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Spanish Philology and the Arab Past: A Case Study
- Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015
- pp. 1-25
- 10.1353/dph.2015.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article studies how modern philologists have reconstructed a now lost ninth-century Arabic chronicle, the so-called Chronicle of al-Razi, through the account found in fifteenth-century Castilian chronicles of the defeat of the last Visigothic king of Iberia, Rodrigo. In addition to exploring the construction of a textual history that is populated by a series of phantasmal Iberian translators, manuscripts, and copyists, the creation of a modern Castilian edition of this lost Arabic chronicle speaks to the ideological basis and desires of modern, national philology.