The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History

A Forgotten Heritage

Maria Rosa Menocal, María Rosa Menocal

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812200713
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

Arabic culture was a central and shaping phenomenon in medieval Europe, yet its influence on medieval literature has been ignored or marginalized for the last two centuries. In this ground-breaking book, now returned to print with a new afterword by the author, María Rosa Menocal argues that major modifications of the medieval canon and its literary history are necessary.Menocal reviews the Arabic cultural presence in a variety of key settings, including the courts of William of Aquitaine and Frederick II, the universities in London, Paris, and Bologna, and Cluny under Peter the Venerable, and she examines how our perception of specific texts including the courtly love lyric and the works of Dante and Boccaccio would be altered by an acknowledgment of the Arabic cultural component.

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 ind...