A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History ed. by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Malette (review)

This collection of sixteen articles on the interpretation of medieval literature is unusual in including a posthumous contribution from the dedicatee, Maria Rosa Menocal, who inspired the 2007 conference in her honour in Toronto from which the book derives. Menocal herself began the conversation in 1987 with The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, provocatively subtitled A Forgotten Heritage, and her achievements and influence are outlined in Suzanne Akbari’s introduction.

As a title, A Sea of Languages gets around a perennial problem with thematic conferences: that not all the papers deal with the designated topic, here essentially Hispanocentric. This does not make them any less valuable: Simon Gaunt is illuminating on the use of more than one Romance language by the same poet; Walid Saleh illustrates the Muslims’ knowledge of Hebrew, which is not unique to Spain; and Paulo Horta is fascinating on Richard Burton’s insatiable appetite for languages – but such papers could belong anywhere.

On the other hand, there are those that deal closely with the central theme. Building on an idea from Menocal, who calls Ramon Llull “the closest of all Ibn ‘Arabī’s kissing cousins,” Cynthia Robinson speculates that there may have been other spiritual borrowings that contributed to what she regards as a uniquely Iberian phenomenon, namely, the transfer of the sufferings of Jesus to the Virgin Mary. Leyla Rouhi conjectures that a mysterious Moor in a Cervantes novella symbolizes the shadowy existence of the Muslim survivors of the Reconquista, and Sharon Kinoshita demonstrates that the literary depiction of Muslim and Christian enmity is exaggerated, a position also advanced by Karla Malette, and already foreshadowed by Menocal.

Other papers use the data to explore theoretical issues: Ryan Szpiech revisits the notion of convivencia in a critical account of Erich Auerbach’s and earlier views on the study of al-Andalus, and John Tolun summarizes the secondary sources on problems of the historiography of Islam and Christianity. Some papers are predominantly from the Arabic perspective: William Granara on the poetic nostalgia of an exile, and Ross Brann on Arab and Jewish poets and the Andalusian landscape, while David Wachs writes about the choice Jews could make of composing poetry in Hebrew or in the local Romance language (or Arabic, for that matter – the Jews were in this situation wherever they lived; as is well known, there is an epic, Dukus Horant, in a form of Middle High German). Dwight Reynolds compares the two musical/prosodic systems, Arabic and Romance, but concludes that their relationship is much too complex to be definitively explained.

In a work of this nature it is disappointing that the Arabic transliterations do not show long vowels or consonantal diacriticals (and there is definitely something wrong with the Arabic in some places); likewise, for a book that laments more than once the decline of philology, it is – to this reviewer at least – unacceptable to list translations under “Primary Sources,” but the rot set in decades ago, and nowadays no one can tell the difference. Curiously, however, the translated excerpts from al-Mas‘ūdī are correctly listed among the secondary sources. For “Allen Jones of Cambridge” read “Alan Jones of Oxford.”

A blind spot in this collection is the absence of the German dimension, apart from a forlorn, though true, remark by Saleh that secondary sources from “non-English European scholarship” are largely ignored. But surely the Sicilian ruler Frederick II justifies taking German primary sources into account as part of the Mediterranean “sea of languages” – especially Wolfram von Eschenbach, who invented a French/Arabic provenance for his Parzival, claiming he had based it on the version of one “Kyot,” whom he describes as a poet from Provence who wrote in French and knew Latin, and enough Arabic, to translate the astronomical work of the (equally fictional) Arab “Flegetanis” while in Toledo. No matter that the story is...