Abstract
This essay situates a discussion of two cosmopolitan metropolises at distinct historical moments—Baghdad (ca. 780 CE) and Venice (ca. 1250 CE)—in order to highlight two of the characteristics that distinguish classical Arabic and Latin, the mega-languages of the premodern world, from the national languages of European modernity.1 First, unlike national languages, Arabic and Latin were languages that were not bounded by territory and, in fact, held a far-ranging, if discontinuous, currency. They were languages of high culture and imperial bureaucracy. Both gave rise to a multitude of other languages and idioms: the mother tongues, local spoken languages, and literary languages of the populace. Second, both cosmopolitan languages—governed by strict, institutionalized laws of grammar—were self-consciously designed to resist historical change, and therefore refused to be shaped by spoken linguistic practice. They were steady-state languages; their capacity to resist change through time allowed them to communicate across the millennia. Immediacy—granted by continuity with current linguistic practice in a given location—is the crowning virtue of the European national languages. But the cosmopolitan languages of the Middle Ages, rather than being keyed to geochronological or cultural specificities, float free of micro-histories and micro-regions.
This chapter investigates the interplay between cosmopolitan languages and local vernaculars in the Middle Ages, using Abbasid Baghdad and late medieval Venice as examples.
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Notes
Husain Haddawy, trans. The Arabian Nights (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 66–67.
The authoritative work of Dimitri Gutas has made the history of the Abbasid translation movement accessible to a broad audience in its glorious (and sometimes baffling) abundance. For a more pointed discussion of the complexities of medieval transmission tradition, see Karla Mallette, “Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle’s Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean,” PMLA 124 (2009): 583–91.
My discussion focuses on the Abbasid east, where shu‘ūbiyya was primarily driven by Persians and Nabataeans (or Aramaeans); in Egypt, during the same period, the movement gave voice to the cultural aspirations of the Copts. On the shu‘ūbiyya movement, in addition to sources cited herein, see C. E. Bosworth, “The Persian Impact on Arabic Literature,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L. Beeston, T. M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 484–85;
Nadia Maria El-Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 111–12;
Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “The Social Significance of the Shuubiyya,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962), pp. 62–73;
and Sami A. Hanna and George H. Gardner, “Al-Shu‘ūbiyyah’ Up-Dated: A Study of the 20th Century Revival of an Eighth Century Concept,” Middle East Journal 20 (1966): 335–51. Although Dimitri Gutas does not discuss shu‘ūbiyya, he does mention the changing position of non-Arabs in the Abbasid state, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (New York: Routledge, 1998), see especially p. 63.
In this context, most commentators cite one Qur’anic verse in particular: 49:13. “O mankind…we made you into nations and tribes [shu‘ūbā wa-qabā’ila].” See Roy P. Mottahedeh, “The Shu‘ūbīyah Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976): 161–82 for a discussion of relevant Qur’anic passages and the early Qur’anic commentary tradition.
Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 parts (1863–1893; repr. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1997), 1872, p. 1555, col. 1.
On reconstructing the political aims of shu‘ūbiyya, see H. T. Norris, “Shu‘ūbiyyah in Arabic Literature,” in ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant, and G. Rex Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 31–47.
Bashshār ibn Burd, Dīwān Bashshār ibn Burd, ed. Muhammad Rif‘at Mahmūd Fatḥ Allāh and Muḥammad Shawqī Amīn, 3 vols. (Cairo: Lajnat al-Ta’līf wa-al-Tarjamah wa-al-Nashr, 1950–1966), 1:377–80; Göran Larsson, Ibn García’s Shu‘ūbiyya Letter (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 40–41.
Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, ed. ‘Abd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn, 16 vols. (Cairo: Maṭba’at Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyah, 1927), 3:138.
See S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden and Boston: Brill E-Books, 2010), pp. 166–67 for a fascinating if brief discussion of the importance of the emerging merchant class to the Abbasid state during its early years, against the backdrop of both Sasanid and Islamic ideologies of nobility, based on a careful reading of a treatise by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘.
On the spread of papermaking technology and its importance to cultural history, see Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
For a wonderful discussion of the remarkably complex volgarizzamento movement, see Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Lorenzo Renzi, “Il francese come lingua letteraria e il franco-lombardo,” in Storia della cultura veneta. 1, Dalle origini al trecento, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1976), p. 565.
For recent scholarship on Franco-Italian literature, see Luke Sunderland, “Linguistic and Political Ferment in the Franco-Italian Epic: The Geste Francor as Minor Literature,” Exemplaria 23 (2011): 293–313;
Simon Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as ‘French’ Writers,” Australian Journal of French Studies 46 (2009): 235–48;
and Kevin Reynolds, “A proposito di due inventari manoscritti relativi al Fondo Francese Antico della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana di Venezia,” Romania 127 (2009): 460–86.
See Angela Nuovo, “A Lost Arabic Koran Rediscovered,” The Library 6th s., 12.4 (1990): 273–92. During this same period—the opening decades of the sixteenth century—Venetian presses also produced books using Armenian and Cyrillic type for the foreign market (Nuovo, 283).
This unedited manuscript appears to be cognate to a volgarizzamento of Aesop from the Veneto, currently in the British Library, edited by Vittore Branca, Esopo veneto (Padua: Antenore, 1992). In the discussion that follows, I will make reference to the Branca edition, where relevant, for purposes of comparison and clarification.
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© 2013 John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie
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Mallette, K. (2013). The Metropolis and Its Languages: Baghdad and Venice. In: Ganim, J.M., Legassie, S.A. (eds) Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_2
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