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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
Building knowledge: the writers of Visigothic and Moorish Spain
Intellectual life under the Visigoths wasn’t as subdued as might be imagined.
In the 6thcentury San Isidoro de Sevilla, Bishop of Seville, covered everything
from the Goths and the Church to the natural world in his collections of
writing. HisEtymologiae, a 20-volume guide to pretty much everything the
learned knew back then, remained a major reference work for centuries.
Intellectual life, not least literature, later flourished in the mixed atmosphere
of Moorish, Jewish and Christian culture.The Moors were particularly erudite,
establishing universities and introducing Spain to the classics long before
the rest of Europe had its Renaissance. Córdoban-born Ibn Hazm is often
nominated as the greatest writer of Moorish Spain;Kitab al-milal wa ‘n-nihal
(The Book of Religions and Sects), challenging the 11 thcentury pillars of Islam,
was his greatest feat. Moorish writers, Ibn Hazm included, had a particular
talent for love poetry, a genre that would re-emerge with spirit in early Spanish
language literature.
Jewish literature in Spain
Jews enjoyed a period of tolerance during the first three centuries of Moorish
rule, living in relative harmony with the Arab population.The poet Ibn Gabirol
was one of the principal literary figures born of this cultural stability; his poetry,
as well asFons Vitae(c.1050), a philosophical treatise on existence, remains in
print. While persecution of the Jews erupted in the 11thcentury, Jews and
Arabs alike found some cerebral solace inToledo after the city’s recapture
by Christians in 1085.There, under King Alfonso VI of Castile, the School of
Toledo gave Spain its first Latin translations of Arab writing, pushing the
development of a native literature with it.
Thejarcha: Spain’s first homegrown poem
Spain’s first ‘native’ literature was written in Mozarabic, the Latin and Arabic
fusion spoken by Christians under Arab rule.Thejarcha, a short verse first
written down in the 11 thcentury, was an early Mozarabic literary format. Born
of an oral poetic tradition and guided by Arabic and Hebrew verse, typically the
poems told the story of a woman longing for an absent love, even though they
were usually recited by men. As theReconquistacrept south, other Romance
tongues moulded thejarcha.The notion of thejarchaas Spain’s earliest native
literature only formed in the 20thcentury after the ‘rediscovery’ of Mozarabic
poems in a Cairo synagogue in 1948.
