Imagining the Mediterranean: Disruption and Connectivity in Medieval Iberian Tales of the Sea A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Nicholas Michael Parmley IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Michelle Hamilton June 2013 Nicholas Michael Parmley © 2013 Acknowledgments I am neither a rock nor an island. This dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance and guidance of countless individuals. I wish to express my sincerest thanks and humble appreciation to my advisor, mentor and friend, Professor Michelle Hamilton for her guidance and training throughout my graduate career. The passion and love she shows for her work, and the time and energy she invests in her students (including countless hours of proofing the present dissertation) is truly admirable and exemplary; to Professor Nicolas Spadaccini for his guidance and friendship, and for the many informal coffee chats in which he offered his honest perspective; to Professor Kathryn Reyerson for her love of the Mediterranean and her invaluable insight and expertise; and to Professor Barbara Weissberger for pushing me beyond my critical comfort zone and for encouraging boldness. Special thanks also to the many colleges and organizations that funded my research: to the U.S. Department of Education for supporting my Arabic language study; to Theresa Vann and her team at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library for manuscript research funding; and at the University of Minnesota, my thanks to the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, College of Liberal Arts, and Center for Medeival Studies for their generous support of my research in the form of numerous grants and fellowships. Thanks to Liam Roodhouse for his artwork, and to Mary Ann Beattie, Kathren Lundquist, Meridith Cody and Jessi Girard for all they do that goes unnoticed. Thanks to my mother and father for their prayerful love and support, and lastly to my wife Aimee for her patience, encouragement and love; for her wisdom, insight and humility; for her grace, forgiveness and prayer; and for reading every word I wrote. To you all, I offer my sincere thanks. i For Aimee and Isaac, I love you ridiculous. ii בים דרכך במים רבים ועקבותיך לא נדעו )תהילים עז:כ) iii Table of Contents List of Figures . v Introduction . 1-18 Chapter 1 . 19-83 Chapter 2 . 84-140 Chapter 3 . 141-184 Chapter 4 . 185-249 Conclusion . 250-255 Works Cited . 256-286 Appendix . 287-307 iv List of Figures Figure 1 . 19 Figure 2 . 84 Figure 3 . 141 Figure 4 . 185 v Introduction “Navigation delivers man to uncertainty of fate; on water, each one of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last.” (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization) “Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage.” (Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator) The last 50 years of globalization have been marked by concerns over the instability of boundaries and identities (including political, social, and religious). Consequently, modern notions of East and West have increasingly been challenged. The famous remark attributed to Alexander Dumas that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees” exemplifies the ambiguity of Spain’s position in that same dichotomy. The present dissertation problematizes the Mediterranean and how in the Middle Ages the sea that laps at Spain’s shores becomes an equally problematic paradigm of disruption and connectivity, exile and salvation. Thus I will investigate Iberian cultural production in a Mediterranean perspective. In particular, I will investigate how medieval Iberian texts in Romance, Arabic and Hebrew envision the sea as a representational space of suffering and loss, incoherence and confusion, as well as a path of salvation, imagined empire and the intellectual journey. To this end, I analyze texts from four medieval Iberian linguistic communities: the Hebrew sea poetry of Moses Ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi (Chapter 1), 1 the Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, of Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl (Chapter 2), the anonymous Castilian Libro de Apolonio (Chapter 3), and the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X, the Wise (Chapter 4). Such an approach, which considers different linguistic, confessional, and ethnic orientations, necessarily requires a familiarity and consideration of traditions and systems of thought that extend beyond the traditional borders of the Iberian Peninsula. This includes aspects of Jewish and Arabic history, philosophy, and literature, as well as recent critical methodologies proposed by Mediterranean (Ocean) Studies, which offers a reorientation of critical perspective beyond methodologies and frameworks imported from existing discourses and takes the sea as a primary point of inquiry. To this end, theories of cartography and space (particularly those of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre) will be useful to the investigation of what I call imagined geographies. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre speaks of three categories of space: spatial practice, spatial representation, and representational space. Whereas the first two remind us of Certeau’s binary that space is practiced place, the latter (or rather the trilogy of terms) allows us to consider how space is lived, perceived and conceived; that is, imagined. And it is in this way that we will investigate the Mediterranean not as a place, but conceptual space (imagined or otherwise) by and through which to re-frame considerations of medieval Iberian cultural production—revealing important cross-religious, linguistic and political connections. Moreover, this paradigm allows us to analyze different “Mediterraneans” or conceptual seas, such as the Atlantic Ocean of Alfonso X (Chapter 4) and the Indian Ocean of Ibn Tufayl (Chapter 2). Though geographically “real” in the historical sense, they are yet 2 imagined seas filtered through the cultural reality of life on, and in contact with, the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the space in and from which these authors write. Despite the importance of the Mediterranean Sea, much literary scholarship of the twentieth century has fixed its gaze on the ports and hinterlands that mark only the beginning and end of maritime travel. My research responds to this lacuna by investigating medieval tales of the sea and seafaring produced by authors of the diverse linguistic and confessional communities that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. These historical groups not only thrived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but many of them braved its depths, in turn creating complex networks of cultural exchange. And as the authors and subjects of these texts adhered to different faiths and wrote in several languages, the tales they tell reveal not only the rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean, but a complex space of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Real or imagined, the tales these authors tell are of importance to our understanding of a diverse people and a rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance, by and for kings, clerics and exiles, the authors whose work I explore reveal a space of constantly shifting geographical boundaries, political frontiers, and religious identities. But before the protagonists of their tales arrive at port, wreck into land, or are swallowed by the sea, each entices us to consider their point of view, a perspective from amidst the tumultuous waves. Such a critical perspective, however, is not easily achieved. The concern of hispanomedievalism for the last 100 years has been focused primarily on Castile and a corresponding construction of Spanish national identity, which has privileged works such as the Cid or 3 Berceo’s Milagros to the exclusion of other texts and traditions such as those in Hebrew and Arabic. Américo Castro and the Cultural Studies Model of Hispanomedievalism Spanish identity according to Américo Castro was intimately connected to the Muslim and Jewish cultures of the peninsula. The subtitle of his book is sufficient to remind the reader of who exactly he believes the Spanish to be: Christian, Muslims and Jews. The result for Castro was that the “Spaniard” entered history from a tridimensional society. As he would later write in Realidad historica española, the Spanish conflict was an internal struggle amongst “castas.” That is, the “Spanish Christian” alone was not enough; he came to the consciousness of himself already islamizado, calling himself “Christian” because his enemy called himself “Muslim.” He writes, “Fuera del campo de batalla, el hacer del moro le fue indispensable, y la vida del cristiano y la del musulmán se compenetraron en múltiples modos” ‘Beyond the field of battle, the way of the Moor was indespensible for [the Spaniard], and the Christian and Muslim ways of life were interrelated in many ways’ (XXIII). More specifically, the intellectual efforts of Iberian Jews and Muslims were indispensable. And by consequence, without Muslims or Jews, the Spanish Christian Empire would not have been possible. It was a systematic denial and eventual expulsion of such knowledge that led to the notion of Spain’s developmental retardation and identity crisis constructed by the Generation of 98 and vigorously countered by Pidal. In their own way, scholars in the wake of Castro (including Menocal, Marquez Villanueva, Armistead and Monroe) operating under adaptations of his model of 4 convivencia, saw their research as helping to complete the picture of a multicultural Spain. Consequently, the new cultural studies model did not seek to insert new works in place of those studied by Pidal. Rather, their approach to criticism questioned his method, not his texts—though, admittedly, they might question Pidal’s definition of a “text.” At any rate, with the help of these pioneering scholars, among others, a renewed interest in heretofore ignored or marginalized literary works and peoples became an important (though still somewhat lacking) part of Hispanomedieval Studies.