Music, Poetry, and Lingua Franca in Medieval Iberia
In: Philological EncountersThis essay examines three different points of cultural contact between Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia as documented in three different bodies of texts. In each example, the use of a lingua franca results in the exchange of cultural ideas and the re-presentation of one group in the language of another. The first point of contact is in the court of Córdoba in the early 9th century as recorded in an Arabic biography of a musician, which has survived only as excerpted in a later encyclopedia compiled across the Mediterranean in Syria in the 14th century. The second point of contact takes place only a few decades later, also in Córdoba, and is documented in a Latin epistle composed by a Christian during a period of increasing tension between Muslims and Christians. The third point of contact occurs in Aragon and Catalonia in the late 14th and early 15th century, where ‘Moorish’ and Jewish musicians and dancers were regularly hired to perform at the courts of the royal family and other nobles, the evidence for which is found in financial records composed in Old Catalan. Each of these examples provides evidence of cultural contact that could significantly change our understanding of the relationship between cultural and linguistic groups in this period.
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Narbaez Luys de Los Seys Libros del Delphin de Música de cifra para Tañer de Vihuela 1945 Barcelona C.S.I.C. and Instituto Español de Musicología [Valladolid, 1538]. Trans. and study by Emilio Pujol.
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Péres de Hita Ginés Bryant Shasta M. Guerras Civiles de Granada 1982 Newark Juan de la Cuesta
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al-Ṭanjī Muḥammad Ibn Tāwīt “al-Ṭarāʾiq wa-l-alh.ān al-mūsīqiyya fī Ifrīqiya wa-l-Andalus” Abḥāth 1968 21 93 116
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al-‘Umarī Ibn Faḍl Allāh Sezgin Fuat & Neubauer Eckhard Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār 1988 Frankfurt-am-Main Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften Facsimile of Aya Sophia ms.
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al-‘Umarī Ibn Faḍl Allāh ʿAbd al-Allāh ibn Yaḥyā al-Sarīḥī 2003 UAE al-Majmaʿ al-Thaqāfī
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al-‘Umarī Ibn Faḍl Allāh Ghaṭṭās ʿAbd al-Malik Khashaba 2005 Cairo Dār al-Kutub wa-l-Wathāʾiq al-Qawmiyya
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al-‘Umarī Ibn Faḍl Allāh Kāmil Sulaymān al-Jubūrī 2010 Beirut Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya
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Wolf Kenneth Baxter Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain 1988 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
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Wright Roger Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France 1982 Liverpool Francis Cairns
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Zwartjes Otto Love Songs from al-Andalus: History, Structure and Meaning of the 1997 Kharja. Leiden Brill
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17
Roger Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1982), 157, quoted in Otto Zwartjes, Love Songs from al-Andalus: History, Structure and Meaning of the Kharja (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 7.
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18
Karla Mallette, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012), 180.
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26
Mallette, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean, 180.
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28
Ibid., 162.
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31
Ibid., 163.
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32
Ibid., 172.
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33
Ibid., 172, 173, 174-75.
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34
Ibid., 73-77.
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35
Ibid., 74 and 134.
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Music, Poetry, and Lingua Franca in Medieval Iberia
In: Philological EncountersThis essay examines three different points of cultural contact between Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia as documented in three different bodies of texts. In each example, the use of a lingua franca results in the exchange of cultural ideas and the re-presentation of one group in the language of another. The first point of contact is in the court of Córdoba in the early 9th century as recorded in an Arabic biography of a musician, which has survived only as excerpted in a later encyclopedia compiled across the Mediterranean in Syria in the 14th century. The second point of contact takes place only a few decades later, also in Córdoba, and is documented in a Latin epistle composed by a Christian during a period of increasing tension between Muslims and Christians. The third point of contact occurs in Aragon and Catalonia in the late 14th and early 15th century, where ‘Moorish’ and Jewish musicians and dancers were regularly hired to perform at the courts of the royal family and other nobles, the evidence for which is found in financial records composed in Old Catalan. Each of these examples provides evidence of cultural contact that could significantly change our understanding of the relationship between cultural and linguistic groups in this period.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 284 | 67 | 0 |
| Full Text Views | 255 | 9 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 132 | 34 | 0 |