Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Mystical imagery and belief provided Iberian intellectuals a shared discursive space beyond the political and cultural specificities (including doctrines) that often divided them into discrete faith groups such as Christians, Muslims, and Jews. By the fifteenth century, many texts penned by and related to the religious minorities and their descendants in the peninsula, the conversos and the Moriscos, reflect such mystical imagery and beliefs and reveal that their authors conceived of a direct connection between knowledge, texts, and mystical illumination. This is true for individuals engaged in projects of linguistic/cultural translation—in the first case, a first-person epistolary account by a fifteenth-century Castilian Muslim religious and community leader, Yça Gedelli, explaining his willingness to assist the Christian cleric, Juan de Segovia, in the creation of a vernacular and Latin translation of the Qur’an; and in the second case, the anonymous author of a fifteenth-century poem expressing a mystical framing of the Akedah, or sacrifice of Isaac, in vernacular Spanish.

Juan de Segovia, a former professor of theology from the University of Salamanca and participant in the Council of Basel, brought Yça from Spain to the small monastery where Juan was living out his final years in Aiton, France. Yça spent four months in Aiton in 1455–56, completing his Arabic-Castilian translation. While neither the trilingual Qur’an nor the letter in Castilian that Yça wrote to Juan has survived, a prologue composed by Juan de Segovia has, as has a Latin translation of Yça’s letter accepting the project.¹ The latter is the first text I focus on in this essay. The second is an anonymous poem recorded on a single folio in a manuscript that contains several translations associated with converso and Jewish culture, all of which, like the poem, are written in Hebrew aljamiado (i.e., the language is the vernacular written using Hebrew characters). Both texts reflect a late manifestation of a long tradition of Iberian intellectual thought that was the product of a robust Mediterranean exchange of people and ideas throughout the medieval period.²

In his letter, the Morisco intellectual Yça explains his reasons for agreeing to translate the Qur’an.³ Yça opens the letter by stating his desire to assist in the translation: “From him who, with great desire, wishes to assist you in a decisive, angelic cause.” After telling Juan it will cost 20 doblas, Yça states his motives: “I want this in order to serve [God’s] administration and the enlightenment of my soul to be attained by study.”⁴ Gerald Wiegers notes that this is the first of three times that Yça speaks of enlightenment (illuminatio) in this brief letter, indicating that “he had some sort of mystical experience and that he was able to grasp the esoteric meaning of the Qur’an afterwards.”⁵ After initially refusing to help translate the Qur’an, Yça has changed his mind and decided to help Juan, “for the true good is one highest good in which the good and the highest are one.”⁶ His motivation is to “extend the perfection” of the Qur’an. And while he says Muslims will never “abandon the one good truth”⁷—a thinly veiled allusion to Juan’s desire to use such a Qur’an translation in his Christian proselytizing—Yça does think that having access to a Qur’an will encourage Romance-language speakers to lead a good life. Variants of the term perfection (perfectio) are even more frequent in this brief letter than are variants of enlightenment, occurring some ten times. Yça not only describes the Qur’an as the “final, complete perfection” and Juan as a “seeker of the true perfection” but also depicts their shared goal, the translation of the Qur’an as “honoured perfection,” and the belief of Muslims in “one truth and unique, perfect and necessary good.” The idea that one seeks and can achieve perfection, or knowledge of the divine, through study of holy texts and the perfection of the soul echoes a Sufi belief found...