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ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO

Of the Arab Origin

of Modern Europe:
Giammaria Barbieri,
Juan Andrés, and the
Origin of Rhyme1
Car ki bien voudra rimoier, il li covient a conter toutes les sillabes de ses dis, en teI
maniere que li vier soient acordables en nombre et que li uns n’en ait plus que li
autres. Apres li covient il amesurer les derraines siIlabes de ses dis en tel maniere ke
toutes les letres de la derraine sillabe soient samblables, et au mains la vocal de la
sillabe qui va devant la derraine. Apres ce li covient il contrepeser l’accent et la vois, si
ke ses rimes s’entracordent en lor accens. Car ja soit ce que tu acordes les letres et les
sillabes, certes la risme n’ ert ja droite se l’accent se descorde. (Brunetto Latini, Li
livres dou Tresor)

W RITTEN BETWEEN 1267 AND 1268 in Picard French, Brunetto Latini’s

third and last book of the Tresor registers the final normalization of a pe-
culiar shift in poetic technique that the Venerable Bede already had begun to
notice in some Latin lyrics four centuries earlier: namely, the passage from met-
ric to rhythmic versification. From the origin of what Aristotle had called poetics,
Greek and Latin prosody had been constructed on the basis of the length and
duration of the vowels. Different combinations of long and short vowels formed
the different classical meters—for instance, the iambic foot (short vowel followed
by a long one) and the dactylic (long vowel followed by two short ones). In this
kind of metric versification, neither the actual number of the syllables nor the
difference between tonic and atonic syllables had much importance. By the eighth
century, however, the vulgarization of Latin, from which the Romance languages
would be born, had started losing the phonetic and semantic difference between
long and short vowels: “peoples speaking the idioms of vulgar Latin stressed the
accent on the syllables with greater intensity than the Romans of the classical
period did; the latter had distinguished the syllables according to their length
. . . while the popular classes now distinguished them according to their stress”

1
I want to thank for their precious help in writing these pages my colleagues Miriam Cook, Martin
Eisner, and Marc Schachter.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /272

(Auerbach 93; all translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated). Conse-
quently, poetic versification also had started abandoning traditional metric val-
ues and had begun to organize the verse according to another principle—that of
rhythm:
Rithmus . . . est verborum modulata compositio, non metrica ratione, sed numero syllabarum ad
iudicium aurium examinata, ut sunt carmina vulgarium poetarum.
Rhythm is the modulated composition of words based not on the norms of metrics, but, judged
simply by ear, on the number of syllables, as it is seen in the songs of vulgar poets. (Bede 138)
Leaving aside the question of whether Bede’s modulata compositio referred to a
practice of setting verses to music that would certainly become widespread in
Brunetto Latini’s days, what is certain is that, already in the eighth century, the
vulgarization of Latin had started shifting the focus of poetic composition to-
wards the numero syllabarum. By the twelfth century, not only the number of the
syllables, but also the place of the accent at the middle (caesura) and at the end
of the verse were finally determined by normative prescriptions (Elwert 22;
Avalle 404). Rhyme, which etymologically derives from Latin rhythmus (Italian
rima, Provençal rim or rima, old French risme or rime), can then arguably be
imagined as the technique that brought the whole mechanism of rhythmic poetry
to close the measure of the verse with a clearly recognizable ending. Certainly
similar to older techniques such as homophony, alliteration, and homoioteleuton,
but stressing as never before the importance of the last tonic syllable of each
verse, rhyme gave an exact measure to the number of syllables. It thus brought
Romance poetry further away from metric consideration, and closer to rhythmic
ones (Beltrami 75).
At the end of this itinerary that goes from metric to rhythmic poetry we then
find Brunetto Latini codifying for the aspiring poet the interdependence of
rhythm, syllabic count, and rhyme in the new vulgar poetry of the age. Here is
my translation of the preceding epigraph from the Tresor :
So, whoever wants to rhyme correctly must count all the syllables of his compositions, so that all
verses have the same number of syllables, and none has more than the others. Furthermore, he
must check the last two syllables of all the verses of his compositions, so that all the letters of the last
syllable, or at very least the vowel of the penultimate one, are the same. Finally, he must balance
tonic stress and sound, so that all rhymes coincide in the tonic syllable. In fact, even if you use the
same letters and syllables, you still will not have a correct rhyme if the tonic stress is not also the
same. (Latini 3.10.2)
Brunetto Latini thus presented future scholars of poetics with one hard fact and
one haunting mystery. The fact was that, by 1268, versification, in at least Ro-
mance vernacular languages, had its own rhythmic rules, separate and distinct
from traditional classical techniques. The mystery concerned the origin of this
characteristic Romance way of making poetry, which had culminated in that most
peculiar of Romance poetic habits: the prescriptive use of rhyme.
Like all mysteries of origins, this one has been accompanied by an impressive
proliferation of hypotheses and related polemics. Romantic Romance philology,
giving the foundations to modern literary sciences, and led by less scientific as-
sumptions regarding the supremacy of a Teutonic Volkgeist, argued that modern
(in the sense of post-classic and post-Latinate) versification originated with Ger-
manic or Frankish popular poems set for rhythmic folk music (Einhard and

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Halphen; Paris; Vossler 30). More positivistic trends, on the other hand, discard-
ing the relevance of the popular, insisted rather on the elements of continuity
between Latin and Romance versification, pointing for instance to the use of
“rhyme” (though loosely understood and far from having any normative value)
in Commodianus, Augustine, and Leo XIII (Avalle; Burger; Lote, Tamine-Gardes,
and Victor). There has also been room for theories of Celtic (D’Ovidio 238),
Gothic (Allen and Jones), and ecclesiastical (Errante) origins. More can always
be imagined.
In recent years, however, an old theory concerning the Arab origin of rhyme
and its introduction into Europe, initially proposed by Giammaria Barbieri in
the sixteenth century and later reformulated by Juan Andrés in the eighteenth,
has gained increasing polemical force (see Boase 62-74). In the 1940s, Ramón
Menéndez Pidal, A.R. Nykl, Robert Briffault, and Gustav von Grunebaum went
back to Barbieri and Andrés to propose an Arab origin of early Romance versifi-
cation, while Samuel Stern, connecting some dots, proposed the Andalusian Jews
as the link between classical Arabic versification (muwashshaht ) and the vernacu-
lar language, the mozarabic, of Islamic Spain (Stern; Renzi and Salvi 243-44).
The defenders of what was starting to be called the “Arab theory” were, at that
point, just as certain as their opponents. Any resistance to the hypothesis of Arab
origins was for them at least unreasonable—symptomatic, at worst, of “a very
rooted prejudice: the belief in the lack of intellectual communication between
the two worlds, the Christian and the Islamic” (Menéndez Pidal 34). If von
Grunebaum had “little doubt as to the influence of Arabic poetry on the songs of
the troubadours” (340), Briffault had absolutely none: “the Arabs introduced
rhyme to Europe” (Briffault 33).
In a series of articles culminating with the publication of The Arabic Role in
Medieval Literary History in 1987, Maria Rosa Menocal has suggested that “the
segregation of European . . . from Arabic when we are discussing many impor-
tant aspects of the Middle Ages and its cultural history is an anachronistic and a
misleading one” (“Pride and Prejudice” 61). According to Menocal, Barbieri’s
hypothesis of an Arab origin of European poetry was “a quite popular theory,
and in fact . . . the regnant one . . . standing unchallenged . . . until the begin-
nings of the nineteenth century” (67). However, in the heyday of European colo-
nialism, and with the emerging sense of a European superiority—says Menocal
—the Arab theory “first cease[s] to be discussed and then becomes altogether
taboo . . . any possibility of ‘indebtedness’ to the Arabic world . . . would have been
inconceivable or very difficult for most Europeans to imagine, let alone explore
or defend” (67-68). In a similar vein, Jareer Abu-Haidar, writing in 1993, de-
clared that “there is no disagreement that rhyme . . . hailed from the Arab east”
(“Muwashshahat” 442-43).
In truth, disagreement did and does exist, and far from ever being a “regnant
theory,” the Arab one—which only gained impetus, as we will see, in the eigh-
teenth century—has been consistently the cause for consternation and exercises
in scholarly sprezzatura. The same Abu-Haidar, in an earlier essay of 1989, had in
fact correctly assessed that, facing the hypothesis of an Arab origin of early mod-
ern European poetry, “scholars have continued . . . to line themselves on both

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sides of this controversial divide” (“Diminutives” 239). In 1938, for instance, only
three years before the publication of Menéndez Pidal’s Poesía árabe y poesía europea,
the Italian philologist Francesco Piccolo, writing in the heyday of the Italian ra-
cial laws that proclaimed the Aryan-ness of Italy, seemed to be intent on proving
the prejudicial, squarely anti-Semitic viewpoint that Menéndez Pidal and Menocal
would later note. In his tirelessly tiresome tract Sull’origine della poesia moderna,
Piccolo is nothing short of scandalized that the Arab theory could have ever been
proposed. It must have been the idea—he concludes with a rhetoric that rings
some bells—of unpatriotic Europeans, motherland bashers, internationalist anti-
Catholics, “Jesuits and intellectual ladies” always ready to put down their Euro-
pean country and choose “Islamic war chants over the Chanson de geste” (10). In
the end, Piccolo accuses defenders of the Arab theory of being amateur philol-
ogists who lack evidence to claim what they do; on the other hand, their op-
ponents, who unfortunately for Piccolo have just as little evidence to prove
the contrary, do not suffer any lack, but enjoy instead illuminations of brilliant
“intuitions.”
One wonders if origins, precisely because they are unknowable, un-reconstruct-
able, and largely hypothetical—“Nothing in the records of Christian Europe af-
fords a glimpse, even the dimmest, on troubadour poetry in the making” (Briffault
20)—are not like Rorschach tests, in which one sees whatever one wants to see.
By this I do not mean to deny the plausibility of the Arab theory. On the con-
trary, it seems frankly implausible to me that three centuries of Islam in Europe,
and of Arabic—or better, Semitic—sciences developed between Sicily and Al-
Andalus, would have been of no consequence for European versification. The
problem is that the Arab theory keeps re-emerging in European history as some
sort of return of the repressed—hence my allusion to Rorschach—threatening
to disrupt the very assumptions of what this issue of Comparative Literature calls
“the idea of Europe.”
In his 1947 book on the Storia dell’idea d’Europa, Federico Chabod, for in-
stance, announced that “the concept of Europe must have first been formed as
an antithesis to that which is not Europe . . . : the first opposition between Eu-
rope and something that is not Europe . . . is . . . Asia” (Chabod 23); and Roger
Ballard, among others, later insisted on the emergence of an idea and identity of
Europe founded on “the disjunction between Christianity and Islam” (Ballard
20). These kind of pronouncements, repeated ad nauseam in a great number of
reflections on the idea of Europe (for a summary of these pronouncements, see
Bugge), are obviously predicated upon the assumption or belief that Menéndez
Pidal had identified: “the belief in the lack of intellectual communication be-
tween the two worlds, the Christian and the Islamic”—that is, the belief in the
necessary antithesis of Europe and Islam.
It may then be easy to understand the reasons behind such fierce agreements
and disagreements over the Arab theory. The re-claiming of such an hypothesis
of origins, especially in recent times, is not only a resistance to the Eurocentrism
of nineteenth-century philology, but also a reaction against an idea of Europe
predicated on the essential antithesis of European and Semitic, of Christian and
Muslim, of circumcised and uncircumcised. The Arab theory, in more ways than

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one, is an antidote to the “notion of Europe as an entity which could be threat-

ened” by the Muslim world (Lewis 18), or, mutatis mutandis, to the notorious
Clash of Civilizations (Huntington). Moreover, what the Arab theory begs to put
into question today is the idea of Europe as a universal and trans-historical hege-
monic presence in the world, caput mundi from which all, including rhythmic
poetry and rhyme, originates—to be only later “diffused” over the other and
backward regions of the world (Blaut).
Yet, some questions need to be asked: What were the stakes of the Arab theory
in the moment and age when it was first formulated by Barbieri, and when it was
later impugned by Andrés? What kind of an idea of Europe was being formed in
the discussions over the origin of rhyme? And what relevance can those polemics
over the idea of Europe still have for us today?

The Origin of the Question of Origin:

Giammaria Barbieri’s Rimario, circa 1560
dire per rima in volgare tanto è quanto dire per versi in latino, secondo alcuna proporzione (Dante,
Vita nuova )
According to John Hale, it was in the period canonically known as “the Renais-
sance” that a true “civilization of Europe” did indeed begin. Only after 1450
the word Europe . . . became part of common linguistic usage and the continent itself was given a
securely map-based frame of reference, a set of images that established its identity in pictorial terms,
and a triumphal ideology that overrode its internal contradictions. . . . When in 1623 Francis Bacon
threw off the phrase “we Europeans,” he was assuming that his readers knew where “Europeans”
were, who they were, and what, in spite of national differences, they shared. This was a phrase, and
an assumption, that could not have been used with such confidence a century and a half before.
(Hale 3)
How curious, then, that exactly in that age of certitude concerning European-
ness, and in that very Italian peninsula where “for the first time we detect the
modern . . . spirit of Europe” (Burckhardt 20), a zealous humanist by the name
of Giammaria Barbieri would complicate such a secure sense and assumption
about European identity by electing Arab literature as the exogenous origin of
modern European poetic tradition—a poetic tradition, needless to say, that was
meant to represent one of the most stunning achievements of European humanitas
in contrast to the rest of the “barbarous” world (Hay 4; Chabod 45-47).
Giammaria Barbieri (1519-1575)—the most learned man of the sixteenth cen-
tury for devotees of the Arab theory (Tiraboschi, Biblioteca 158), or a superficial
erudite according to his detractors (Piccolo 20)—was fascinated by modern po-
etry. Inspired by the recent publication of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (in 1529),
but also by Antonio da Tempo’s Ritmis vulgaribus (1322) and Raymond Vidal’s
Las Razos de Trobar (around 1200), he had decided to leave for France in 1538,
planning to learn Provençal and look, first hand, at the original manuscripts.
Only one year later, François I was to ban Provençal, and all other local dialects
and languages but “French,” from public use in France. Even in 1538, however,
as Barbieri would later recollect,
questa [lingua provenzale] si vede essere ignota non solo a gli stranieri, ma eziandio ai Provenzali
medesimi.

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this Provençal language is unknown not only to foreigners, but to today’s Provençals themselves.
(Barbieri 95)
After spending some years on his own, afflicted by “un molesto ardor d’orina”
(Tiraboschi, Biblioteca 160), with no available guide or tutor, and learning Pro-
vençal directly from the sources, Barbieri managed to become fluent in the dead
language, and acquired authority on all things Provençal for years to come. The
more he read the poetry of Arnault Daniel and Gaucelm Faidit, however, and
the more he compared it to the early poets of the Sicilian school and Andalusian
courts, the more curious he became about the development of rhyme in all these
several Romance languages.
None of the extant authorities—from Dante to Vidal—had adequately handled
the problem for Barbieri. Worse, these scholars had consistently mistaken the mod-
ern novelty of rhyme as but a variation on the classical techniques of metric poetry:
l’hanno vestita [poesia in rima] di nomi di piedi greci, della poetica d’Aristotele, delle idee di
Hermogene.
they discussed poetry in rhyme according to the categories of Greek feet, Aristotle’s poetics, and the
ideas of Hermogenes. (Barbieri 29)
The problem, for Barbieri, was to be imputed to the very ambiguity of the term
“rhyme,” which many, including Dante, who was misled by etymological equiva-
lencies, confused with mere “rhythm” (Barbieri 35). No doubt, if we understand
rhyme as rhythm, then rhyme is at the basis of any kind of versification, includ-
ing Greek and Latin. Yet:
Ultimamente Rima si prende per una maniera di dire, che con numeri [delle sillabe] e tempo
regolato in rimate consonanzie cade.
As of late, Rhyme means a way of saying in which the constant uniformity of the number of syllables
and rhythm ends with the rhymed consonance of sounds. (Barbieri 32)
Unable to avoid some measure of tautological reasoning—rhyme is versification
that ends with a rhyme—what Barbieri was suggesting was that this practice was
eminently modern (ultimamente) and radically different from any classical one
in its unprecedented attention to the homophonic ending of the verse. (From
his insistence on the “way of saying” rather than “writing,” one can assume that
rhyme, as a “consonance of sounds” rather than spelling, was for Barbieri the
fruit of a shift of lyrics towards orality: same sounds, despite different spelling,
constitute rhyme. See Zumthor, Oral Poetry). In other words, modern rhyme was
more than mere rhythm, which both Bede and Dante could detect already in late
Latin verses. Modern rhyme was the final and normative homophony of the verse:
Et questa è quella Rima, che noi cerchiamo, & della quale principalmente s’intende ragionare ne i
conseguenti capitoli. Della quale non havendo havuta notizia gli antichi Greci e Latini, bisogna
haver ricorso a’ più moderni scrittori.
And this is the kind of Rhyme we are looking for, and that remains the focus of our reasoning in the
following chapters. Since we have no record of this rhyme in the ancient Greek and Latin poets, we
need then to look at more modern writers. (Barbieri 32-33)
Once the modern novelty of rhyme had thus been established—“we have no
news of this rhyme in the ancient Greek and Latin poets”—the question remained
for Barbieri to hypothesize a plausible origin for such an innovation. Petrarch’s
theory that rhyme had already been practiced in the Sicilian magna Grecia dur-

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ing classical times, already criticized by Bembo and Castelvetro, was therefore
unable to adequately represent the novelty of this modern technique. Even if
ancient poets did use consonant endings in their verses,
gli antichi usarono [la rima] non per necessità, come noi, ma a suo piacere & di rado, & etiandio
alcuni la fuggirono
the ancients used rhyme not as a necessity as we do, but according to their likings and seldomly,
while some even avoided it. (Barbieri 40-41)
Moreover, Petrarch’s authority was on this issue pitted against that of Dante, who
had looked instead at Provençe as the origin of the poesia nuova, the poetry of
the modern age. Sicily or Provence, then? Petrarch or Dante? With equanimous
and Solomonic composure, Barbieri answered:
A volerlo decidere giustamente [il problema], si potrebbe dar ragione a ciascuna delle parti, overo
il torto ad ambedue; ragione, per essere state le prime [Sicilia e Provenza] fra noi a mettere in
pratica le rime vulgari ciascuna nel suo linguaggio; il torto, per haverle apprese da altri, ciò dal
modo della nazione degli arabi.
To solve the problem justly, we should say either that both parties are right, or that both are wrong.
They are right because Sicily and Provence were the first to put rhyme into practice, each in its own
language; they are wrong because they learned rhyme from someone else, namely from models
elaborated by the Arab people. (Barbieri 41)
Barbieri had found the first evidence and support for his thesis of an Arab
origin of rhyme in the Improbatio Alchorani (1500) of Father Ricoldo da Monte-
croce. The Tuscan missionary had returned from his travels to the Muslim world
with the news—quite surprising for those Europeans, like Barbieri, pondering
upon the mysterious origin of rhyme—that already the Coran contained chap-
ters written in saj’, or rhymed prose, dating back to the Meccan period (610-
623). If the Coran did contain rhymes,
egli per tutti i modi precede in tempo ad ogni Scrittura rimata così Latina come volgare, della quale
noi abbiamo memoria.
it precedes in any way any rhymed Writing, either Latin or in vulgar tongues, of which we have any
memory and knowledge. (Barbieri 44)
Besides the peculiarity of the saj’, Averroes, in his commentaries to Aristotle’s
Poetics, had also referred to ancient Arab poems ending with the concordance of
“one or two last letters” (Barbieri 42). Hebrew treatises on rhyme, which Barbieri
began consulting with the assistance of the philologist Mosè Finzio, did nothing
but confirm the thesis that rhyme was “an Arab science” (Barbieri 43).
The hypothesis of an Arab origin of rhyme, in the last analysis, could offer a
reasonable historical explanation for the emergence of rhyme in two relatively
distant regions of Europe such as Sicily and Provence, especially considering the
Arabs’ political and cultural control of Sicily (from the ninth to the eleventh
century) and al-Andalus (711-1263):
La qual maniera di versificare come habbia potuto passare in Europa, e specialmente a’ Provenzali
& a’ Siciliani, che si vantano di esserne stati i primi trovatori nel loro volgare, se ne può molto bene
venire in cognizione delle Storie, che parlano particolarmente de i progressi de i Saracini.
How this method of versification moved to Europe, and especially to Provençal and Sicilian poets,
who boast to have been the first users [trovatori] of rhyme in their vulgar tongues, can be well
explained by Histories, especially those which discuss the progress of the Saracens. (Barbieri 44)
In short:

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É ben verisimile, che gli Spagnuoli . . . fossero i primi da quella banda [d’Europa] ad apprendere
dagli Arabi . . . la maniera di poetare. La quale è verisimile anchora, che da i medesimi Spagnuoli
[sia potuta] passare alle altre vicine regioni, & specialmente nella Provenza . . . Similmente . . .
passarono i Saracini nella Cicilia.
It is very likely that the Spaniards were the first, in that part of Europe, to learn from the Arabs a
method for versification; from the Spaniards, that method could have easily passed into near re-
gions, especially into Provence. Similarly, the Saracens went through Sicily. (Barbieri 45-46)
Barbieri’s ease in conferring Islam any intellectual strength—let alone the ge-
nius to turn a decisive page in the history of European versification—was cer-
tainly at odds with his age. Written around the years of growing Catholic orthodoxy
promoted by the Council of Trent, Barbieri’s pages on rhyme remained, unsur-
prisingly, unpublished for around two centuries (De Conca 106). Long gone was
the age when Abelard of Bath could say that he had learned from the magistri
Arabici both science and the use of reason against authorities (Mancini 200). By
1355, frankly irritated by that science still practiced in Europe by Islamic and
Jewish doctors, and in defense of the superior knowledge of (European?) po-
etry, Petrarch had inaugurated, with the Invectiva contra medicum quendam, a
brave new age of anti-Arabist Europeanism. Such anti-Arabism, predicated upon
the assumption of a reciprocal impermeability of Europe and Islam, had become
characteristic of Renaissance humanism tout court (as claimed by Gabrieli; Dilig
272). As European humanists strived to elaborate a new consciousness of “our”
canons and traditions, Pico della Mirandola had demanded: “Leave us, for God’s
sake, our Pythagorus, Plato, and Aristotle; keep your Omar, Alchabitus, Abenzoar
and Abenragel!” (cited in Mancini 217).
As much as the Arab theory was not exemplary of the age, Barbieri’s search for
origins certainly was. Not only the Christian dogma of origin as Revelation, but
also the very idea of Christian Europe as the center of the oecumene was being
repeatedly put into question by both a new understanding of science and the
recent geographical discoveries (Dupront 47-112). Not only the European puzzle-
ment at the existence of developed Mayan and Incan societies in the Americas,
but also the reports, following Marco Polo, of the wonderful civilization of China
had challenged the biblical dogma of a unified origin of humankind, language,
and culture that had sustained the Catholic Weltenschaung until the Renaissance
(Dubois 17-92). From now on, origins, liberated from the telos of monotheism,
were a question that could have as many answers as the many nations peopling
the world. Rather than unfolding from the designs of divine Providence, origins
had become the artifact of human will that became concrete in the “genius” and
traditions developed by the various civilizations (Badeau and Hayes; Martineau,
Hope, and the Royal Academy of Arts [Great Britain]; Schleiner; Brann). Ori-
gins, now secular, were the product of historical circumstances. So, from which
historical circumstances did modern European culture, climaxing in the rise of
a new rhymed poetry, originate?
A supplementary question we may want to entertain is why, of all the possible
hypotheses of origin he could imagine, did Barbieri settle for the arguably un-
popular Arab one. One possibility is of course that Barbieri was convinced by the
evidence. Another, and not mutually exclusive, one is that perhaps, since his
years of residence in France, he was caught up in the Franco-Italian patriotic

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polemics that had begun with Petrarch and exploded with the establishment of
the see of the anti-pope in Avignon:
No one conducted a more vigorous campaign against the residence of the popes at Avignon than
the Florentine exile Petrarch. In 1366 he published a letter claiming that only the crudest motives
retained pope and cardinals in the Rhone valley. From this point a lively controversy developed
between Petrarch and a series of French apologists for Avignon. The exchanges were scarcely edify-
ing and much turned on Petrarch’s accusation that the French were barbarians, like all other trans-
Alpine peoples, and counter charges of corruption and incivility in Italy: all a curious anticipation
of the later battle of the books which developed between the two countries in the sixteenth century.
(Hay 73 -74)
By the sixteenth century, a French animus against Italian claims of cultural supe-
riority had become a full-fledged anti-Italianism (see MacPhail). Contrary to Ital-
ian claims to an “old wisdom” inherited from a Greek and Latin ancestry (Casini),
French perceptions of an unstoppable decadence of Italy, begun with Chrétien
de Troyes Cligés (twelfth century) and reinforced by the sack of Rome in 1527,
cohered around theories of a translation imperii from Rome to Paris, and its
corollary translatio studii from Latin and Italian to French.
Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (1549) was a
central text in this Franco-Italian polemic. An Italian refusal to recognize the
end of the age of Roman hegemony was for Du Bellay nothing less than an intel-
lectual act against God:
car telle injure ne s’entendoit seulement contre les espris des hommes, mais contre Dieu, qui a
donné pour loy inviolable à toute chose crée de ne durer perpetuellement, mais passer sans fin d’un
etat en l’autre, etant la fin & corruption de l’un, le commencement & generation de l’autre.
because this offense is not meant only against the spirit of man, but against God, who has given as
inviolable law to all things created that they cannot last for ever, but must move without end from
one state to another, so that the end and corruption of one thing will be the beginning and origin
of another. (56 -57)
Accordingly, the age of Rome’s hegemony was at an end, and a new age with
France leading the world was about to begin. In this sense, the French language
had to be “defended” against accusations, for instance, of being a lesser language
than Latin. And French culture—a new culture indeed—had to be “defended”
from Italian claims to a hegemonic tradition that, alas, no longer was operative
—let alone hegemonic—in the new times.
One of the signs that a new age had begun was for Du Bellay exactly that emer-
gence of a novel method of versification organized “not on the quantity [i.e.,
long or short], but on the number of syllables” (Du Bellay 125). Rhythmic versifi-
cation, in other words, climaxing in the use of rhyme, registered the event of a
new, modern culture, which no longer had Greece or Italy, but France as its
epicenter. Where did this new age begin? Du Bellay had no doubts:
Or quand à l’antiquitè de ces vers que nous appellons rymez, & que les autres vulgaires ont empruntez
de nous . . . Bardus V. roy des Gaules en feut inventeur.
Now, concerning the antiquity of those verses we call rhymes, which other vulgar literatures have
taken from us, Bardus V, king of the Gauls, was their inventor. (Du Bellay 151-52)
With little debt from either Greece or Rome—say, from the past—Gallic tribes
had then “invented” the key to all modern versification, which all other nations,
Du Bellay assured his reader, “have taken from us.” That the origin of modern

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poetry lay with “us” offered some sort of argumentum ad verecundiam proving,
rhetorically at least, the superiority of France as the leader of the modern age: if
the origin of rhyme was Gallic, then France, heir of king Bardus V, must have also
been the nation that led Europe into modernity.
From this context, the polemical usefulness of the Arab theory for Barbieri
can acquire a supplementary, patriotic meaning. Dante’s claim of a Provençal
origin would have simply confirmed the subsidiary role of Italy in the sort of
modern Vita nuova inaugurated from beyond the Alps. Petrarch’s thesis of clas-
sical origins of rhyme, on the other hand, by failing to take notice of the funda-
mental modernity of rhyme, was incapable of identifying the proper origin of
modernity, which, in Paul Hazard’s famous formulation, was predicated in the
formula of “the Past abandoned; the Present enthroned in its place” (Hazard
30). The advantage of the Arab thesis, instead, was that it both avoided the Franco-
Italian polemics altogether (the origin is neither French nor Italian but Arab)
and reclaimed the dignity of Italian culture, and Italian letters more specifically,
in the face of modernity. Italy, from this latter perspective, was not simply the
heir of classical romanità—a claim insufficient in itself to advocate the modernity
of Italian culture—but rather the heir of a modern technique of versification that
the Arabs had introduced to Sicily.
If, in Hale’s terms, the Renaissance first established the identity of Europe, the
question was still who, and from which particular geo-cultural position, was en-
titled to define the civilizational traits of “we Europeans” in the new culture in
formation. Because, in that same epoch in which Hale saw the emergence of a
“triumphal ideology [of Europe] that overrode its internal contradictions,” Eu-
rope itself, far from truly overriding any contradiction at all, was in fact engen-
dering a new, latitudinal one “between an increasingly wealthy Protestant North
and an increasingly impoverished Catholic South” (Pagden 13). From this con-
tradiction, Du Bellay had seen the beginning of “the Spirit of modern Europe”
(Ritter 15) fermenting in the rhymes of Gallic bards and coalescing in a translatio
studii from the Roman south to the Frankish north. Against this north-bound
“French Europe” (Rougemont 143), Barbieri had pitted his Arab theory as an
alternative model of European modernity. Besides the pettiness of the patriotic
and possibly anti-French claim, his modern Europe had its origin in the Mediter-
ranean—the place of encounter, that is to say, of East and West, Islam and Chris-
tianity, Latin humanitas and Arabic rhyme.

Reforms: Juan Andrés, Esteban de Arteaga, and the Climate of Origins,

1782-1785
Giammaria Barbieri’s Arab theory, languishing unpublished somewhere in its
author’s estate, remained unfelt, unheard, and unseen until, in the 1780s, the
Jesuit Juan Andrés, unknowingly, stumbled upon the same hypothesis.
If the Renaissance had marked the emergence of the question of origins, the
eighteenth century certainly celebrated its heyday (Aarsleff 84-100). The con-
tinuing discoveries of new civilizations and languages reported by Jesuit mission-
aries, along with steady progress in the study of Egyptology and Sinology, gave

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new impetus to an old question (see Rossi). From Leibniz’s theories of a univer-
sal lingua adamitica in Brevis designatio meditationem de originibus dictus potissimus
ex iudicium linguarum (1710) to Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances
humaines (1746), from Robert Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius and Writing of
Homer (1768) to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de
l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1753)—origins were the riddle of the day. Furthered
by nationalistic self-assertions and connected with the emergence of the concept
of the nation-state, discussions on the superior origin of the German language
(Herder’s Teutonic männlicher Witz, Herder 66) or of Italian culture (Vico) ex-
acerbated a tendency of the discourse on origin that was already present in Du
Bellay and Barbieri.
Du Bellay had in fact only begun theorizing that translatio studii from ancient
Rome to modern France that the Académie Française, founded in 1635, would
later consolidate by elevating French as “the ‘most perfect of modern’ languages”
(Reiss 71), and that Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie would erect as a monu-
ment for the eighteenth century:
Since our language [French] has spread throughout Europe, we thought that the time had come to
substitute it for Latin, which since the renaissance of learning had been the language of scholar-
ship. I must say that there is more excuse for a philosopher to write in French than for a Frenchman
to compose verses in Latin. I would even agree that the use of French has helped to make the
Enlightenment a more universal phenomenon. (1.30)
It may not be mere chance, in this context, that the Encyclopédie also had begun
as an attempt “to go back to the origins and generation of our ideas” (1.9). Nor
can it be chance that the same Encyclopédie happened to find the poetic origin of
modern Europe nowhere else than in France: “In a word, all our modern poetry
comes from Provence” (12.840; Andrés will retort to this point by suggesting that
“Provence” was, in good part, Catalunia).
Juan Andrés (1740-1817), attempting to “oppose the implantation of the re-
straining Gallic literary tenets and precepts of the neoclassical school of thought
. . . [and] counteract the influence of Encyclopedism” in Europe (Mazzeo 45),
could not but tackle the thorny question of origins. Dell’origine, progressi e stato
attuale d’ogni letteratura was the title of the monumental work he started to pub-
lish in 1782 from his Italian exile, following the expulsion of his order from
Spain in 1767. Eight tomes were necessary for Andrés to disprove one single
thesis: that France was the origin of modern European culture.
In spite of the fact that he did not know Barbieri’s unpublished work on rhyme
(at least, there is no mention of it in Dell’origine), Andrés came to exactly the
same conclusion as his predecessor (for the actual sources of Andrés, see Mazzeo
156-69):
Uno de’ caratteri, che più distingue la poesía moderna dalla greca e latina, è la rima. E che questa
sia venuta dagli arabi, e col mezzo degli spagnoli propagatasi per la Francia e per tutta l’Europa, lo
dicono, non che gli altri, gli stessi francesi.
One of the traits that most distinguishes modern from Greek and Latin poetry is rhyme. That rhyme
came from the Arabs, and through Spain it spread through France and all over Europe, is some-
thing that the French themselves, along with all others, maintain. (Andrés 1:306)
In fact, the “French themselves” to whom Andrés was referring were no more
than one: Pierre Daniel Huet, bishop of Avranches, had remarked en passant, in

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /282

his 1670 letter to Monsieur de Segrais on the “Oriental” origin of the roman, that
“it is the Arabs, in my opinion, who gave us the art of rhyming” (Huet 15).
Dismissing the possibility that rhyme could derive from late Latin versification
(1.308-12), Andrés goes on to discuss four ways in which modern Romance po-
etry is strikingly similar to Arabic poetry. First, the Arabs, who held in high es-
teem popular modes (1.300), preferred to write poetry in vulgar rather than
classical languages. This was particularly evident in the poetry of Al-Andalus,
where Arabs preferred the hybrid mozarabic language, a mixture of Arabic, Jew-
ish, and the substrate local dialect, to classical Arabic or Latin. In their choice to
write poetry in popular languages (and forms) as well, Romance poets seemed
to be influenced by the Arabs. Second, like the Arabs, the Romance poets privi-
leged didascalic, moral, encomiastic, and love poetry above all other lyrical forms.
Third, the typical Romance forms of tenzone and contrasto, unknown to the Greeks
and Romans, had very close equivalents in Arabic poetry. Fourth, and most im-
portant, was the issue of rhyme, which for Andrés had absolutely no attested
precedent before al-Farabi “invented” both rhyme and syllabic poetry (1.301-307
and 2.35-38).
Supplementing the argument of rhyme with new formal considerations, Andrés
could propose again the Arab theory—if not as an absolute fact, at least as the
“easiest” hypothesis for the origin of modern European poetry:
Quanto era più facile, che una tale invenzione nascesse dall’esempio degli arabi poeti, che sì
felicemente vedevansi tuttodì poetare nella lor lingua, cantare in versi rimati i lor amori e le loro
passioni . . . La rima era talmente in uso presso gli arabi fino da’ tempi più antichi, che anche negli
scritti prosaici si vede frequentemente adoperata. Nella biblioteca dell’Escuriale si trovano molti
arabici dizionarj, ne’ quali non si debbono cercare le parole, come si usa comunemente in simili
libri, nelle lettere iniziali, ma sibbene nelle finali; perciocchè tanto è il diletto, che si prendono gli
arabi della rima, che più anno in pensiero la desinenza e l’ultime lettere delle parole, che non
quelle, con cui cominciano.
How much easier it is that such invention [modern Romance poetry] was thus born with the Arab
poets, who successfully used, all the time, to versify in their own language, and sing in rhymed verses
of their love and passion. Rhyme was so widespread in Arabic letters since the oldest of times, so
much so that it was used even in prose [a possible reference to the Coranic saj’ ]. In the libraries of
the Escurial we can find many Arabic dictionaries in which you do not look for the word, as it is
usually done, starting from the initial letters, but starting from the ending of the word. It was so
because great was the pleasure the Arabs derived from rhyme, who care more about the declension
and ending than about the beginning of a word. (Andrés 1.311-12)
However, Andrés’s claim of an Arab origin of rhyme went beyond Barbieri’s merely
philological concern and was meant to engender a more radical re-evaluation of
all values: not only poetry, but the entire rebirth of modern literature, il risorgi-
mento della moderna letteratura (Andrés 1.261), came from the Arabs. Neither
Charlemagne’s Frankish schools nor the courts of Provence were capable of giv-
ing Europe a new and modern culture after the demise of a classical one:
Noi siamo debitori agli arabi del rifiorire, che fecero le scienze nell’Europa, e che da quella nazione
si dèe prendere l’origine della nostra coltura negli studi scientifici.
We are in debt to the Arabs for the rebirth of culture in Europe, and from the Arab nation we must
take the origin of our own culture in scientific studies. (Andrés 1.169)
What all this meant—and here, unsurprisingly, is the return of patriotic pa-
thos—was that the origin of a modern European culture—poetic rhyme being a

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mere synecdoche of it—was not the prerogative of Gallic kings, Frankish schools,
and Provençal troubadours, but the coeval development of a technique in those
parts of Europe under the direct influence of Islam. Europe must come to terms
with the possibility, says Andrés, that
la poesía volgare nascesse nella Spagna, nella Provenza, e nella Sicilia, dove altra particolare cagione
non può trovarsi che l’influenza de’ saraceni.
vulgar poetry was born in Spain, Provence and Sicily, where no other cause can be found than the
influence of the Saracens. (1.272)
Far from being the effect of a translatio studii from Rome to the modern genius
of the French Provence, Romance poetry is then the fruit of the accidental his-
torical encounter of Europe and Islam in the Mediterranean. Originating from
this encounter, European modernity owes little to the French:
Dove le scienze degli arabi più fiorirono, dove più spiccò il lume del loro sapere, dove si fissò, per
dire così, il regno della loro letteratura, fu la Spagna.
Where Arab sciences flourished the most, where the light of their knowledge shined the brightest,
and where the realm of their literature, so to speak, was grounded, was Spain. (Andrés 1.122)
In conclusion:
Quest’uso degli spagnoli di verseggiare nella lingua, nella misura, e nella rima degli arabi può dirsi
con fondamento la prima origine della moderna poesia.
This Spanish habit of versifying in the language, in the prosody, and in the rhyme of the Arabs can
be considered as the first origin of modern poetry. (Andrés 1.275)
Such a thesis runs counter not only to the explicit petty patriotism of a Du Bellay,
but also to an entire generation of Francophile intellectuals who saw in the lead-
ing role of France, with its philosophes and Encyclopédie, an example to be imi-
tated and followed by the other nations on the way to their reformation and
modernization. Montesquieu’s claim that France was the “most ancient and pow-
erful kingdom of Europe” (Montesquieu 2.279), and thus the leader in the mod-
ernization of the Spirit of the Law, was taken quite literally by scholars such as
Cesare Beccaria (see also Berselli Ambri), who, defending the necessity of abol-
ishing the death penalty in 1764, invoked the authority of Montesquieu and the
example of France as beacons of reformatory policies.
Andrés had just published the first tome of Dell’origine when Esteban de Arteaga
(1747-1799), another Jesuit exiled in Italy and breathing the air of French-inspired
reformatory politics, felt the necessity to dispute the Arab theory in his 1783 first
edition of Le rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano. Shocked that someone could
propose l’origine arabica delle poetiche facoltà in Europa, the Arab origin of poetic
skills in Europe (Arteaga, Rivoluzioni, ed. Manfredini and Arnaud, 1.169-70),
Arteaga stuck to the more homely idea of a Provençal origin of modern Euro-
pean culture:
Niuna delle moderne nazioni Europee ci presenta monumenti di poesia profana . . . che gareggino
nell’antichità con quelli de’ provenzali.
No modern European nation offers monuments of secular poetry as old as the Provençal. (First
Rivoluzioni 1.169-70)
Arteaga’s argument that a “reform” and “revolution” of European melodrama
had begun with the Provençal’s custom to set poems in music attempted to dis-
miss ironically the possibility of Andrés’s Arab origin:

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Se poi i provenzali siano stati eglino medesimi gl’inventori di quella sorta . . . di poesia, oppure
s’abbiano l’una e l’altra ricevuta dagli arabi, per mezzo de’ catalani, io non mi affretterò punto a
deciderlo. Sebbene l’influenza letteraria, e scientifica di que’ conquistatori sul restante dell’Europa
sia stata con molto apparato d’ erudizione da un dotto Spagnuolo oltre modo magnificata: sebbene
il sistema poetico . . . d’entrambe nazioni araba, e provenzale concorra in alcuni punti di somiglianza,
ciò non ostante, io non mi crederei in stato di poterne cavar conseguenza in favor della prima.
I do not want to be quick to decide whether the Provençal were the inventors of that kind of poetry,
or whether they received it from the Arabs. Although the literary and scientific influence those
conquerers had on Europe has been greatly exaggerated with abundant erudition by a learned
Spaniard [i.e. Andrés]; and although the poetic systems of both Arabs and Provençals is somewhat
similar, I am still unconvinced that one can then conclude in favor of an Arab invention. (First
Rivoluzioni 1.169 -70)
As proof of the weakness of the Arab theory, Arteaga then adduced the evidence
of Alfonsinian rhymes and of Guido Aretino, who, before al-Farabi, singled out
by Andrés as the “inventor” of rhyme, already practiced that technique.
Andrés soon wrote to Arteaga asking for clarifications about the alleged prece-
dence of European rhymes, but the epistolary exchange only led to some vague
reference to “un cierto Francone” that Arteaga took upon his word in his claim
of Provençal rhymes of the tenth century (in Mazzeo 169-70). By the time Andrés
was preparing the second edition of Dell’origine in 1785, he was ready to engage
Arteaga in a fierce war of the footnotes. At the bottom of the first page devoted
to his Arab theory, Andrés matter-of-factly informed his opponent that al-Farabi’s
book on rhyme preceded chronologically Guido Aretino (who was not born yet)
and the Frankish treatise alluded to by Arteaga:
Or questa stessa credo io poter accrescere le nostre obbligazioni verso gli arabi. Imperciocchè mentre
gli europei altra idea non avevano . . . che di salmi e d’antifone, gli arabi scrivevano dotti libri di
quella scienza [della rima] . . .
Now, to my mind, this can only increase our debt to the Arabs. Because while the Europeans had an
idea, and only a vague one, about nothing else except psalms and antiphons, the Arabs were already
writing learned books about the science of rhyme . . . (Andrés 1.290)
Arteaga’s response came quickly, in the second edition of Le rivoluzioni in 1785.
A footnote spanning 21 pages—“piuttosto dissertazione che nota,” indeed! (Sec-
ond Rivoluzioni 1.182)—began, with typical sarcasm, by claiming that, truth be-
ing preferable to his sincere friendship with Andrés, the verity of the origin of
rhyme had to be correctly re-established. While admitting to being wrong about
the dates of Aretino, Arteaga still found the logic of Andrés utterly unconvinc-
ing. First of all, if Provençals were so indebted to the Arabs, why do they allude to
Greek history and mythology, but never to Arab beliefs (Second Rivoluzioni 1.146-
47)? Besides, love, encomiastic, didascalic, and satirical poetry, which Andrés
had considered as typical genres of Arab and Romance poetry, were in fact prac-
ticed by Romans, Greeks, Celts, Persians, and Chinese as well (Second Rivoluzioni
1.163-64). Also, the contrasto and the tenzone, which Andrés claimed were intro-
duced by the Arabs in Europe, were in fact universal forms. Ditto for syllabic
verses, which have been, are, and always will be common to all verses and poems
of the world (Second Rivoluzioni 1.166). All this, to get to the ironic—that is to
say, sarcastic—conclusion:
Dunque (conchiuderò io colla dialettica del Signor Abbate Andres) la poesia provenzale ebbe una
origine cretico-greco-orcadico-danico -norvego-islandico-scoto-peruviano-chinese.

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Therefore (I conclude with the same dialectics as Father Andrés’s) Provençal poetry must have had
a Cretan-Greek-Orcadic-Danish-Norwegian-Icelandic-Scottish-Peruvian-Chinese origin. (Second
Rivoluzioni 1.168)
Apparently still not happy with having disproved the theory of an Arab origin of
rhyme, Arteaga, after 21 pages devoted to it, then declared the question of origin
a waste of time:
Del resto non dissimulerò, che tutte le dispute sul prima e sul poi, sul proprio e sul derivato mi
sembrano pure e prette quistioni de lana caprina.
After all, I cannot dissimulate my conviction that all these quarrels about before and after, on essen-
tial and accidental seem to me pure questions unworthy of any consideration. (Second Rivoluzioni
1.182)
In truth, it is likely that the question of origin, in itself, may not have been
Arteaga’s primary concern in this diatribe. What was at stake for him was nothing
less than the validity of the scientific method—engine of all possible reforma-
tions in Europe—that Montesquieu had inaugurated with his climatology. If, as
Montesquieu had empirically observed, “the heat of the climate” produces, along
with despotic governments, “no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generosity of
sentiment; the inclinations are all passive; indolence constitutes the utmost hap-
piness” (Montesquieu 2.477)—how then could the scorching climate of despotic
Arabia possibly be the active origin of anything at all? More temperate climates,
Arteaga assured, were needed to begin a new modern era for Europe:
Acciò si coltivino in un paese le arti . . . oltre l’influenza del clima dolce, e fervido insieme . . . vuolsi
eziandio un particolar assortimento di cause politiche, vuolsi un ozio agiato ne’ cittadini, e magnifi-
cenza ne’ Principi, voglionsi costumi, che inclinino alla morbidezza, in una parola vuolsi piacere,
tranquillità, ed abbanondanza.
For the arts to be cultivated in one country, what is needed is, besides the influence of a temperate
climate, also a specific arrangement of political causes. What is needed is a comfortable idleness for
the citizens, munificence of the princes, habits more inclined to suavity. In short, one needs plea-
sure, tranquillity, and abundance. (Second Rivoluzioni 1:139)
Ergo, it all had to begin with
i Provenzali popolo celebre nella storia della piacevolezza del suo temperamento sempre vivace,
alla giocondità, e al riso inchinevole, che abbonda di vini spiritosi, e di donne galanti, e ch’educato
sotto un Cielo per lo più sereno, e ridente, e in un paese amenissimo sembra fatto a bella posta dalla
natura per non aver altro impiego che quello di cantare, e di ballare.
the Provençals, a people famous in the history of pleasures, of lively temper, joyous and with a polite
smile, producer of strong wines and elegant ladies, educated under a mostly temperate and clear
sky, in a happy countryside which seems to have been created by nature to have no other job than
singing and dancing. (Second Rivoluzioni 1.140)
That poetic modernity, as modernity tout court, had to be born in the temperate
climate of the Frankish courts and in the temperate political systems of Europe,
rather than in the heat of Arab despotism, was then one of those indisputable
facts that the empirical method of modern science—climatology—had legitimated
once and for all.
The problem was that, in order to defend Montesquieu and his climatology
from Andrés (for the latter’s critique of Montesquieu’s climatology, see Andrés
5.609 and 1.26), Arteaga ended up attacking one of those untouchables of the
Italian intelligentsia who had claimed that the first modern reform of poetry
had begun not in Provence, but in the heat of Sicily. It must have been in a

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moment of incautious distraction that Arteaga impudently wrote that an idea of

Sicilian origin could only be imputed to
l’eccedente amor della patria (il più lodevole degli eccessi quando non vien disgiunto dalla giustizia)
che mosse il Cavaglier Tiraboschi
the excessive patriotism (most laudable of excesses when it is accompanied by justice) that moved
Sir Tiraboschi (Second Rivoluzioni 1.164-65)

Barbieri Redux: Girolamo Tiraboschi and the Origin of Rhymed Poetr y,

1790-1791
Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731-1794) had easily acquired the reputation of “wise”
man of letters (Andrés 2.xiv) with the publication of his Storia della letteratura
italiana (1772-1782), the first literary history in Europe to go beyond the mere
collection of biographical and bibliographical data and offer instead a histori-
cally organic overview of the teleology of literary epochs. In his patriotic defense
of Italian poetry from the accusations of decadence pronounced by French clas-
sicism, he had acquired in Italy the social status of some kind of patron saint of
national belles lettres.
As a good friend of Andrés, and having been dragged into the “thorn-bushes”
(Tiraboschi “Introduzione” 9) of the Arab theory by Arteaga, Tiraboschi decided
to get into the arena by proxy, so to speak—by lending his editorial authority to
the publication of the still unknown Rimario by Giammaria Barbieri. In view of
the recent polemics, Tiraboschi decided to re-title Barbieri’s Rimario as Dell’origine
della poesia rimata and to supplement it with a rich introduction detailing the
terms of the recent controversy:
Sarà ella [opera di Barbieri] accolta favorevolmente e applaudita da tutti? Io temo assai, che dell’opera
di Barbieri, e di chi la dà alla luce, non giudicherà troppo favorevolmente l’ingegnoso ed erudito
Sig. Ab. Arteaga, di cui parrebbe quasi, che il Barbieri prevedesse, qual opinione fosse per sostenere
intorno all’origine della Poesia, e che fin d’allora prendesse ad oppugnarla. Il Barbieri esaminando,
per qual maniera e da chi si introducessero i versi non metrici . . . e rimati, quali si usan comune-
mente nelle lingue moderne, sostiene, che gli Arabi ne dieder l’esempio, e che da essi gli appresero
gli Spagnuoli e poscia i Provenzali. Questa sentenza medesima fu con molta erudizione e con di-
versi e forti argomenti sostenuta dal Ch. Sig. Ab. D. Giovanni Andrés. Ma altrimenti ne parve al Sig.
Ab. Arteaga.
Will this work by Barbieri be welcomed favorably and applauded by all? I strongly fear that both
Barbieri’s work, and the man who now publishes it, will not be judged too well by the ingenious and
erudite Father Arteaga. It would seem in fact that Barbieri could foresee Arteaga’s future opinions
about the origin of Poetry, and was already advancing the proper arguments to oppose it. Studying
in which way and by whom non-metric, rhymed verses, commonly used in modern poetry, were
introduced, Barbieri maintains that the Arabs offered them as an example, and from the Arabs they
were learned by the Spaniards first, and then by the Provençals. This same thesis was advanced with
great erudition and many strong arguments by the Illustrious Father Juan Andrés. Yet, Father Arteaga
did not agree. (Tiraboschi, “Introduzione” 8 -9)
The attack on Arteaga, accused of supplementing his lack of arguments with
bitter sarcasm and violent invectives, proceeds according to this opening note.
In truth, however, apart from lending his own and Barbieri’s authority to the
Arab theory, Tiraboschi’s introduction is nothing more than yet another exer-
cise in bitter sarcasm and violent invectives. New arguments are hard to find:

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Arab rhyme precedes Provençal (Tiraboschi, “Introduzione” 10-11); the Arab

conquest of al-Andalus and Sicily offers a plausible explanation for the spread of
Arab rhyme in Europe (11-12); Provence, bordering with Catalonia, must have
learned rhyme from there (17), and so on. Not dissimilar is Arteaga’s reply, pub-
lished in 1791 as Della influenza degli arabi sull’origine della poesia moderna. The
Arabs, says Arteaga, could not communicate directly with the Provençals, and
are thereby an unlikely origin of Romance poetry; the latter comes from Provence,
and the model is late Latin poetry (Della influenza 8).
It seems, in other words, that by 1790 the debate over the Arab theory had
reached both its heyday and its entropic state. In the absence of new arguments,
what remains is a set of unresolved personal conflicts, patriotic claims making an
instrumental use of the Arabs, and unreconcilable assumptions. It is, however, a
look at these very assumptions, masked behind the Arab theory, that can cast
some light over radically different ideas of Europe that were being formed in the
European eighteenth century. Was Europe Arteaga’s Franco-centric, northbound
culture whose genius was diametrically opposed to the Arab (“la differenza tra il
genio e lo spirito poetico de’ sarraceni e de trovatori è totale e completa,” First
Rivoluzioni 23 )? Was Europe a radically distinct cultural topos from which inter-
actions with exogenous models could not possibly be imagined (“il commercio
vicendevole è insussistente,” First Rivoluzioni 19 )? Or was Europe more like
Tiraboschi’s Mediterranean, a place of encounter where,
poichè le guerre non furono continue . . . Maomettani e Cristiani vivevano in pace, i primi comun-
icassero a’ secondi alcune loro usanze . . .
since the wars were not endless, Muslims and Christians lived in peace, and the former communi-
cated to the latter some of their customs? (Tiraboschi, “Introduzione” 12)

The Ends of Origins: New Beginnings

The nations in cold regions, particularly in Europe, are full of [courage] . . . which is why they con-
tinue to be comparatively free . . . By contrast, those in Asia . . . lack [courage], which is why they con-
tinue to be ruled and enslaved. (Aristotle, Politics)
The reflection on identity as an open question and as a relation to alterity begins from the “philoso-
phy” and the way of thinking of Europeans . . . it may be that European peoples recognize in the ques-
tion of identity their own different and common identity, the game of alterity as identity . . . (Armando
Gnisci, Da noialtri europei a noitutti insieme)
In 1813, writing De la littérature du midi de l’Europe, Sismonde de Sismondi,
hosted by Madame de Staël in Coppet, briefly came back to the question of the
Arab origin of European rhyme. Echoing—and even plagiarizing—Andrés (Maz-
zeo 87-90), Sismondi argued once again that the Arabs gave shelter to literature
and the sciences while “the West was drowned in barbarity” (Sismondi 1.39). He
hypothesized, once more, that rhyme entered Europe from al-Andalus (1.104).
For him, too, “modern Europe [was] formed at the Arab school and enriched by
it” (1.10). This did not mean, however, that the whole of modern Europe was
indebted to the Arabs, but that only the literatures of the south were: “Arab po-
etry is rhymed like ours” (Sismondi 1.60, my emphasis), he wrote, meaning that
northern troubadours developed rhyme “like” the Arabs did, but independently
from them.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /288

Following the hint of his hostess, Sismondi was theorizing here the double
origin of modern European literature, one “that comes from the south and one
that descends from the north; one for which Homeric is the first source, and one
of which Ossianic is the origin” (Staël 203). The Arab theory, in other words,
helped now to explain the formation of southern Europe, but not of a northern
one imagined as distinct from it. Europe, slowly but surely, was internalizing the
Oriental Other into its own south—a south whose exogenous cultural origin
served in turn to explain the peculiarity and deficiency of its modernity:
Studying the literature of the south, we have often been surprised by the subversion of morality, the
corruption of all principles, of the social disorganization that this literature indicates.” (Sismondi
4.19)
Also from Coppet, August Wilhelm Schlegel, in Observations sur la langue et la
littérature provençales (1818), conceded that the Arabs may have invented the use
of rhyme, but that did not mean that such a cruel and misogynist people as the
Arabs could have really invented the love poetry of the European middle ages:
“Muhammad’s sect has never had the slightest influence on anything that consti-
tutes the original genius of the Middle Ages” (67-69). His brother Friederich,
founder and editor of the journal Europa, insisted that not only was Arab influ-
ence limited to al-Andalus (F.V. Schlegel 247), but also that the evolution of
northern European literature was radically distinct from the literature “of Cath-
olic countries, such as Spain, Italy, Portugal” (F.V. Schlegel 246; see also Duran-
ton; Cometa).
The initial fracture between north and south, which had motivated the entire
quarrel around the Arab theory, was coming now to its theoretical closure: rather
than elevating southern Europe as the origin of European modernity, the Arab
theory served now to reconfirm the south’s “oriental” peculiarity vis à vis the
normative hegemony of a northern Europe uncontaminated by Arab influence.
In the meantime, interest in questions of origins was on the wane. After almost
three centuries of inquiries into the origin of everything, by the second half of
the nineteenth century any enthusiasm over origins had completely disappeared.
In 1852, the Berlin Academy, which in 1770 had opened an annual competition
devoted to the theme of the origin of language (Herder won it in 1770, Jacob
Grimm in 1851), shifted its interests towards Indo-European philology—a sci-
ence aiming at ascertaining the development, but not so much the hypothetical
origin, of European languages. The Société de Linguistique de Paris, founded in
1865 to unify all pre-existing French academies and literary societies, declared
by statute that “the society will accept no communication dealing with . . . ori-
gins.” The Philological Society of London, while not pronouncing any explicit
bans, consistently avoided, especially after the scandal of the Origin of Species
(1859), any involvement whatsoever with questions of origin (Stam 256-60).
The Arab theory of the origin of rhyme was one casualty of this waning inter-
est: Reinhart Dozy, referring to Giammaria Barbieri, declared the entire ques-
tion utterly useless, “tout à fait oiseuse” (Dozy 47), in 1849. This did not of course
mean that the question of origin disappeared altogether. It underwent, rather,
one more process of secularization. It was translated, to take my cue from Edward
Said, into the parallel question of beginnings: if origin harks back to a meta-

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OF THE ARAB ORIGIN OF MODERN EUROPE/289

physical design or to the unknown, beginnings mark instead a secular, authorial

intention, and a praxis—“the beginning A leads to B” (Said 6). Beginnings, in
other words, establish authorial ends and methods. One begins from A —say the
Arab theory—because one wants to get to B—say an idea of Europe as antidote
to the clash of civilizations.
Reduced to a mere question of beginnings, the Arab theory has recently func-
tioned as nothing more than a rhetorical commonplace: it serves to begin to artic-
ulate and unfold the idea of Menéndez Pidal’s “intellectual communication”
between Europe and Islam or Menocal’s “unprejudiced” cultural cooperation
“standing unchallenged until the beginnings of the nineteenth century.” Yet, a
look at the Arab theory between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, I hope
to have shown, demonstrates that it was never “unchallenged” and was in fact
enmeshed in a complex web of prejudices concerning not only the Orient but
also the question of Europe’s own south. A quick historicization of Europe’s cur-
rent “prejudice” toward the Arab world, and the parallel positing of a utopic past
of unchallenged communication may be, more than rhetorical exaggeration,
the very veil hiding the real problem at hand: that a European prejudice started
not in the nineteenth century, but with the very origin of the idea of Europe as
an alterity and an “identity” in and for itself.

Duke University

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