Donald W Wood

Series: Brill's Companions to Medieval Literatures and Cultures, Volume: 3

Volume Editors: Robin M. Bower and Matthew V. Desing

Mester de clerecía is the term traditionally used to designate the first generations of learned poetry in medieval Ibero-Romance dialects (the precursors of modern Castilian and other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula). In its time, this poetry was anything but traditional. These long poems of structured verse reappropriate the heroic past through the retelling of legends from Classical Antiquity, saints’ lives, miracle stories, Biblical apocrypha, and other tales. At the same time, the poems recast the place of their authors, and learned characters within their stories, in the shifting dynamics of their thirteenth and fourteenth century present.

This chapter examines the version of the Coplas contained in Cambridge
University Library, MS. Add. 3355, published by González Llubera. Following a brief consideration of the text’s position relative to the phenomenon of mester de clerecía, I will conduct a close reading of the Coplas alongside parallel accounts of the story of Joseph found in Genesis, early collections of midrashim or Jewish Biblical exegesis—particularly the one known as Sefer HaYashar—as well as the General estoria, which was initiated by Alfonso X of Castile. This analysis will demonstrate how the scribe’s lexical and content choices created a version of this narrative whose central themes of local governance, measured heroism, and filial devotion fit within medieval Iberian conceptions of courtly culture.

At its core, the present article is a response to Jerry R. Craddock's brief work "Concerning the Transliteration of Aljamiado Texts," published in La corónica in 1976. Craddock's critique of the cumbersome system by which scholars render Aljamiado texts in Latin characters provided a starting point from which to survey key theoretical trends and approaches to working with Aljamiado-Morisco texts that have emerged during the past half century. Our journey begins in Europe, particularly in the Universities of Oviedo and Alicante where Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, Antonio Vespertino Rodríguez, and their students set the standards for creating critical editions of Aljamiado works on both sides of the Atlantic. Important contributions from other parts of Europe are also highlighted. From there, we turn to North Africa, particularly Tunisia, to highlight the work of Abdeljelil Temimi and the Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l'Information (FTERSI). Our survey concludes with the work of American scholars and emerging, often interdisciplinary, tendencies that are currently pushing the boundaries of theoretical interpretation in American universities.

Pedagogical edition, transcription, and translation of the Aljamiado-Morisco Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona (Aragón, ca. 1587) found in MS J57 of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, Madrid. A variant of the folktale of the “handless maiden,” this narrative details the conversion of the pagan princess Carcayçiyona to Islam and the trials that befall her. The English version contains a short introduction in English, a transliteration of the Aljamiado into Latin characters, and English translation translation, accompanying notes, and a short bibliography.

Housed at: Open Iberia/América: Online, Open Access Teaching Anthology of Premodern Iberian and Latin American Texts https://openiberiaamerica.hcommons.org/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to download, share, adapt and republish, provided you attribute the source and do not use for commercial purposes.

Pedagogical edition, transcription, and translation of the Aljamiado-Morisco Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona (Aragón, ca. 1587) found in MS J57 of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, Madrid. A variant of the folktale of the “handless maiden,” this narrative details the conversion of the pagan princess Carcayçiyona to Islam and the trials that befall her. The Spanish version contains a short introduction in Spanish, a transliteration of the Aljamiado into Latin characters, a modern Spanish translation, accompanying notes, and a short bibliography.

Housed at: Open Iberia/América: Online, Open Access Teaching Anthology of Premodern Iberian and Latin American Texts
https://openiberiaamerica.hcommons.org/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to download, share, adapt and republish, provided you attribute the source and do not use for commercial purposes.

The subject of this study is the Aljamiado-Morisco narrative, the "Alḥadix đe Musā kon Yako el-karniçero," found in Madrid, BNE, MS 5305; an adaptation of the popular “Companion in Paradise” folktale type. Through a comparative reading of this and similar renderings of this tale, I will demonstrate that the Aljamiado narrative develops a detailed exemplification of ritual-like domestic practices that, within a Morisco context of use, served as a model for the proper care of one’s parents. For his fulfillment of these practices, the protagonist Jacob, condemned by the members of his community identified collectively as Banī Isrā’īl, is promised a privileged place in Paradise along the prophet Moses. Contextualized within an Aljamiado-Morisco manuscript, Jacob’s reward is reframed as a polemical victory for Islam over other monotheistic traditions; a recurrent theme linking several of the texts contained in this manuscript.

The present study approaches sixteenth-century Aljamiado-Morisco narratives as spaces of cultural and religious negotiation. Specifically, it examines the insertion of the initial two verses of the Latin Ave Maria prayer into an Islamic ḥadīṯ of the life of Jesus. Applying sociolinguistic theories of diglossia to examine the use of language in this and comparable texts, I argue that the Morisco appropriation of a Latin Christian text is an organic step in the evolution of their religious identities.

My contribution to this conversation proposes an alternative approach to formulas thought to exemplify Morisco magical practices that focuses on the ecology of their manuscript context. That is, to consider the ways in which written organisms—talismans, potions, formulas, prescriptions, diagrams and other imagery, ingredients, vocabulary, grammatical and syntactical structures, handwriting styles, and other topographical features—coexist within their pages. How do words and ideas move through a text? Where does connective tissue give way to moments of separation and vice versa? How do segments of text speak to or question one another? Such an approach is messy and uncomfortable. It challenges the reader to suspend preconceptions of the magical and the medicinal; to resist the temptation to compartmentalize according to Arabized Galenic, Neoplatonic, or Scholastic Christian interpretations. Rather, each formula in a text must be scrutinized objectively, allowing it to speak from and through its environment. As I hope to demonstrate, this type of close reading may help to parse out a more nuanced understanding of how Morisco practitioners may have classified magic and medicine, not as static points along a spectrum of religion, magic, and science, but as moving and evolving constructs.

Within approximately two centuries of the birth of Islam, Sunni mystics were developing a doctrine of nūr Muḥammadī (the Light of Muḥammad), which proposes that the soul of the Prophet Muḥammad existed prior to the creation of humankind. Bestowed in the form of resplendent light to Adam, the nūr Muḥammadī was passed from prophet to prophet until the coming of Muḥammad himself. This study proposes a relationship between this doctrine and the practice of writing upon bodies. Forms of Islamic magic, including the fabrication of amulets and talismans (alherçes), employed individual letters, words, phrases, and symbols—constructed of specific materials often under precise circumstances—that, in combination with their placement on a physical body, harnessed and focused magical powers. The term “bodies,” in this case, is employed broadly to refer to both the human form and materials such as paper or cloth, metals, tablets, and even buildings. This analysis will consider a range of Aljamiado documents produced by the Moriscos of Spain between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Sixteenth-century Aljamiado-Morisco manuscripts play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of how the Moriscos conceived of and negotiated the structures of rituals and sacred space. Aljamiado recontamientos, particularly miracle narratives and works pertaining to the Islamic genre of dalā’il or “proofs,” reveal a complex interplay between performance, space, and manifestations of the divine that come together to form and transform sacred spaces. As the following analysis will demonstrate, Aljamiado texts challenge traditional theories of the sacred and profane and of the formation of sacred space proposed by Mircea Eliade, Arnold Van Gennep, and Joel Brereton of a clear delineation between the sacred and the profane and the notion of a central axis mundi, or point of contact between the three realms of heaven, earth, and the underworld. Rather, they manifest multifarious interpretations of these constructs that challenge us to reconsider traditional or canonical definitions of sacred space. The present study will illustrate these points as they appear in the miracle narrative "Alḥadīth de Ibrahīm." I have chosen this text for two reasons. First, the proliferation of this work in at least five manuscripts suggests relatively widespread popularity within Aragonese Morisco communities. Second, the work exemplifies multiple types of sacred space, thereby offering a microcosmic glimpse at the variety of religious experiences and manifestations of sacred found throughout the Aljamiado corpus.

The present study considers Aljamiado narrative texts [ḥadīth] broadly as spaces in which the socio-cultural and religious identities of their composers and users are negotiated. Specifically, I examine the insertion of the first two verses of the Latin Ave Maria prayer into an otherwise Islamic ḥadīth of the lives of Mary and Jesus. A consideration of the roles of code-switching and diglossia in this text—and in an Aragonese Moriscos context, more broadly—will allow us to being to understand how the various languages used in the narrative were comprehended and what purposes they may have served. It is my contention that this insertion is, in part, the result of what Mukul Saxena has termed “critical diglossia;” a form of diglossia that moves beyond language to consider the consequences of state-sponsored efforts to ideologically shape the Moriscos. In this way, the syncretistic appropriation of the Ave Maria, that, for decades, had formed part of the Moriscos’ environment, is testimony to inevitable evolution of Aragonese Morisco religious thought.

The aim of this study is twofold: to demonstrate how the Moriscos’ appeal to their historical past through the figure of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr situates the Aljamiado "El-rrekontamiyento del-çibdad del-aranbere" (Junta (CSIC) MS 57, fols. 112v-144v) within the larger historical narrative of Islamic expansion and the conquest of Al-Andalus and to demonstrate the processes of textual preservation, translation, and gloss employed by Morisco scribe’s, which reproduce methods employed by ibn Nuṣayr in the tale. Through careful consideration of the scribe’s the semantic choices and syntax, we can begin to piece together the ways in which this narrative may have been utilized in a Morisco framework of textual performance to at once bridge the spatial and temporal distances between the Morisco present and their historical past and to shape the ideologies of its audience.

The present study constitutes an attempt to catalogue the many forms and functions of angels that appear in Aljamiado manuscripts. Aljamiado legends of the prophets and the early followers of Islam – identified as ‘alḥadīth’ (legend), ‘rrekontamiyento’ (recounting), or ‘estoriya’ (story) – supplemented with Morisco translations of prophetic traditions and other non-legendary didactic materials, provide an ideal platform to this end.  The traditional isnād, or chain of transmission, accompanying many of these texts helps to identify the types of sources available to the Moriscos. Legendary materials drew heavily from the qiṣāṣ al-anbiyā’ genre, which includes the compilations of Muḥammad ibn ᶜAbd Allāh al-Kisā’ī (hereafter al-Kisā’ī) (c. eleventh century CE) and Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaᶜlabī (hereafter al-Thaᶜlabī) (d. 1036 CE), as well as from earlier Judeo-Christian, Persian, and Indian materials. Morisco prophetic traditions, to quote Chejne, ‘relied on the established traditions contained in the collections based on the accepted Six Canonical Books’.  A comparative approach of these materials reveals multifarious and often overlapping representations of angelic forms and functions from one Aljamiado text to the next. While this study is encyclopaedic in nature, it is not exhaustive. In most cases, I have selected texts that have been transcribed and published in Latin characters and are thus accessible to a general audience.

This is my own complete transcription, transliterated into Latin characters of the Aljamiado MS RESC/8 (antigua Junta 8), housed in the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library of the CSIC, Madrid. This has not been thoroughly proofed, but is being made available to anyone that might benefit from it.

This is my own complete transcription, transliterated into Latin characters of the Aljamiado MS RESC/57 (antigua Junta 57), housed in the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library of the CSIC, Madrid. This has not been thoroughly proofed, but is being made available to anyone that might benefit from it.

This is my own complete transcription, transliterated into Latin characters of the Aljamiado MS 5305 housed in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid. It has not been thoroughly proofed, but is being made available to anyone that might benefit from it.

Contents:
1. Alhadith de Musa con Yaacob el carnicero (fols. 1r-4v)
2. ᶜUmar con Ḥudīfata (5r-5v)
3. Alhadith de dos hombres (6r-13v)
4. Historia que acaeció en tiempo de Isa (14r-16v)
5. Alhadith y recontamiento de Isa con la calavera (16v-22v)
6. Historia y recontamiento de Ayub (23r-41r)
7. Historia de la ciudad de alatun y de los alqanqamās de Sulaymān (41v-60v)
8. Porofecía de Fray Juan de Rocasia (61r-68r)
9. Alhadith de Sulayman (68v-103v)

This panel challenges researchers to consider the ways in which interdisciplinary or otherwise innovative approaches to critical theory and methodology can be applied to the study of Aljamiado languages and/or texts. We interpret “Aljamiado” broadly to include Romance language texts composed in Hebrew, Arabic, or other characters in the Iberian Peninsula or in the post-expulsion diasporas from the Middle Ages through 1700.

We encourage approaches to the study of Aljamiado that challenge or cross hermeneutical boundaries. These may include, but are not limited to, approaches to race, liminality, postcolonial theory, history of emotions or of the senses, history of the book, and sociolinguistics. We also invite proposals whose contributions will bring diverse disciplines – literary studies, history, material culture, linguistics, political science, interdisciplinary studies, etc. – into productive dialogue. Papers by graduate students and emerging scholars are particularly welcome.

In a 2016 article, Sol Miguel-Prendes, former editor of La corónica, described the mission statement of the journal as welcoming “scholarship that transcends the linguistic and/or cultural borders of Spanish and explores the interconnectedness of those languages and cultures that coexisted in medieval Iberia.” The word “Iberia” opens the field of medieval and early modern studies related to the Peninsula to “methodologies that reach beyond the monolithic, proto-nationalist narrative implied in Hispanism as an ideology.” It brings into the conversation languages
and literatures that fall outside of the Castilian dominant canon. In that vein, this panel seeks papers on any area of Aljamiado language or literary studies. “Aljamiado” may be interpreted broadly to include Romance language texts composed in Hebrew or Arabic characters in the Iberian Peninsula or in the post-expulsion diasporas from the Middle Ages through 1700.

This panel seeks to explore uses of niche or alternative alphabets in the Iberian Middle Ages, conceived broadly as the period spanning the 8th through 17th centuries. Within this framework, the term “Iberian” may also be interpreted to refer to Iberian-controlled territories outside of the Iberian Peninsula. Papers may address Judeo-Spanish, Mozarabic, Aljamiado, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as lesser studied languages such as Haketia, or other linguistic blendings that have yet to be explored. Possible themes may include the implications of an alphabetic choice on the resulting textual object (manuscripts, letters, glosses, inscriptions, epigraphs, and other forms of written expression) or examples of alterity beyond the text to a particular end (assimilation, coercion, subversion, polemic, etc.).