The Latin Readers of Algazel, 1150-1600

This dissertation examines how Arabic works found an audience in medieval Europe and became a part of the Latin canon of philosophy. It focuses on a Latin translation of an Arabic philosophical work, Maqasid al-falasifa, by the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, known as Algazel in Latin. This work became popular because it served as a primer for Arab philosophy and helped Latins understand a tradition that had built upon Greek scholarship for centuries. To find the translation’s audience, this project looks at two sets of evidence. It studies the works of Latin scholars who drew from Algazel’s arguments and illustrates that the translation’s influence was more extensive than historians have previously thought. It also examines copies of the translation in forty manuscripts and broadens the Latin audience of Arab philosophy beyond what historians typically study—the university—to include the anonymous scribes and readers who comprise the often-voiceless majority of medieval literate society. These codices yield details about Algazel’s readers, their interests and concerns, which cannot be gathered from other sources. Scholars spared little expense with these manuscripts since several are quite ornate or contain gold leaf. Many copies possess wide margins where scholars interacted with the text by writing notes, diagrams, pointing hands, warnings, and the occasional doodle. Scribes integrated the work into the established canon by placing Algazel in manuscripts with Christian philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas. The manuscripts also contain marginalia left by generations of readers, which give insight into how scholars read the text and what passages grabbed their attention. The notes indicate that a few readers agreed with ecclesiastical authorities who condemned Algazel’s work since some scholars wrote warnings in the margins alongside passages that they considered dangerous. Thus, Latins paradoxically expended great effort to understand Arab philosophers while simultaneously condemning ideas in the translations as errors. This study expands our understanding of the European interaction with the Arab tradition by examining reading practices with evidence drawn from the readers themselves. It demonstrates that Europeans read translated Arabic works alongside long-standing authorities and treated Arab authors as valuable members of the Latin canon

The Baroque: Beads in a Rosary or Folds in Time

When Benedetto Croce associated the baroque with decadence he was developing a current of critical thinking which had construed the term ‘baroque’ pejoratively since the seventeenth century. This essay explores the idea of a baroque that is neither pejorative nor ‘early modern'’ by outlining the etymology and history of the term ‘baroque’, tracing its chequered history as a term of abuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through Benedetto Croce's characterization of the baroque as ‘decadent’, to two radically different ways of interpreting the baroque adopted by Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. This paper asks whether we might consider the baroque not as decadent, but as antidote to decadence, of baroque as troubling the smooth waters of a linear historicism

Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore

“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele's Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish, di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people. This article is part of a broader study of the Red Jews in Jewish popular culture from the Middle Ages through modernity. It is partially based on a chapter from my book, Umstrittene Erlöser: Politik, Ideologie und jüdisch-christlicher Messianismus in Deutschland, 1500–1600 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). Several postdoctoral fellowships have generously supported my research on the Red Jews: a Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Fellowship of the German Academic Foundation, a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica/Alan M. Stroock Fellowship for Advanced Research in Judaica at Harvard University, a research fellowship from the Heinrich Hertz-Foundation, and a YIVO Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship. I thank the organizers of and participants in the colloquia and conferences where I have presented this material in various forms as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of AJS Review for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Dauber and Elisheva Carlebach of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, where I was a Visiting Scholar in the fall of 2009, for their generous encouragement to write this article. Sue Oren considerably improved my English. The style employed for Romanization of Yiddish follows YIVO's transliteration standards. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Latin are my own. Quotations from the Bible follow the JPS translation, and those from the Babylonian Talmud are according to the Hebrew-English edition of the Soncino Talmud by Isidore Epstein

Late medieval churchwardens' accounts and parish government : looking beyond London and Bristol

This contribution reviews a number of contested issues in the historiography of the late medieval English parish. In contrast to views expressed by Clive Burgess in a recent article in this journal, it is argued that the reliability of churchwardens’ accounts cannot be judged in a general manner, but depends on the specific questions historians want answered. While offering reliable insights into ordinary financial transactions made by churchwardens on behalf of their parishes, they are utterly inadequate for a histoire totale of local religious life. Closer examination of the function, context and compilation of the records suggests that quantitative analysis is not only possible, but an essential prerequisite for informed discussion of parish regimes. The complexity of local communities and the desirability of comparative perspectives call for a plurality of approaches. Finally, the pivotal role of churchwardens within the varying (religious, political and administrative) configurations of the ‘whole body of the parish’ is reasserted

Being-in-the-World-Hispanically: A World on the "Border" of Many Worlds

This translation of Enrique Dussel's “‘Ser-Hispano’: Un Mundo en el ‘Border’ de Muchos Mundos” offers an interpretation of hispanos (Latin Americans and U.S. latinos) as historically, culturally, and geographically located “in-between” many worlds that combine to constitute an identity on the intercultural “border.” To illustrate how hispanos have navigated and continue to navigate their complex history in order to create a polyphonic identity, the essay sketches five historical-cultural “worlds” that come together to form the hispanic “world.