Divided Mediterranean, Divided World: The Influence of Arabic on Medieval Italian Poetry

Notes

1. See John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch (1216–1380) (London and New York: Longman, 1980), 1–3.

2. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , vol. II, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973), 799.

3. See Karla Mallette, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 46–47. Note that there are many translations of Petrarch's lyrics into English. See for instance, The Sonnets of Petrarch , trans. Joseph Auslander (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1931); Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics , trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Petrarch: The Canzoniere or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta , trans. into verse with notes and commentary by Mark Musa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); and The Poetry of Petrarch , trans. David Young (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004).

4. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. See Canto XXVIII The Sowers of Discord in The Inferno , trans. John Ciardi (New York: The New American Library, 1954), 234–239 and Canto XVIII in Paradise , trans. D. L. Sayers and B. Reynolds (Harmondsworth, 1962, reprinted Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1967), 43–51. See Samar Attar,“An Islamic Paradiso in a Medieval Christian Poem? Dante's Divine Comedy Revisited,” in Sebastian Günther and Todd Lawson, eds., Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam , vol. 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 891–921.

5. See Canto IV, Circle One: Limbo, The Virtuous Pagans in Dante's The Inferno , trans. John Ciardi, line 129 (53). Here Saladin is seated by himself apart.

6. In Canto IV of The Inferno, Dante also places Seneca the moralist, Euclid the geometer, Galen, Avicenna, and“ Averrhoes of the Great Commentary” where there is no punishment, or pain. See lines 141–144 (54). There is another reference to Averroes, without naming him, in Dante's The Purgatorio , trans. John Ciardi (New York: The New American Library, 1961), 255. See Canto XXV, lines 61–66 where the possible intellect is discussed and the Arab philosopher is criticized:“ But how this animal-thing grows human powers/you do not yet see; and this very point/has led astray a wiser head than yours.//By him, the possible intellect was thought/ (since it occupied no organ) to be disjoined/from the vegetative soul-and so he taught.”

7. Dante puts his own teacher and friend in Hell. See Canto XV in The Inferno , 135–139.

8. Note that Avicenna's the Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing—a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia—are often cited in most Latin philosophical and medical texts. His treatment of love as a case of severe depression may have influenced the thirteenth-century Italian poet Cavalcanti among others.

9. For brief biographical information on Cavalcanti consult The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, rev. ed., eds. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995), and Dictionary of Italian Literature , eds. Peter Bondanella and Julia Conway (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). For the translation of Cavalcanti's poetry, see Marc Cirigliano, Guido Cavalcanti, The Complete Poems (New York: Italica Press, 1992); Lowry Nelson Jr., The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti with an Introduction (New York: Garland, 1986); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100–1200–1300) in The Original Metres, Together with Dante's Vita Nuova (London: Smith Elder, 1861), ed. Sally Purcell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press and London: Anvil Press, 1981) and Ezra Pound's Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays by David Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

10. See Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron , trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1982).

11. Note that compiling biographies of famous women and men was very popular among the Arabs and Muslims. Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 893), for instance, a Persian linguist and poet, who was born in Baghdad and wrote his books in Arabic, devoted a whole book to women writers, Balaghat l-Nisa' or The Eloquence of Women.

12. For a quick reference on the life and works of Giovanni Boccaccio, see The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio , eds. Guyda Armstrong et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works , eds. Victoria Kirkham et al. (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature , eds. David Robey and Peter Hainsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Dictionary of Italian Literature , rev. ed., eds. Jody Robin Shiffman et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); and The Reader's Companion to World Literature , rev. ed., eds. Lilian Herlands Homstein et al. (New York: Signet, 2002).

13. Reinhold Schuman, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years: A Concise History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986). Cf. The Hutchinson Dictionary of World History (Oxford: Helicon Publishing Ltd., 1993), 309–310.

14. For historical information on the Arabs in Sicily and the Crusades, consult Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs , 10th edition (London: Macmillan, 1970); Donald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades , trans. John Gillingham (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades , 3 vols, 1951, Reprinted (London: Penguin, 1991).

15. Christopher Kleinhenz,“Sicilian School of Poetry,” in Gaetana Marrone and Paolo Puppa, eds., Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 1754. Note that“ The cultivation of poetry in the vulgar tongue was evidently due to the example of Arabic poets and singers, and the metrics of the early popular poetry of Italy, as represented by the carnival songs and the ballata, is fundamentally the same as that of the folk poetry of Andalusia.” See José M. Millas in Revista de archives , vol. xii (1920), 550–564, xiii (1921), 37–59. Quoted in Philip Hitti's History of the Arabs , 10th edition (London and New York: Macmillan St. Martin's Press, 1970), 612.

16. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 2, Courtly and Romantic (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

17. Petrarch's Secret; or the Soul's Conflict with Passion: Three Dialogues between Himself and St. Augustine , translated from the Latin by William H. Draper (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911).

18. See Ibn al-Farid's anthology in al-hakawati.net/Arabic/civilizations/diwanindex4.asp. For information on the various classical Arab lovers, see reference books, such as the tenth-century book al-Aghani by Abu al-Faraj al-Asfahani, 16 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya, 1927–61) and the different editions of Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, ed. by P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. Van Denzel, W.P. Heinrichs, et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960–2005).

19. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , vol. II.

20. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2011).

21. See Leonard C. Chiarelli, A History of Muslim Sicily (Malta: Midsea Books Ltd., 2011), xv.

22. Barbara M. Kreutz,“Arabs in Italy,” in Christopher Kleinhenz, ed., Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia , vol. I (London: Routledge, 2004), 46–49.

23. John Day,“The Levant Trade in the Middle Ages,” in Angeliki E. Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century , 3 vols (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 807–814. Cf. also Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

24. See Boccaccio's Seven Story in the Second Day in The Decameron , trans. with an Introduction by G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 191. For understanding the importance of Cyprus as a trading port with the Orient, especially, after the fall of the last Christian outposts in the Holy Land, see Laura Balletto's article“Ethnic Groups, Cross-Social and Cross-Cultural Contacts on Fifteenth-Century Cyprus,” in Benjamin Arbel, ed., Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 35–48. Balletto observes that“Arabic was … one of the languages normally spoken on Cyprus, because of the presence there of considerable numbers of people originating from Syria. The other, naturally, was Greek …” (48). See also Georges Jehel's article“Jews and Muslims in Medieval Genoa: From the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century” (120–132). Jehel argues that“Mediterranean port cities in particular tend to be cosmopolitan, especially when the nature of their trade and the contacts they have both in the East and the West have led these cities constantly to expand their international networks. Genoa must be included together with a few other large metropolises, such as Constantinople, Venice, Naples, and Palermo, at the centre of the Ligurian coastal region, between the eleventh and the fifteenth century it built up a vast commercial hub covering the entire Mediterranean from the Black Sea to Gibraltar …. It is quite certain though that the majority of Muslims living in Genoa were slaves either by status or origin” (120). Jehel's insistence on the Mediterranean port cities does not tell the whole story. Damascus and Aleppo are not on the coast, yet both Syrian cities are cosmopolitan and have Italians among their population.

25. See the article“Promiscuity, Emancipation, Submission: The Civilizing Process and the Establishment of a Female Role Model in the Frame Story of 1001 Nights” by Samar Attar and Gerhard Fischer in Arab Studies Quarterly , 13: 3 & 4 (1991), 1–18.

26. Recently, while I was checking new books and articles on the Internet, I came across an article by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza in a book entitled A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, edited by him and two other professors, Anxo Abuin Gonzalez and César Dominguez (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), 1–52. In his article“The European Horizon of Peninsular Literary Historiographical Discourses,” the author/editor argued,“the thesis that Arab literature and culture were the basic impulse for the creation of modern Europe, springing from the cultural otherness of the South and particularly of the Iberian Peninsula, is quite an audacious proposition” (17). He was referring to the thesis of Juan Andrés (1740–1817), a Spanish Jesuit priest who died in Rome in exile, and Martin Sarmiento (1695–1772), a Spanish scholar, writer, and Benedictine monk who wrote on a wide variety of subjects and died in Madrid. I was very curious to find out why the thesis of the two Spanish writers was“discarded by the mainstream authors of Peninsular literary history” as Aseguinolaza assured us. When I checked another book entitled World Literature Reader: A Reader, eds., Theo D'haen, César Dominguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–8, I found excerpts from the writings of Juan Andrés and a few lines about his life. In“On the Origin, Progress and Present State of All Literature” (1782–1799/1784–1806), I learnt that when the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1767, Andrés moved first to Corsica, then he taught philosophy at the Jesuit School in Ferrara, Italy, until 1774. From 1774 to 1796 he stayed at Mantua working as a private tutor. After traveling across Italy and collecting several materials, he began writing a seven-volume world history of literature, which was published between 1782 and 1799. His brother Carlos translated it into Spanish, in a ten-volume version between 1784 and 1806. In his book, Juan Andrés discussed Chinese, Indian, Persian, Phoenician, Chaldean, Hebrew, and the Greco-Roman literatures and had a lengthy analysis of Arabic literature and its crucial role in developing European literature including Spanish, Italian, Occitan, French, German, English, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch. The book was very popular in the eighteenth century. Still, the reviewers were not very happy about the attention paid to Arabic literature. They would have preferred more emphasis on Greek and Roman literature.“Arabs,” the article on Juan Andrés states,“have traditionally been considered a barbarian people who have destroyed literature. By assessing their literature extensively, the author has shown, on the one hand, how much modern culture is indebted to them, and, on the other hand, their influence on the re-establishment of the belles lettres and, even more, of the sciences. This new opinion and the honorable role played by Spain for having stored Arabic literature and transmitted it to other nations explain why the author has devoted so much attention to this issue” (2–3). I was extremely surprised to read about these two Spanish scholars, Juan Andrés and Martin Sarmiento. As an old specialist in Comparative Literature, I have never read anything about them in the past. No one in my field ever took these two historians seriously or ever mentioned them!

27. See Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).