This essay studies the transmission of framed narratives in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing ... more This essay studies the transmission of framed narratives in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on a narrative tradition that was at once immensely popular, particularly complex, and poorly documented: the Seven Sages of Rome (known as the Book of Sindbad in the Eastern Mediterranean). Using the scholarship of political geographers and political scientists on territoriality, frontiers, and the 'New Medievalism,' and two theories borrowed from mathematics—fuzzy sets and game theory, the essay examines one story from the Seven Sages in particular: the last tale told in the western versions of the work, known as 'Vaticinium.' The essay contributes to the development of a scholarly methodology able to describe transmission histories so complex that previous philological studies have had difficulty accounting for them in their entirety.
This essay studies late Italian versions of two popular narrative traditions: Homer’s Odyssey and... more This essay studies late Italian versions of two popular narrative traditions: Homer’s Odyssey and the Seven Sages of Rome. The Odyssey was not well known in western Europe until the Renaissance. Lodovico Dolce’s ottava rima compendium of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, published as L’Ulisse (1573), appeared in multiple editions in Cinquecento Italy. The narrative cycle known as the Book of Sindbad the Wise in the east and the Seven Sages of Rome in the west circulated widely, from the Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Greek versions popular east of the Mediterranean to the Latin and vernacular spin-offs in late medieval and early modern Europe. The anonymous printed edition Erasto (1542) reimagined the work for early modern readers and, like L’Ulisse, was frequently reprinted. Both of these narrative traditions contain multiple embedded tales. This essay focuses on tales in which a protagonist risks all to seek his fortune at sea. These stories provide an occasion to think about linguistic complexity and complex transmission histories in pre-modern Mediterranean narrative traditions, and to describe the role of the sea in those stories as a sign of both contingency and the cure for contingency.
Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent... more Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors – including Cervantes and Marco Polo – were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. A Sea of Languages brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean.
This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.
A brief response to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, thinking a... more A brief response to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, thinking about how we produce narrative in order to account for events and (in a more sweeping sense) historical change.
During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by th... more During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by the Arabs and the Arabic-language culture of the Normans – centuries of eventful history that had been lost to the West because European historians could not read Arabic documents. In their histories, Sicilians identified an alternate origin for European modernity: the vibrant Arab culture of the medieval Mediterranean transmitted to the continent through borderland states like the Kingdom of Sicily. This essay examines the lives and scholarship of three nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalists – Pietro Lanza, Vincenzo Mortillaro, and Michele Amari – who worked to articulate a Mediterranean origin for European modernity.
This article examines medieval Italian literary sources for information about the ghetto town whe... more This article examines medieval Italian literary sources for information about the ghetto town where Frederick II resettled Sicilian Muslims, Lucera (in Puglia).
... Curiously, the knowledge we have of that Arabized Jewish universe comes from the reports of a... more ... Curiously, the knowledge we have of that Arabized Jewish universe comes from the reports of a certain Anatoli ben Joseph, who like many other travelers bound for other places (famouslyIbn Jubayr, of course) would have left us sparkling portraits of Sicily. ... Rih· lat ibn jubayr. ...
Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) as an earl... more Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) as an early masterpiece of vernacular lyric. Yet Petrarch directed most of his professional energies as writer to Latin composition, in the belief that Latin was the language of his most important literary models and of the literary future. This essay studies Petrarch’s life – in particular, episodes revealing his conflicted attitudes toward the sea and especially toward travel by ship – in order to comment on his attitude toward the language of literature: his respect for Latin, his enduring affection for Italian, and his work on the vernacular lyrics at the very end of his life. The essay uses Theodor Adorno’s formulation of late style (Adorno used this concept to discuss the late work of composers, in particular Beethoven) to describe Petrarch’s late work on the RVF in his last years. It argues that Petrarch’s turn to the vernacular in his final years should be read as a kind of linguistic experimentalism – fragmentary and catastrophic, as Adorno would describe it, rather than sweet, unified and harmonic – made possible when Petrarch is no longer using Latin to think about literary posterity.
This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical A... more This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical Arabic created by Edward William Lane (1801-1876), in order to discuss the constitution of Arabic as a cosmopolitan language. And it examines parenthetically the efforts made by novelist and newspaperman Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1887) to rejuvenate Arabic as a modern cosmopolitan language. The essay is particularly interested in the temporal dynamic of the cosmopolitan language. Because it is not connected to contemporary usage in a specific region, a cosmopolitan language – like literary Arabic – is able to maintain a dynamic connection between multiple historical eras. Its historical scope is viewed as a weakness by national language ideology, which promotes the mother tongue as the only viable literary language. The essay focuses on the celebration of the historical depth and richness of the cosmopolitan language by its champions and practitioners, like Lane and al-Shidyāq.
This essay studies the transmission of framed narratives in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing ... more This essay studies the transmission of framed narratives in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on a narrative tradition that was at once immensely popular, particularly complex, and poorly documented: the Seven Sages of Rome (known as the Book of Sindbad in the Eastern Mediterranean). Using the scholarship of political geographers and political scientists on territoriality, frontiers, and the 'New Medievalism,' and two theories borrowed from mathematics—fuzzy sets and game theory, the essay examines one story from the Seven Sages in particular: the last tale told in the western versions of the work, known as 'Vaticinium.' The essay contributes to the development of a scholarly methodology able to describe transmission histories so complex that previous philological studies have had difficulty accounting for them in their entirety.
This essay studies late Italian versions of two popular narrative traditions: Homer’s Odyssey and... more This essay studies late Italian versions of two popular narrative traditions: Homer’s Odyssey and the Seven Sages of Rome. The Odyssey was not well known in western Europe until the Renaissance. Lodovico Dolce’s ottava rima compendium of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, published as L’Ulisse (1573), appeared in multiple editions in Cinquecento Italy. The narrative cycle known as the Book of Sindbad the Wise in the east and the Seven Sages of Rome in the west circulated widely, from the Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Greek versions popular east of the Mediterranean to the Latin and vernacular spin-offs in late medieval and early modern Europe. The anonymous printed edition Erasto (1542) reimagined the work for early modern readers and, like L’Ulisse, was frequently reprinted. Both of these narrative traditions contain multiple embedded tales. This essay focuses on tales in which a protagonist risks all to seek his fortune at sea. These stories provide an occasion to think about linguistic complexity and complex transmission histories in pre-modern Mediterranean narrative traditions, and to describe the role of the sea in those stories as a sign of both contingency and the cure for contingency.
Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent... more Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors – including Cervantes and Marco Polo – were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. A Sea of Languages brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean.
This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.
A brief response to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, thinking a... more A brief response to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, thinking about how we produce narrative in order to account for events and (in a more sweeping sense) historical change.
During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by th... more During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by the Arabs and the Arabic-language culture of the Normans – centuries of eventful history that had been lost to the West because European historians could not read Arabic documents. In their histories, Sicilians identified an alternate origin for European modernity: the vibrant Arab culture of the medieval Mediterranean transmitted to the continent through borderland states like the Kingdom of Sicily. This essay examines the lives and scholarship of three nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalists – Pietro Lanza, Vincenzo Mortillaro, and Michele Amari – who worked to articulate a Mediterranean origin for European modernity.
This article examines medieval Italian literary sources for information about the ghetto town whe... more This article examines medieval Italian literary sources for information about the ghetto town where Frederick II resettled Sicilian Muslims, Lucera (in Puglia).
... Curiously, the knowledge we have of that Arabized Jewish universe comes from the reports of a... more ... Curiously, the knowledge we have of that Arabized Jewish universe comes from the reports of a certain Anatoli ben Joseph, who like many other travelers bound for other places (famouslyIbn Jubayr, of course) would have left us sparkling portraits of Sicily. ... Rih· lat ibn jubayr. ...
Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) as an earl... more Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) as an early masterpiece of vernacular lyric. Yet Petrarch directed most of his professional energies as writer to Latin composition, in the belief that Latin was the language of his most important literary models and of the literary future. This essay studies Petrarch’s life – in particular, episodes revealing his conflicted attitudes toward the sea and especially toward travel by ship – in order to comment on his attitude toward the language of literature: his respect for Latin, his enduring affection for Italian, and his work on the vernacular lyrics at the very end of his life. The essay uses Theodor Adorno’s formulation of late style (Adorno used this concept to discuss the late work of composers, in particular Beethoven) to describe Petrarch’s late work on the RVF in his last years. It argues that Petrarch’s turn to the vernacular in his final years should be read as a kind of linguistic experimentalism – fragmentary and catastrophic, as Adorno would describe it, rather than sweet, unified and harmonic – made possible when Petrarch is no longer using Latin to think about literary posterity.
This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical A... more This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical Arabic created by Edward William Lane (1801-1876), in order to discuss the constitution of Arabic as a cosmopolitan language. And it examines parenthetically the efforts made by novelist and newspaperman Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1887) to rejuvenate Arabic as a modern cosmopolitan language. The essay is particularly interested in the temporal dynamic of the cosmopolitan language. Because it is not connected to contemporary usage in a specific region, a cosmopolitan language – like literary Arabic – is able to maintain a dynamic connection between multiple historical eras. Its historical scope is viewed as a weakness by national language ideology, which promotes the mother tongue as the only viable literary language. The essay focuses on the celebration of the historical depth and richness of the cosmopolitan language by its champions and practitioners, like Lane and al-Shidyāq.
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This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.
This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.