mediterranean literature 317
Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, and Jewish sacred texts (Selden, 2012: 32–33)—has
to do with the way the figure of Alexander conjoins the thematics of world conquest
and the insatiable quest for knowledge.
Cross-readings“The most fundamental cultural rift in the Mediterranean,” writes Karla Mallette, is
the breach between language written from left to right and language written from
right to left” (2013: 254–255). For the medieval and pre-modern Mediterranean,
taking the place of Arabic into account is complicated by the way standard literary
histories have cast these centuries as a “period of decadence.” This dismissive label—
which the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Allen and Richards, 2006) dis-
places with the term “post-classical”—reflects the emergence of a popular literature
(enabled by the introduction of paper-making in the mid-eighth century) in which
vernacular and orally-derived language, styles, and genres displace or recombine with
those characteristic of the literary production of the “classical” age. The resulting
complexities and incongruities include phenomena that bedevil any attempt to canon-
ize literary history as linear successions of taxonomies of discrete genres: “genres from
one category that satirize those of another, materials that cross over nearly unchanged,
and genres that exist in both popular and elite forms.” In medieval Arabic, for exam-
ple, learned works of adab (belles-lettres) incorporate “popular” forms (humorous
anecdotes, jokes, doggerel verse) while “popular” genres such as the siyar (folk epics)
sometimes feature lengthy passages of “classical” poetry. This challenge is com-
pounded by the fact that most of the corpus of popular narrative—tens of thousands
of manuscript pages—remains unedited and little known (Reynolds, 2006a: 246–
247). Among the texts from this linguistically and generically diverse tradition, frame
tale collections—“not usually conceived of as integral works, but rather as open-ended
vessels that copyists and redactors could alter as they wished, adding, deleting and
reordering tales quite freely” (Reynolds, 2006b: 256)—were natural vehicles for
transmission across linguistic, cultural, and confessional lines. Arabic versions of com-
pilations such as Kalila and Dimna or the Sendebar/Seven Sages were, as we have
seen, crucial nodes that introduced these text networks into Mediterranean circuits of
transmission and exchange.^4
Mallette introduces boustrophedon—the bi-directional writing employed in some
archaic texts and inscriptions in which lines run from left to right and right to left in
alternation (after the way an ox pulling a plough reverses direction at the end of each
row)—as a metaphor for bridging the divide between languages written from left to
right and those written from right to left (2013). In literary studies, the practice of
reading across this breach has been most developed and sustained in the case of medi-
eval Iberia. Between the Muslim conquest of 711 and the Christian reconquest of
Granada in 1492, peoples of different languages, ethnicities, and religions co-habited
for nearly 800 years. In contrast to dominant perspectives that would compartmental-
ize Iberian literature into separate Romance (Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan), Hebrew,
and Arabic components, a Mediterranean perspective encourages us to understand it
as a literary “polysystem” in which texts are both produced and consumed in more
than one language (Wacks, 2007).^5 Through centuries of co-habitation, these lan-
guages “translated each other, glossed each other, calqued each other [and] appeared