CULTURES OF MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN

The course aims to outline the medieval Mediterranean space as a zone of contact and conflict among Latin-Romance, Greek-Byzantine, Jewish, and Arab-Islamic cultures, through the direct philological analysis of texts, artifacts, and linguistic phenomena. Within the framework of Mediterranean polycentrism, the course will examine the relationships between languages and identities; the literary genres of the medieval West in their actual or presumed relationship with Eastern sources; and the geographical sites of encounter and conflict—Spain, Norman Sicily, and the Crusader Holy Land—through the study of primary textual and material sources, alongside a critical discussion of the historiographical paradigms of *convivencia* and "colonial society."

The first part of the course is devoted to an introduction to Romance Philology as a discipline historically founded on the concept of national identity. Philology and archaeology share, in nineteenth-century Europe, a common foundational vocation: both were institutionalized in order to construct and legitimize emerging national identities — the former by seeking in medieval languages and texts the roots of a collective popular spirit, the latter by excavating artifacts and burial sites so as to materialize an ethnic continuity within the soil of the patria. Developing a critical awareness of this shared ideological premise is essential for practising both disciplines with scholarly rigour. The second part of the course is devoted to languages, identities, and literary genres in the medieval Mediterranean. The four major cultural traditions are examined — Latin-Romance, Greek-Byzantine, Hebrew, and Arab-Islamic — together with the phenomena of linguistic variation and allography (Romance texts written in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac characters). The principal literary genres are then approached from the perspective of intercultural contact: epic (Chanson de Roland, Cantar de mio Cid), lyric poetry (the Arabic origins of troubadour lyric, the ḫarǧāt, lyric production at the court of Frederick II), and the short narrative tradition (the circulation of Arabic and Indian stories, One Thousand and One Nights, the Hebrew sapiential tradition). Finally, the course examines the principal geographical sites of cultural encounter and conflict in the Mediterranean area: medieval Spain (translations of the Qurʾān, the Toledo translation movement, Aljamiado-Morisco literature, multilingual glossaries), Arab-Norman-Swabian Sicily (Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew documents, allographic texts, multilingual epigraphy, vernacular poetry), and the Crusader Holy Land (French-language literature, Romance linguistic varieties, Latin scriptoria, Arabic and Romance epic, glossaries, etc.).

Regular attendance is strongly recommended.

Philology, history, society:

1)      Stefano Rapisarda, La Filologia al servizio delle Nazioni. Storia, crisi e prospettive della Filologia romanza, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2018 ISBN 978-8867741922 (2 CFU)

Introduction to Mediterranean medieval cultures:

2)      Stefano Rapisarda, Filologia del Mediterraneo medievale. Incontri e scontri tra testi, lingue e culture, Carocci, Roma 2026 ISBN 978-8829032013 (4 CFU)

Please remember that in compliance with art 171 L22.04.1941, n. 633 and its amendments, it is illegal to copy entire books or journals, only 15% of their content can be copied.

For further information on sanctions and regulations concerning photocopying please refer to the regulations on copyright (Linee Guida sulla Gestione dei Diritti d’Autore) provided by AIDRO - Associazione Italiana per i Diritti di Riproduzione delle opere dell’ingegno (the Italian Association on Copyright).

The teachers undertake, within the limits of the financial resources, to ensure as far as possible that a copy of the adopted texts is available in the departmental library or (in the case of hard-to-find texts, articles and essays) to make them available on Studium, in accordance with the applicable copyright laws.