Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters

K. Attar, L. Shutters, K. Attar, L. Shutters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137465726
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.

PART I

SYNCHRONIC CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

CHAPTER 1

ANDALUSIAN IBERIAS: FROM SPANISH TO IBERIAN LITERATURE

Seth Kimmel

On the first day of my undergraduate “Andalusian Iberias” seminar, I distribute a multilingual and multiscriptural handout of a kharja (pl. kharajāt) composed by Ibn al-Rāfi’ Ra’suh, an eleventh-century poet from Toledo.¹ The mixture of Ibero-Romance and Arabic that comprises this refrain, found, as the Arabic word kharaja (to leave) implies, at the end of an Arabic strophic poem, piques students’ curiosity: “Was the earliest extant Spanish verse really written in Arabic script?” they ask. Over the course of the conversation, this initial curiosity turns to terror: “Must we know Arabic, not to mention Hebrew, Latin, Catalan, Portuguese, and Provençal, in order to take this course? Isn’t this an upper-level Spanish elective?” I assure my students, typically no more than ten, that although knowledge of Spanish and English suffices, we will also read Spanish texts alongside works of theology, philosophy, and literature translated from those other languages. One goal of this approach is to see whether Spanish literature looks different when studied within this interwoven Iberian fabric. But we aim also to read works from beyond the Spanish tradition on their own terms, paying attention to their generic conventions and circumstances of production and circulation. In this way, Spanish literature serves as a gateway into the cultural complexity of the Iberian Peninsula, so splendidly epitomized by Ibn al-Rāfi’ Ra’suh’s kharja.

By reading works produced between the eighth-century Berber invasions and the seventeenth-century expulsions of peninsular Muslim converts to Christianity, known as Moriscos, we pose the relationship among the different Iberian religious communities and literary traditions as methodological questions: What constitutes historical evidence of cross-cultural encounter? How might we chart currents of literary influence through the meandering tributaries of translation, polemic, and patronage? When to employ economic, aesthetic, or religious categories of analysis? In my view, courses on medieval and early modern Iberian literature should be comparative in design and content, but they must also question the institutional conditions and methodological assumptions driving comparison. Let us follow Américo Castro in disputing Spanish nationalist history and María Rosa Menocal in interrogating the “myth of Westernness,” I tell my students, but let us also use the variety of Andalusian Iberias that emerge from comparative study to think critically about such approaches.²

Especially since September 11, 2001, students come to classes on the history and representation of premodern Christians, Muslims, and Jews aware that contemporary politics of religion shape interpretations of the past. Research on medieval convivencia and early modern inquisition, for instance, are in part products of a present characterized by alarmism about sharī‘ah law in the United States, angst over public displays of piety in France, and global uproar around free speech and religious tolerance in Denmark.³ By addressing the approaches of previous specialists, from early modern editors and literary critics to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philologists, we can encourage students to scrutinize the history as well as the present of scholarship and teaching about the Iberian Peninsula. To cultivate historicizing habits is to foster both close and distant reading skills.

In what follows, I describe the organization and content of my Andalusian Iberias syllabus, further address the above pedagogical, methodological, and political issues, and offer pragmatic teaching suggestions. Scholars of Mediterranean studies, tolerance and intolerance, regionalism, material culture, and a host of other issues have employed the Iberian Peninsula as a laboratory for testing new interpretations and disciplinary structures; I hope the same might become true for teachers of cross-cultural encounters seeking to experiment with their course designs and goals.

The Syllabus

According to Castro’s and Menocal’s narratives, Iberian cultural and intellectual history is upside down. While much of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, and Toledo were hubs of philosophical learning and artistic patronage. Here was medieval tolerance in a crusader age. Likewise, when the roots of Enlightenment took hold north of the Pyrenees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popular bigotry and institutionalized religious violence remained entrenched to the south. In this view, Iberia was exceptional in myriad ways, not least because it became “medieval” in the pejorative sense only in the early modern period. As scholars such as David Nirenberg and Stefania Pastore have demonstrated, however, this simple periodization does not stand up to critical prodding.⁴ Daily conflict and exchange structured the medieval Iberian golden age, and erudite and popular opponents of inquisition alike found ways to avoid the inquisitors’ clutches or limit the reach of their power. From the political to the poetic, other sixteenth-century gauges of peninsular periodization similarly complicate rather than confirm the story of Iberian exceptionality.⁵ Grappling with this tension between anachronism and exemplarity is an integral feature of studying Iberian history.

Yet like history itself, syllabi require narrative structure. However flawed or contradictory, periodization should be part of any class with historical breadth. We must mark the untidy transition between the medieval and the early modern periods even as we study their common features. One of my goals is to show how peninsular authors addressed similar philological and political issues differently at divergent historical moments. I also seek to underscore the extent to which the interpretation of texts and the formulation of historical contexts are mutually contingent processes. It is wrong to imply only that the latter conditions the former. By showing that history is up for debate along with the meaning of a particular metaphor or turn of phrase, the high stakes of reading come into focus. That there are disagreements among specialists about the unfolding of peninsular history and its scope of cross-cultural encounter should empower rather than frighten us.⁶ The chronological logic of the syllabus is thus a hypothesis in need of revision. It offers an account of Iberian literature and culture over the longue durée, one that students learn to assess critically.

Our reading does not represent an ideal Iberian multicultural canon, but rather fosters methodological deliberation at the expense of comprehensiveness. We begin with Arabic strophic poetry and formal odes called muwashshaḥāt and qaṣā’id, respectively, which we examine alongside Provençal troubadour lyric from roughly the same period in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.⁷ We then read Spanish-language collections of exempla, or brief moral anecdotes, such as the thirteenth-century Sendebar and fourteenth-century El libro de buen amor, alongside parallel traditions of episodic narratives from the medieval Arabic tradition, such as The Arabian Nights and humorous, rhymed, prose vignettes known as maqāmāt. To explore overlapping approaches to classical philosophy, theological polemic, and juridical inquiry among the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities from the late eleventh through the early fourteenth centuries, we study works by Averroës, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Ramon Llull, and Petrus Alfonsi. In surveying these texts over the first half of the semester, students develop a sense of how generic conventions work within and travel among the different linguistic and religious communities of the Iberian Peninsula. Although we do not read any secondary scholarship in this undergraduate course, I tell students that the implicit formalist argument of the first half of the syllabus is an artifact of recent Anglophone research in medieval Iberian studies.⁸ Chronology offers a handy literary-historical structure, but for many of these specialists genre is the ultimate measure of cultural and religious exchange.

The second half of the syllabus is dedicated to the history of late medieval and early modern Muslim and Jewish conversion to Christianity, the cultural impact of inquisition, and Renaissance and Baroque literature in which Muslims play prominent roles. Our focus shifts from the history of cross-cultural encounter to its representation and legacy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, following more than a century of coerced conversions, there were no Muslims or Jews on the peninsula—only Moriscos and conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity). Representations of religious and cultural difference both produced and reflected tension among New Christians and their Old Christian counterparts. To study the politics of representation during this period by reading Fernando de Rojas’s late fifteenth-century prose drama La Celestina, the anonymous mid-sixteenth-century romance El Abencerraje, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s early seventeenth-century drama El príncipe constante, and a selection of materials related to the Moriscos is thus to confront classical concerns about mimesis newly interwoven into peninsular religious and political polemic. That is, anxiety over the dubious signs of New Christian orthodoxy expanded into a concern about representation broadly. This second half of the syllabus also echoes recent scholarship, particularly “new historical” literary criticism and cultural history.⁹ To understand poetry, prose fiction, and drama, it is sometimes necessary to step beyond the traditional bounds of the literary.

Though balancing chronological and lateral reading is an effective way to approach the history of language and narrative, in my experience students find close encounters with the odors and textures of manuscripts and early printed books to be the most memorable pathway into a historicizing mindset. Confronted with an oversized fifteenth-century choir book or a seventeenth-century collection of comedias, students’ eyes widen and mouths drop. I seek both variants of well-known works and bizarre textual anomalies, objects that highlight the profound instability of the most canonical works. To thumb a late medieval manuscript Bible, copied on vellum and held together by a Moorish-style binding, is to open up an unimagined paleographic and codicological toolbox for students accustomed to paperbacks and electronic media. Guided by expert librarians, who often take pleasure in sharing their specialized knowledge of book history, these sessions at local archives and museums are invariable triumphs. Students from my Fall 2012 Andalusian Iberias class trip to the Hispanic Society of America, for example, were astonished to come across a coarse, goatskin book cover, stray tufts of hair poking their fingers as they handled the text. On another trip to the Jewish Museum for an exhibit of Hebrew manuscripts from the Bodleian Library’s collection, these students saw all manner of titillating theological and aesthetic mash-ups, ranging from colorful Christian iconography in the margins of Hebrew scripture to animal illustrations interspersed within exempla collections. We even had the good fortune to discuss the Introduction to Maimonides’s late twelfth-century Guide to the Perplexed the same afternoon we examined the autographed notes for Maimonides’s Judeo-Arabic commentary on the Mishnah. I am convinced that students internalize the ebb and flow of linguistic, theological, and technological exchange across cultural and religious lines through this sort of encounter with material objects.

Yet proximity to museums and archives is a luxury rather than a necessity. Facsimile editions of several texts on our syllabus are widely available, and many university libraries have rare book rooms. With a bit of foresight and instructor-librarian teamwork, it is usually possible to construct a syllabus so that local holdings pack a pedagogical punch. And even if you find yourself teaching a “Semester at Sea,” the online resources of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) and Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC) provide a level of accessibility unimaginable just a few decades ago. To transition from the medieval to the early modern segments of our course, we dedicate a session to the Complutense Polyglot Bible, which is available in brilliant color on the BNE Web site, for instance.¹⁰ With a polyglot projected on the screen and modern editions of the Bible circulating around the classroom, a discussion about the continuities and transformations in the language and materiality of scripture is guaranteed. That the early modern history of comparative and multilingual exegesis is in the peninsular context inseparable from the newfound legitimacy of converso scholars skilled in Hebrew and Aramaic, on the one hand, and the influence of humanists trained in Greek and Latin, on the other, adds an interpretive layer to the stratified core sample of material culture and sectarian polemic. The early modern transition from manuscript to print culture may have been no more decisive or comprehensive than the contemporaneous Christianization of the peninsula, but the two processes were more closely connected than may initially seem. Material culture does more than foster student enthusiasm; it gives shape to the chronological arc of peninsular intellectual and literary history.

The goal in a class like this should not be to fit multiple pieces of Iberian history together into a single image, but rather to emphasize the rough edges of incongruence. Like the balkanization of sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Synchronic Cross-Cultural Encounters
• Part II Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters
• Part III Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index