REMEMBERING JOHN BOSWELL'S MEDIEVAL SPAIN

7 5 R R E M E M B E R I N G J O H N B O S W E L L ’ S M E D I E V A L S P A I N M A R I A R O S A M E N O C A L I first arrived at Yale in the fall of 1986 for what I imagined might be only a year as a visiting professor in the Spanish Department, which had recently lost its medievalist. This was, in fact, something of an odd turn in my career, since I was not a conventional Spanish medievalist. My training was in Romance philology, and at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had studied and then remained on the faculty for a few years, I taught courses on poetry across that broad range of languages that today we would rather conveniently refer to as ‘‘Mediterranean studies’’: from Provençal to Sicilian to Hispano-Arabic. So it was that one of the courses I gave that first year at Yale was outside the Spanish Department, with the clunky title of ‘‘Comparative Medieval Romance Lyric’’ in the ‘‘Literature major,’’ as the comparative literature division of the undergraduate curriculum is called. In my previous experience , at Penn, I had found that this kind of seminar really also had to serve as an introduction to the social and intellectual culture of the Middle Ages, since students tended to have little sense of the broad features of that period within which this great lyric tradition makes any sense: Why were some of the texts I had chosen poems originally written in Hebrew and Arabic when the course title 7 6 M E N O C A L Y indicated it was about ‘‘Romance’’? How could the medievals – those invariably devout people, according to our students, then and now – have written so many poems marked by such frank, even vulgar, sexuality – and a number of those homoerotic sexuality at that? Even though this was still the age of high theory, and even though I had studied in a department su√used with the ideology of the ‘‘text itself,’’ I had found, if nothing else as a practical matter, that it was impossible or perhaps just silly to read a troubadour love poem, let alone a bilingual muwashshah from eleventh-century Seville, without doing considerable historical stage setting. Only a few days into the semester, probably the second or third class, I was doing a spiel I had developed at Penn which amounted to a little mini-course on the intellectual atmosphere of Paris in the early twelfth century, and it involved having the students read the marvelous letters of Abelard and Heloise. This was an exercise that allowed me to illustrate many vital propositions at once, not least the existence of an intellectually powerful and erotically charged female voice. It also nicely furthered one of the goals of my little potted history – to give some sense of the ways in which the Islamo-Arabic universe centered in Spain at that time was already, at the beginning of the twelfth century, a source of intellectual prestige and influence, the seemingly improbable site of cultural chic for Latin Christendom. The rhetorical climax was intended to come when I revealed to the students the name that Abelard and Heloise gave to the child born of their passionate and disastrous a√air. It was always a great moment since students never knew the child’s name – Astrolabe – and were appropriately astonished and intrigued when I explained what an astrolabe was and where it came from and what the whole thing might mean, this story of how an intellectually avant-garde couple had chosen such a strange and yet distinctly evocative name for their o√spring . I especially loved being able to use this story to make a fundamental point about Christianity at that moment: it was not monolithic or single-minded and far from uniformly closedminded or intolerant. Even at such a moment, when there was, in fact, an unambiguous crusader mentality vis à vis Islam in some quarters – and how convenient that Bernard of Clairvaux, who set in motion...