real Orientalism, or Arabism, is that practiced solely by those who have always been the colonizers of the Arabs, not those who were transformed by Arabic colonization and who have had to come to grips with that fact in themselves. But even without going this far, without dissecting Orientalism from the same vantage point from which it dissects that field, one can certainly note that this most widely read and influential discussion of the marginalizing approach to the study of the Arabs outside of Europe itself very much reflects the segregation of the study of European Arab culture and history and just how marginal the scholarship on the Arabs in medieval Europe really is.

13. Even traditional Orientalists of the sort severely criticized in Said 1978 have noted the Orientalism of scholarship on the medieval period. See note 4 of the preface, above. In Watt 1972, one finds a statement that might have been made by Said himself: “In this post-Freudian world men realize that the darkness ascribed to one’s enemies is a projection of the darkness in oneself that is not fully admitted. In this way the distorted vision of Islam is to be regarded as a projection of the shadow-side of European man” (83). Daniel 1960 is the most extensive exploration of the misconceptions of Europeans concerning Islam, and it is remarkable that many of his observations about the ignorance and prejudice that are part of this view are relevant not only for the medieval period. See also Southern 1962. A recent study of the crusades concludes with the succinct observation that “modern Western European Christians seem in general to be as ignorant of the fundamentals of Islam as their twelfth-century predecessors” (Finucane 1983:211). To fully realize how acceptable, even expected, much racial prejudice was until very recently, one need only read any of the social histories of the twentieth century or biographies of some of the individuals whose lives and views have spanned the period of vastly altered attitudes. It is enlightening, for example, to read of the matter-of-factness as well as the depth of anti-Indian and anti-Arab feelings among the British upper classes in Manchester’s biography of Churchill. Or, on this side of the Atlantic, the overt racism and anti-Semitism that is considered unspeakable today but that until recently was not only not shocking but was expected of the educated classes are both described in some detail in Lash’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

14. Hitchcock 1977 is a good indication of the studies dedicated to the kharjas alone, and a considerable number of those studies have discussed direct or ancillary questions of possible Arabic borrowings. Even more telling, perhaps, would be a glance at Cantarino 1965, which includes a full bibliography of studies on Dante and on the possible influence of Arabic texts on the Commedia. One is struck both by the quantity of such studies (there are eighty-one entries in his bibliography) and by the fact that so very few of them are by mainstream Italianists. Cantarino himself notes that “Asín Palacio’s theory, although rejected almost unanimously and without any qualifications by Dante critics, did not fail to leave a deep influence on subsequent research of which, however, Dante scholars have not always been fully aware” (182, emphasis mine). Cantarino’s survey of this scholarship and of the extent to which it has been ignored by Dante scholars led him to conclusions much like my own. In noting the impasse in the pseudodebate over Dante’s indebtedness to Arabic sources, he concludes that it “shows rather to what extent the controversy has ceased to be a problem which can be restricted only to the study of Dante’s sources. The controversy has become a problem to be solved only with a reinterpretation of our understanding of the European Middle Ages as a time in which Arabic and Jewish cultural elements as well are given the place they deserve as components of the so-called “Western” tradition. In this light the ‘influence’ of a specific work on any particular author is only an episode” (191).

15. The term “translation” is here used in quotation marks because, although it is the term normally used, it can be seriously misleading. For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 2.

16. For examples of this Europeanist absorption of Haskins’s work, see Southern 1953, Wolff 1968, and Benson, Constable, and Lanham 1982. The centrality of the Arabic tradition is apparent even in studies that do not explicitly acknowledge it and that may seem to be saying something quite different. See note 3 above for Haskins’s and Kristeller’s indirect revelations. For explicit and detailed explorations of the centrality of Averroes, his own relationship with Aristotle, and the different translations available in Europe, see both Peters 1968 and Lemay 1963a.

17. I use the term “occupation” in quotation marks partially because its accuracy is questionable when one is dealing with a seven-hundred-year period and most of all because the use of such terms is so often among the best indicators of current attitudes we have about the presence of Arabs in Europe. I can think of few other seven-hundred-year long “occupations,” and it would seem that this usage, so often reflexive, is indicative of the general image of the entire phenomenon as something quite removed from Europe, a temporary (long but still transient) interlude. The terms “Western” and “occidental,” to make another example, are often used as if they were geographical notions but at the same time in explicit juxtaposition to Islamic Spain without further explanation of how or why the Iberian peninsula comes to be relegated to the East. Clearly, geographical terminology has been reshaped by notions of cultural ideology in such cases. It is still more interesting to note that even studies specifically dedicated to exploring or demonstrating connections between the Arabic and Romance worlds often begin with the assumption of a fundamental separateness that must be “bridged.” See, for example, the titles of many works, especially Terrasse 1958, Islam d’Espagne, une rencontre de l’Orient et de l’Occident, or Menéndez Pidal 1956 (“Eslabón”), both among the best general sources of information on the admixture, rather than separation, of culture in medieval Spain. (Interestingly enough, it is the word for “bridge” in Arabic, al-Qanṭara, that was chosen as the name for the journal that has replaced Al-Andalus. See its first issue, in 1890, for a discussion.) Thus the name of a conference to explore the issue is “Islam and the Medieval West,” with an intimation of the separateness of those two entities, and the title of the 1965 Spoleto conference, “L’Occidente e l’Islam nell’alto Medioevo” conveys a similar impression. No less so Makdisi’s 1976 “Interaction between Islam and the West” or Jean Richard’s 1966 “La Vogue de l’Orient dans la littérature occidentale du moyen âge.” Even Menéndez Pidal’s 1955 Poesía árabe y poesía europea, one of the best essays on the subject of the close and vital interrelations between the two poetries, has a title that might well create a quite different impression: that the Arabic tradition (and he is, of course, speaking of the Andalusian one) is not European. The same notions impinge on concepts of nationality. As I note in several other places in this book, the very use of the title “Spaniard” is implicitly defined in racial and religious terms. The Cid is a Spaniard, but Ibn Ḥazm and Maimonides are not; they are an Arab and a Jew respectively.

18. Monroe 1970, which is both comprehensive and analytically acute, is undoubtedly the best source of the two closely related issues discussed here, covering both how the Arabs and Islam have been studied academically within the Spanish intellectual tradition and how the question of Spain’s special character as a part of the European community has been shaped by Spaniards’ views on the “Arab question.” The now-classic works on the latter issue are Castro (all entries in the bibliography) and Sánchez-Albornoz [1956] 1966. The polemic is far from dead, as Sánchez-Albornoz 1973 indicates. See also Glick 1979, the introduction of which includes a concise summary of the different views on the question. Glick begins his study by noting that “History seems scarcely distinguishable from myth” (3) and goes on to note that, in the realm of dealing with the Spanish past, the problem is more than usually acute. He notes that “long after the enemy was vanquished, the Jews expelled, and the Inquisition disbanded, the image of the ‘Moor’ remained as the quintessential stranger, an object to be feared” (3).

19. There are some views that are more explicitly negative on the Arabs than Sánchez-Albornoz’s. Bertrand’s 1952 comments verge on the unquotable and include observations that Arabs are “enemies of learning” and a “nullity as civilizing elements.” Those wishing to read as vitriolic an example as any of anti-Arab prejudice are referred to pp. 82–94 of the English translation.

20. It is important to remember here how closely related were the literary and philosophical traditions of Hebrew and Arabic in Spain. In many instances it is more accurate to recall them as a single reasonably coherent tradition with two different prestige languages than as two completely separate ones. Suffice it to recall that the kharjas that Stern deciphered were kharjas to Hebrew muwashshaḥas. For the close relationship between those poems in the two different classical languages, see especially Stern 1959 and Millás y Vallicrosa 1967. It is also helpful to recall the admixture of originally Hebrew and Arabic elements in prose narrative as well. See M. J. Lacarra 1979. The melding of those traditions is evident in the text of the converso Petrus Alfonsi; see Hermes [1970] 1977, M. J. Lacarra 1980, and Vernet 1972 and 1978. Because of the prestige of Arabic as the language of letters and philosophy, Maimonides was perhaps the most noteworthy, but far from the only, Jewish writer to have used Arabic as his medium. For admixture in the textual history of the philosophical tradition, see Lerner 1974, introduction.

21. Thus, when Curtius writes his brief observations on “Spain’s Cultural ‘Belatedness’ ” (Curtius 1953:541–43) he cites Sánchez-Albornoz in support of his views. The short piece by Curtius is worth reading in any case because it reveals much in its three pages about the sort of exclusionary and negative image some of the most important Romance medievalists have had of medieval Arabic culture in Europe.

22. “Discovery,” too, is a misleading term. Stern’s famous “discovery” of 1948 is much more accurately described as an “identification.” The kharjas were not lost or unknown—they even existed in published form. It was just that no one knew what they were. The Arabists and Hebraists who had worked on the muwashshaḥas of which they are a part had no idea of what they were, because, of course, they were studying Arabic or Hebrew literature, not Romance, and they did not imagine that the literature they were dealing with, despite its geographical provenance, had anything to do with Romance. Romance scholars, on the other hand, even those Hispanists working on medieval material, would have little if anything to do with material written in Arabic even within their own geographical and chronological sphere of interest, or even, as turned out to be the case here, with texts written in Romance but preserved in either Hebrew or Arabic transliteration and embedded in texts written in one of those two classical languages. The circumstances render Stern’s identification and decipherment of these texts far more worthy of the greatest possible respect than any mere “discovery,” any serendipitous stumbling on a lost manuscript, would have been. It was not accident or good fortune but rather his accurate understanding of the cultural situation in medieval Spain that made it possible, an understanding few scholars before him had had—or at least had applied. In addition, his success is best honored as a landmark, proof of the failure of our views of and approaches to the culture of al-Andalus, of medieval Spain, to accurately identify or deal with its literature. It is a failure that has not been overcome by Stern’s discovery and that affects the study of the kharjas and other Hispano-Arabic poetry to this day. Instead, the achievement is popularly reduced to mere discovery, which many, if not most, Europeanists believe to be literally the case.

23. Alonso 1958 (in his essay “Un siglo más para la poesía española”) and Alonso 1961 (in “Cancionillas ‘de amigo’ mozárabes: Primavera temprana de la lírica europea”); also, of course, Menéndez Pidal, especially 1961.

24. O’Donoghue 1982 is the most recent example, but it would be misleading to think that that editor is particularly negligent. In fact, this anthology is remarkable for having included anything Arabic at all, and O’Donoghue takes some pride in noting what a broadening of the usual range of texts this comprises. He is certainly justified in noting that even this is an improvement.

25. See citations in notes 2 and 7 above. See also Corti 1979 for a discussion of models and antimodels in medieval culture and Bloomfield 1979 on continuities and discontinuities in the medieval world. In neither is there any hint that the Arabic cultural phenomenon might be an important example of an antimodel or that the question of alterity and sameness in the medieval period might be profitably reviewed, taking the Arab other and alterity as an informing concept.

26. To understand and accept the Saussurian dichotomy between diachrony and synchrony as meaning that the two are absolutely separable rather than separable as different focuses of analysis, is as fallacious in literary studies as it is in linguistics. For an extended and lucid discussion of this fallacy in linguistics, see Lehmann 1968. Many of the same kinds of problems explored here also come to light when concepts and terms are displaced from linguistics into literary studies.