The Courtly Arts of Praise and Insult in Medieval Literature by Samuel Tifft England A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Margaret Larkin, Chair Professor Jerry R. Craddock Professor Chana Kronfeld Professor Frank Bezner Fall 2011 The Courtly Arts of Praise and Insult in Medieval Literature © 2011 Samuel Tifft England All rights reserved. Abstract The Courtly Arts of Praise and Insult in Medieval Literature by Samuel Tifft England Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Margaret Larkin, Chair This dissertation compares the poetry of two political figures, the Buyid vizier al-Ṣāḥib Ibn cAbb ād (938-95 CE) and King Alfonso X of Castile (1221-84 CE). I argue that they produced poems to control elite discourse, managing rules of linguistic style and social decorum. In so doing, they ensured an obedient court. This technique is most evident in their authorship of ribald, slanderous poetry, which purported to break down social rules but in fact shaped and enforced the court’s normative logic. Ibn cAbb ād, writing Classical Arabic poetry, did not seek to change preexisting notions of high and low speech; nor did Alfonso, who codified the Spanish language and was the most famous troubadour of Galician-Portuguese lyric. Instead, they recognized the utility of writing across the rhetorical spectrum of a courtly poetic tradition. Most of their political forebears and contemporaries limited themselves to writing such poetic motifs as panegyric, chaste love, and friendship. Invective poetry had been considered an outside force, a pastime of disgruntled or merely playful poets seeking to chide or manipulate the patron. Ibn cAbb ād and Alfonso made proprietary, authorial claims to scathing invective as well as grand praise, a combination that allowed them to dominate would-be opponents in the poetic field. I suggest that this dominance of language translates into political advantage, a sign of protection from opportunistic poets and a potential threat to enemies. Diverging from prior taxonomies of medieval literature, which station panegyric and invective as ethical opposites, I argue that the specific court politics of the Buyid and Castilian court resist this binary reading. The first chapter provides historical and linguistic accounts of the two empires, then details Ibn cAbb ād’s and Alfonso’s interventions therein. Because they took seemingly contradictory positions in their legislation, administrative prose, official correspondence, rhetoric, and poetry, their work forecloses certain broad arguments on ethics. This breach makes way for my epistemological discussion of poetic form, which connects the poetic analysis in chapters 2 and 3. The study then moves into a structural account of the poetic utterance. In chapter 4, I show how the social hierarchies invented in the poetic text push insistently outward, shifting our critical view toward the hierarchy of the court. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abbreviations iv Chapter 1: History, Language, and Heteroglossia 1 Chapter 2: The Use Value of Praise 29 Chapter 3: Regulation, Economy, Insult 71 Chapter 4: The Work of Definitions and Conclusions 119 Works Cited 151 i Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude as an academic goes to my committee, a group of extraordinary intellects and, to my good fortune, people so gracious that our many cups of coffee together I have enjoyed just for the good company. I thank Margaret Larkin for chairing the committee, for her dedication to Arabic, and for her ability to imbue that passion in students such as myself. I particularly appreciate the joy she takes in the language’s broad variety, from Classical poetry to the colloquial wit of modern Egypt. Her mastery of both is a source of great motivation. Chana Kronfeld’s generosity and deep engagement with my written argument have been vital to this project. As I prepare for the next phase of my scholarly life, I keep her detailed, rigorous and always encouraging comments with me, literally and figuratively. I will doubtless draw lessons from them in the years to come. Frank Bezner extended to me great help by joining my committee, and his perspective as a medievalist and comparative scholar has been of inestimable value to this dissertation. His energy in reading and discussing texts is, in itself, a lesson in good pedagogy. To Jerry R. Craddock I give my heartfelt thanks and, as befits the consummate gentleman he his, a tip of the hat. I could scarcely hope for an advisor with such deep knowledge of Iberian textual culture, but what is even more remarkable is how readily and assiduously he has imparted some of that knowledge on me. Literary study has been, for me, a process of discovering a scholarly community and of fruitful solitary labor. This dissertation is a product of conversations with friends, colleagues, and professors—what is most gratifying to me is that these three groups are not at all separate, just as the written text that follows is not truly separable from the conversations themselves. For their friendship and the ideas they have helped me develop and write, I thank Kareem Abu-Zeid, Nicholas Baer, Axel Berny, Paco Brito, Brian Brown, Juan Caballero, Kfir Cohen, Eli Friedman, Donaldo Osorio, Anat Shenker- Osorio, and Laura Wagner. Special thanks are due to Seth Kimmel, who is second only to my committee members in helping me shape my dissertation, and second to no one in the hospitality he has shown me in visits on both coasts and across the Atlantic. I greatly appreciate my department, Comparative Literature, for the unique intellectual environment it provides, for its early support of my language study, and for cultivating a fine academic community. There, Karl Britto and Erica Roberts stand out in particular for their encouragement and good counsel in the course of my writing. I can hardly imagine navigating the academic and administrative waters of Berkeley without their guidance. Their diligent work and graciousness to students (and to everyone else) makes all the difference in our department. Just upstairs, in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, I received much help from Ana Ameal-Guerra in learning to read cantigas . My research and writing have been partially funded by a grant from the Al-Falah Program of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Many thanks go to its staff and affiliated faculty. The Bancroft Library, in particular its director Charles Faulhaber, was extremely helpful with manuscripts, both the very old kind I researched and the new text I was producing as a dissertation. Further afield, the ii United States Department of Education and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq both funded my research. I thank my colleague Sinan Antoon for his insights and perennial affability. In my first year of writing the dissertation, Paul Minsky offered me astute and necessary advice, and has helped me develop a general sense of patience, compassion, and perspective on life and work. For teaching me how to write and to argue persuasively in writing, I thank four outstanding educators: Thomas Dodd, Jonathan Friendly, Eileen Pollack, and Victoria Kahn. In 1984, my mother, Lizabeth Tifft England, finished her dissertation and began work in Egypt, bringing me to live with her. As I studied in elementary school outside Cairo, she went downtown to teach courses on languages, how people learn them, and how best to teach them. Looking back upon this experience, I have a keen sense of why I developed the academic interests that inform my own dissertation. I am deeply grateful for her courage and inquisitive spirit in moving, as a single parent, to a new place where we knew neither the language nor the people. She gave me the opportunity to know both. To my father, Albert “Terry” England, are due thanks for the lessons he continues to teach me about kindness, self-reflection, and personal integrity. He has shown me by example how adulthood can bring just as much insight, and be just as formative, as childhood. I hope I have followed his example in that. Had I been able to imitate his work ethic, I could have written two dissertations by now. I count myself lucky that my family has grown to include people from around the world, some of whom share my name, some of whom do not. Barbara England has shown me by example what it means to be gracious and caring. In one way or another, I owe to her my relationships with my growing family: Benjamin Adelsberger, Anne Adelsberger, and Eliot England. I thank John Pisoni for instilling in me a fascination with languages and Italian food. As generous academically as he is personally, he helped me in my efforts to revive my long-dormant German reading skills. He reviewed my translation of major German philological texts, appending careful pencil marks and a thorough narrative response. He also wrote out an entirely new translation so that I might improve, by comparing texts, my understanding of the original—a reminder of what is special about our discipline and also that, then as now, all errors in this study are mine. iii Abbreviations AW = Al-Taw ḥīdī, Ab ū Ḥayy ān. Akhl āq al-waz īrayn . Ed. Mu ḥammad bin T āwīt al- Ṭanj ī. Damascus: Ma ṭbūcāt al-Majma c al-cIlm ī al-cArab ī, 1965. CBN = Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (Colocci-Brancuti), Codex 10991. CEM = lyric poems known as Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer . Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the original texts are from Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer dos cancioneiros medievais galego-portugueses .