El esplendor de la poesía en la taifa de Zaragoza (409 hégira/ 1018 D.C.-503 hégira/1110 D.C.) (review)

As the Cordoban caliphate collapsed in the beginning of the eleventh century, the mosaic of local and regional principalities known as the Taifa kingdoms rose in its place, each competing for power and prestige. That competition, which played out in many arenas, led to political instability and military weakness. It also resulted in robust patronage of poets, scribes, scholars and artisans, all employed in the hopes of furthering the glory of –or adding some legitimacy to– each of the many taifas. As Fernando Andú Resano points out in El esplendor de la poesía en la taifa de Zaragoza, the individual taifas were simply replicating the cultural strategy of the Umayyad caliphs and the Amirid chamberlains who used poetry and belles-lettres "to transmit an image of power and influence" (189). While Western literary studies generally underscore the importance of local rivalries in fueling an eleventh-century "golden age" of letters in al-Andalus, paradoxically some ignore the particularities of place as they mine poems for information on social mores and descriptions of economic life, sport and so forth, as is the case in Henri Pérès's La Poésie andalouse en arabe classique au XI^ème siècle, or seek to delineate literary trends throughout the whole of Islamic Spain, as in Teresa Garulo's La literatura árabe de al-Andalus durante el siglo XI.

By contrast, Andú Resano's El esplendor de la poesía en la taifa de Zaragoza tantalizes us with the promise of a "rigorous and exhaustive" look at the "intense poetic activity" at the Tujibi court (1018-1039) and that of their successors, the Hudids (1039-1110). If the first dynasty was marked by its liberality with poets and royal secretaries, the second dynasty also supported "the most famous and celebrated mathematicians and astronomers of the time" (23). Highlighting the connection of his work to that of Pérès, which was published in Spanish under the title El esplendor de al-Andalus: La poesía andaluza en árabe clásico en el siglo XI, Andú Resano promises the literary analysis and interpretation that Peres often neglected. In a sense, this concern for local context brings us back full circle to our best source for the eleventh century, Ibn Bassam al-Shantarini's anthology al-Dhakhīra fī maḥāsin ahl al-jazīra, which arranges its material geographically. As Ibn Bassām's anthology makes clear, such an approach allows one to appreciate how factors such as geography and demography shape local culture in, for example, the contributions of Jewish writers in areas with prominent Jewish minorities. Andú Resano takes the local focus one step further by examining how court functioned as a refuge and meeting place for writers and intellectuals hailing from different parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

Andú Resano does an impressive job of synthesizing a rich array of sources related to the Zaragozan taifa. The treatment is quite wide-ranging, beginning with a geographical description of the area and the city of Zaragoza, accounts of trade and the various occupations of residents, a discussion of numismatics, social conditions of religious minorities and a lively account of the political and military history of the taifa. Everywhere there is evidence of the enormous strides made by Spanish scholars doing closer, regional studies of literature, culture and history of this period, studies that very nicely supplement the groundbreaking work of scholars like Pérès and Emilio García Gómez (both of whom are amply cited). Andú Resano's citations and bibliography provide an extremely helpful guide to the many translations, text editions and specialized studies that have appeared in Spanish in recent decades. Especially noteworthy is the activity of Zaragozan presses and journals Turiaso and Revista de Historia Jer...