Saturday, November 13, 2010

Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain

Richard Fletcher. Moorish Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xiv and 189. 28 Illustrations and 5 Maps. ISBN 0-520-08496-9. Softcover.

Sean Guynes, Western Washington University

Moorish Spain reflects the detailed and comprehensive scholarship of one of medieval Spanish history‟s outstanding academics, Richard Fletcher. His work is an introductory overview of the history of Spain under the Moors (more on terminology later), roughly spanning the period that begins with the fall of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain circa the invasion of an Arabo-Berber army under the leadership of Tariq in 711 to the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492 during the final stage of the Reconquista at the hands of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. Fletcher‟s Moorish Spain goes beyond providing a basic historical introduction of the eight-century Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula to present to the reader the historically unique cultural atmosphere of medieval Spain in which Christian, Jewish, and Islamic promulgated innovations on political, philosophical, religious, and artistic bases. His work is organized in appropriately-sized chronological chapter that are easy enough to digest, making the book suitable for audiences with not more than the typical interest in Spanish or Islamic history, using primary Islamic and Christian sources to reinforce his accomplished scope. However, from the point of view of a burgeoning scholar, Fletcher‟s work does leave something to be desired in his lack of precise references and the occasional typographical error, though these are minor shortcoming in light of the book as a whole. A more precise look at Moorish Spain will give a better sense of Richard Fletcher‟s accomplishment at providing an introductory text to those desiring a look at medieval Spain, the Moorish occupation thereof, and its cultural-historical significance.
As noted, Moorish Spain is separated into chronological sequential chapters pertaining each to an era of Andalusian Moorish history that can reasonably be partitioned called separate from other eras. Its 175 pages are divided into nine chapters, beginning with a concise introduction to the “reality” of Moorish Spain in which Fletcher disavows myths of Moorish brutality against medieval Christians, provides considerable data on the linguistic effect of the Moorish occupation on modern Spanish, and an extensive geographical introduction that proves beneficial throughout the text (most of which is unaccompanied by maps). With this beginning Fletcher establishes that “the Iberian peninsula is the area of Mediterranean Europe where the most prolonged and intimate encounter between Christendom and Islam occurred” (5). In the following chapter the conquest of Visigothic Spain by Tariq‟s army – beginning in 710 and extending until the final Visigothic kings had been killed or pacified in about 720 – is detailed alongside the lasting effects of the Arabs‟ reliance on loosely-Islamicized Berbers (rife with revolts), the creation of the tierras despobladas, or a demilitarized zone defining the Muslim-Christian frontier, and the establishment of the Spanish Umayyad Caliphate under `Abd al-Rahman. The third chapter provides necessary, and appealing, insight into the issue of conversion to Islam in Andalusia (from the Arabic term Al-Andalus, i.e. the Iberian Peninsula), as for the first few centuries of Islamic occupation the Muslims had remained a relative minority. However, the work of American Richard W. Bulliet suggests that the percentage of Muslims in Andalusia double every fifty years, so that “by about the year 1000 the proportion [of Muslims] stood at something like 75%” (38). The following three chapters explicate the political, and at times complex, history of the creation golden age of the Spanish Umayyad Caliphate; its disintegration into a number of smaller party (faction-based) states called taifa states (as a whole this is called the fitnah or “strife” period); the conquest of the taifa states by the Almoravids – a fundamentalist Berber sect from Morocco – who ruled Spain from without, in Morocco; and the Almoravids‟ fall to another, though even more orthodox, Islamic Berber sect who thought themselves led and ruled by the Mahdi, “„the rightly-guided one‟ sent by God in the last days to restore righteousness before the Day of Judgment” (119). These three chapters alone span some 513 years – the bulk – of Moorish Spanish history, covering as well the golden ages of Arabo-Spanish philosophy and literature, many examples of which are provided from a copious number of sources. They form the greater part of Fletcher‟s work compiling this book, in that he was generously fine combed the details of such a complex period so as to illustrate in a manner that is easily intelligible, providing (where necessary) multiple examples, such as the extravagance of taifa court life and the subsequent mass-production of court patronized artists and writers (see Chapter 5: The Party Kings).
To wrap up his discussion of Andalusian history, Fletcher concludes with a largely religio-cultural chapter that outlines the general trend in Christian-Muslim relations from the twelfth century (Spain under the Almohads) to the formation of the Kingdom of Granada, and subsequently with a look at the final Islamic kingdom in southern Spain and the culmination of the so-called Reconquista of Granada. The convivencia – or, living together – of Muslims and Christians (to use Fletcher‟s term) is examined in considerable detail, taking into account both the Christian and Muslim perspectives, though through a lens that is slight Islamocentric: Fletcher seems to bemoan the particularly harsh conditions of the Mudejars (Muslims under Christian rule; from the Arabic al-mudajjar, “person allowed to remain”), even appealing to the reader for sympathy via a tragic ballad involving the rape of a young Muslim girl. While sympathizing for historical atrocities is not undesirable, these chapters together place Fletcher among a strain of Islamocentric historians, beginning perhaps with Stanley Lane-Pool in 1897, who believe that “whatsoever makes a kingdom great and prosperous, whatsoever tends to refinement and civilization, was found in Moslem Spain” (171). These two chapters, paired with the final, epilogual chapter (which, ironically, since he questions the combining history and nostalgia in medieval primary sources, discusses the nostalgic idea of Muslim Spain alongside a sketch of the book‟s content) conclude what is a brilliant addition to the body of literature devoted to Islamic history in general, and perhaps a paradigm for future introductory texts on the history of medieval, Islamic Spain.
While the content and organization of the book is of the quality a reader may easily respect and admire, as has been noted, there is a lack of precise citation of sources. For example, Fletcher will at times reference the title of a source, as in his citing of a passage from the Qu‟ran on page 79, or his use of Dante‟s commentary on Averroes from the Inferno on page 134. In fact, it seems that Fletcher‟s reference to Dante is the only in his entire work that provides a complete citation: Inferno, IV, 144. It is frustrating that, more often than not, references and quotes used by Fletcher are not even associated with a specific work, often following the form: “Isa Yabir, a prominent Muslim intellectual …compiled a compendium of the law of Islam” – a quote would be inserted following such a typical phrase (135). In addition, there is not bibliography provided for this work, and Fletcher seems pleased to follow the final chapters with a “Further Reading” section, though it does provide a fair number of sources. Also, it has been discovered that the index is not the most comprehensive source, as it tends to provide only the first page that an indexed figure appears on, rather than a list of all pages (this has made searching for particular references within Moorish Spain rather difficult). Truthfully, these number of errors listed here represent bias of a student of history criticizing the work from an academic perspective, and it should be noted that Fletcher perhaps has left the book in such a state not to displease the scholarly audience (as the book does not seem intended for academia alone) but to make the book as comprehensible for the average interested reader as possible, leaving out such references, citations, and thorough indexing that would otherwise be of no concern.
In totally, Richard A. Fletcher‟s Moorish Spain stands as a compendium of Moorish Andalusian history, stretching from the conquering of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 by Islamic forces to the destruction of its final Muslim kingdom at Granada in 1492, and including countless resources that display the cultural industry produced therein. While from a scholarly perspective Moorish Spain is lacking, this is of little consequence when compared to the breadth of scope Fletcher has accomplished in providing an introductory text on medieval Hispano-Islamic history that is easily accessible and enjoyable to those with a sincere attraction to this invaluable era.

Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth

Garth Fowden. Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii and 205. 14 Illustrations and 1 Map. ISBN 0-691-06989-1. Softcover.

Sean Guynes, Western Washington University

The period of Late Antiquity – roughly the second century to the ninth century CE – stands as one of Western Civilization’s most innovative periods of history, the link between the polytheistic, non-universalist empires of the Classical world and the monotheistic, universalist culture inherited by the medieval and early-modern world. Thus, in short, is the purpose of Garth Fowden’s Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, which attempts a generalization of the significance of the conjoining of monotheism, particularly Christianity and Islam, with the cultures of Rome and the Arab world, and also displays the integral role of the “Mountain Arena” in Western history, and defines and outlines the history of a universality empire. While Fowden covers many topics, such as the status of various religions in Late Antique Persio-Roman society, the splintering of various Christian groups (i.e. the Armenian Orthodox Church), and histories of notable figures, Empire to Commonwealth is recommended only for the highly-advanced student of Classical, Late Antique, Byzantine, Islamic, and Religious history, as the work presupposes knowledge of events, works, and people that are not otherwise described. This work would be a valuable asset to the advanced undergraduate or graduate student for its welcome, but little-practiced combining of historical and geographical areas that are often taught separately of one another, and for its thesis, which displays the vision of an avid researcher who has recognized the need for such useful scholarship.
Though advanced, Fowden’s Empire to Commonwealth is organized in a manner that is chronological, easily accessible, and which allows the progression of his thesis with increasingly useful historical examples. The first half of his work concerns his thesis and an overview of the politico-religious situations of Rome and the Fertile Crescent from the onset of polytheist cults and Judaism to the second century CE. The latter half uses Constantine’s Rome, the First Byzantine “Commonwealth,” and the Islamic caliphate to exemplify the trend towards commonwealth following the adoption of monotheism in an imperial setting.
Fowden first established his thesis: that the knowledge and belief in one god justified and made more effective imperial power and thus made possible a “universal empire,” and subsequently that that the nature of monotheist doctrine naturally gave birth to heresies, and (the “consequence”) the creation of commonwealths united not in religion, culture, and history. One of his main focuses is on the ancient idea of world empire, the definition of orbis terrarum or oikoumene, and the possibility of a politico-cultural world empire (he lists Cyrus the Great, Alexander of Macedonia, and Mohammed as the only men before the medieval era to achieve a politico-cultural world empire by his definition). At the center of such ideas, according to Fowden, is the idea of universalism (political, cultural, and/or religious), and how the idea of orbis terrarum can make or break politico-cultural aspirations; as such, the world as the Classical and Late Antiquity was concerned, consisted of two spheres: Iran and Rome – each of which vied concurrently for “world” domination and universal empire. Ultimately, it is figures suchas Cyrus, Alexander, and Mohammed who shattered the one-sided views of each group to united the two theatres of East and West under one kosmokrator. The sections of Fowden’s work on polytheist Rome and the Fertile Crescent ultimately posit that, while polytheism allows for the ability to recognize gods and goddesses in foreign lands and to adopt them to one’s needs – and as a result the gods of the urban areas universalize those on the periphery – the too numerous cults, traditions, customs, and attachments of various sects could prove harmful to imperial universalism; on the other hand, monotheism allowed the universal worship of one god, in one empire, under one emperor (though, as in the case of Judaism, this did not always presuppose universalism) – Christianity and Islam provided that bond, under the right leaders, to unite the orbis terrarum and its various polities, cultures, and ethnicities under that God.
The next half of Fowden’s work focuses on the role of Constantine, the Byzantines, and the Muslims in creating powerful empires that dissolve into commonwealths as a result of religious, cultural, and political tensions. For Constantine, becoming Christian was a welcome relief to the Roman Empire, which, having reached its peak, was spiraling into decline. As Fowden states, “…when it came to politics, the Christian Church had an organization and an impetus that no one could rival” and “Constantine does not just Christianize the Roman Empire; he unifies it too” (87-88). While Judaism had been cautious to accept converts and had remained a largely ethnic religion due to its scriptural restriction to the Hebrew people, and because it was generally non-proselytizing, Christianity was an all-inclusive doctrine that stressed salvation of all, and the belief that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to” Christ merely backed the idea of a singular world empire under the Romans. On the other hand, the Byzantine Commonwealth inherited the eastern half of an empire ravaged by barbarian invasions and, as Fowden posits, was no more than a loosely bound polity linked by the universal idea of Christianity – inherited from Constantine’s Rome – more so than a single political unit. However, areas such as Armenia, Iberia (Georgia), the Arabian Peninsula, Nubia, and Iran proved a difficulty to control, at least in terms of religious orthodoxy, and thus led to the formation of more or less independent polities within the larger “Byzantine” category. However, for Fowden, the onset of Islam – Mohammed’s universalist, monotheist religious doctrine – allowed the creation of one of histories most successful world empires, combining the Mountain Arena, Africa, Anatolia, and Iran into a conglomeration of ethnic groups bound together, at least eventually, by Islam. However, as with Rome and Byzantium, the nature of such a culturally broad empire and of monotheism led to the separation of the Islamic caliphate into multiple successor states – commonwealth. The separation of Islam into multiple groups was largely the result of legitimate succession of the title of Caliph and the creation of multiple Islamic power bases.
Garth Fowden’s extraordinarily perceptive Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of monotheism in Late Antiquity is a cautiously recommended work of scholarship, which should be approached only by the reader with a wealth of knowledge in the afore-mentioned disciplines or with the time and patience to slowly digest the complicated background information presented in the defense of the work’s thesis. It is ultimately an argument for the idea that monotheism helped create strong imperial bases around a universal religious ideal that polytheism fruitlessly attempted, and the results ofsuch a unity: heresy, factionalization, and, ultimately, political entities bound in by religious preference.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire. By Ruth Downie.
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Paperback ISBN: 1-59691-518-8
Pp. 382. $15.00 (paperback).

This book is the second installment in a series. Terra Incognita picks up several months after the first book ended. The main character, Gaius Petreius Ruso, is a medicus or a doctor who works for the Roman army and who has a knack for getting involved in murder cases. It’s all set in the time right after the Roman Empire started to take over Britain. In the first book he saved a slave girl, whom we will come to know as Tilla, from being killed in public by her master. After this he becomes her new master and she helps him solve the murders that he doesn’t even really want to be a part of. In this second book, the two travel together to what Ruso calls the very edge of the empire with the army. This is the area of Britain that Rome has been able to conquer so far. Not only this, but it’s the same village that Tilla was born in and taken from 3 years prior. While there, tensions become even more strained with the murder of the local supplier; the medicus who was in charge in the area claimed that it was he who committed the murder when the officers are convinced that it was one of the locals. Ruso then volunteers to help out in any way that he can, which includes finding out anything that can help lead them to who the real murderer is.
Since this book is a novel, it is a lot more focused on the characters themselves and the development of the plot. That being said I also believe it to be quite a good representation of what people during these times of the Roman Empire might have actually had to go through. I am not sure how historically accurate it is but then again there wasn’t a lot of historical information that was given. The cultural aspect of it though was very good. The author incorporated a lot of day to day activities that we know the Romans participated in. She was also good with some of the minor details like clothing, money, cultural customs, ways that people talked to each other, or even the way that they wrote.
I believe that anyone who reads this book will be able to benefit from it. It’s a well written story and if you pay enough attention you can learn a lot about Roman culture. I would definitely recommend this book and the two other books in the series to everyone I know.

Victoria Zimmerman
Katzgomoo9@yahoo.com

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World

Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. Basic Books. 2008. Pp. 672. ISBN 978-0465024971.

By Nathan Oglesby

Robin Lane Fox begins the preface to The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian with the admission of something self-evident, that presenting nine-hundred years of ancient history in a single volume is a fraught enterprise; and yet in five and half hundred pages he appears to have been manifestly successful. This reviewer had come to the book with at least a haphazard and general account of such history in his head, but had never encountered a volume of such simultaneous scope and concentration, framed at once for the novice and the initiated, and most importantly presented almost throughout as a narrative, rather than “discuss[ing] a topic…across a thousand years in a single chapter” (xv). This concerted “narrative” is told in frank and swift language, and with what appears to be great discernment of emphasis. Laced throughout the narrative framework are temporal flash-forwards to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, with whose reign Fox’s history terminates, on his grand tour of his dominions, so that we might see one of the classical cast members classicizing what is to him already the distant past at every major point in the journey of our own readership. This device complicates the work beneficially, and buoys the dense catalogue of bygone personae and events with an essential impression of the classical world examining itself and its own ‘classicism.’ While it asks, rightfully, to be read as a tale, intercalary chapters are dispersed throughout, which magnify certain personalities, or generalize sociological trends, the only points at which Fox remotely favors the textbook to the chronicle.
The Classical World is divided into two huge stages (Greece, then Rome) of three parts each, which respectively cover ‘The Archaic Greek World’, from Homer’s Greece through the Persian wars, ‘The Classical Greek World’, Athens’ ascendancy through Philip’s advances, ‘Hellenistic Worlds’, Alexander’s conquests and the decline of Greek freedom through the dawn of Rome; then ‘The Roman Republic’, from its early evolution through its effective dissolution by Julius Caesar, ‘From Republic to Empire’, detailing the struggle of Antony and Octavian and the character of the victorious latter’s subsequent political overhauls, and finally ‘An Imperial World’, charting Rome’s frenetic succession of principes from the Julio-Claudians up to the now-familiar congenial globetrotter himself, Hadrian.
The thematic pillars of this ‘epic’ are the buzz-words ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘luxury’, to which Fox makes constant recourse as alternating lenses through which to examine the long course of political modulations which are presented as themselves a cyclic recurrence of these ideas and their reactions. As Fox has it, the call for political ‘freedom’ was as frequent an object of rhetorical ‘spin’ as it is today, the very conduit for the violent usurpations and repossessions of the power of dispensing ‘justice’ over against the tide of ‘luxury’, the spectrous heritage of that power. In this connection he makes a good deal of reference to Polybius, a Greek historian of Roman activity, in whom he identifies a similarly systematic view of history. “According to Polybius’ theory, such change [toward the adoption of ‘luxury’] would inevitably occur, linked to changes in the citzens’ ‘customs’ and behavior: oligarchy would change to democracy, democracy to degenerate mob-rule and then back to monarchy, the starting point” (329). The appropriateness of these themes is manifest, so much so that the insistent emphasis placed on them becomes somewhat tiresome—there are junctures where the operation of these rallying cries (for ‘freedom’, for ‘justice’; against ‘luxury’) is sufficiently self-evident that the work is a little burdened by Fox’s effort to make them transparent. In addition to this, the narrative is laden by a certain categorical repetition of the phrase ‘in my view’, apparently the author’s means of emphasizing the separation of his inferences from fact—but this distinction is likewise too self-evident to necessitate this phrase surfacing nearly ten times a chapter, and therefore several hundreds of times altogether. But as Fox’s frankness appears to make no pretensions to stylistic achievement, excepting the structural impressiveness of the whole, let these be dismissed as petty detractions. And in despite of them, Fox’s voice is not without humor and charm, assuring us that the dubious art objects left in the ruins of Pompeii, whatever the unknown nature of their decorative role had been, “are simply sexy.” But of course, “Pompeii did not collapse in a final torrent of orgies” (537-40).
Diverse chapter headings, almost all from ancient texts, whether literary or clerical, situate the narrative very effectively, and at times are juxtaposed to great effect. One such chapter, which treats the inception of the Flavian dynasty, pits some verses of Statius which appear on a bronze statue of the emperor Domitian (“This staute…will stand while earth and sky endure…” (520)), against the younger Pliny’s Panegyric which lauds the destruction of one of the same such statues. Here and elsewhere, The Classical World is at its most affecting when Fox lets his wisely selected material speak powerfully for itself.
He is at his most effective as a story-teller in the dizzying political drama of the fourth and fifth parts at the heart of the book, during which Hadrian’s trans-temporal field trip is abandoned awhile for the companionship of Cicero, the precedent reductions of whose character he amends, whilst following the manifold civil strife of late-Republican Rome from his beleaguered perspective. Fox cuts through what he identifies as the inherent ‘spin’ (he seems to find this contemporary term very helpful) of ancient sources on the subject, and presents as intricate a record as is possible to follow of these intrigues and their participants, who appear by turns, in this bright objective light, brutal and beautiful, and unfailingly ingenious.
In its totality, The Classical World manages to offer a sustained vision of nearly an entire millennium, of which most would otherwise pass their lives with only the vaguest impressions. It will well furnish for the interested reader copious contextual material with which to approach ancient sources themselves, as well as pull together the accumulated miscellany and ambiguity of such studies into an integrated narrative whole.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language

Joel M. Hoffman. In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi. and 263. 4 illustration. ISBN 0-8147-3690-4. Softcover. $17.95.

By Sean A. Guynes

For those interested in Near East history, Scriptural studies, or linguistics – specifically of the Hebrew language – In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands as an accessible and practical achievement of Hebrew Union College’s Joel M. Hoffman, professor of ancient Hebrew at the Jewish Institute of Religion and translator for Jewish Lights Publishing. In the Beginning details the adventure of the life of Hebrew, its effects on the world’s alphabetical systems, the importance of the language’s successes, and how ancient, or biblical, Hebrew might have actually sounded. Though approaching such a significant work of scholarship appears intimidating, Hoffman’s book is organized in a manner that even those without prior knowledge of Hebrew, linguistics, or Scripture will find it straightforwardly instructive. The comprehensive nature of the book’s organization leaves no questions unanswered and provides appendices for further investigation of more broadly related topics. Brilliant and easy to read, In the Beginning portrays Hebrew as a language instrumental to the creation or widespread literacy and a predecessor to modern alphabets as a result of Hebrew being the first known language to record vowels. Further, an introduction to historical and linguistic theories and to various forms of non- and alphabetic writing is given. From the attempted recreation of ancient Hebrew pronunciation by the Masoretes and the Greeks, to the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical dialects, and advances of Modern Hebrew by Ben-Yehuda, In the Beginning presents the grand picture of the Hebrew language’s over-3,000-year journey and its world-changing implementations as the language of Scripture and ancestor to the Western and Near Eastern worlds’ modern alphabets.
Anyone who wishes to delve into the wonders and mysteries of the creation of the Hebrew language should find no issues with Hoffman’s work, which is filled with scholarly insights and organized so that one with no experience may learn in the first few chapters all that is needed to understand the latter commentary, while someone with knowledge of historical and linguistic theories and the Hebrew alphabet may simply skip to the next chapters. In the Beginning is divided into four Parts and a fifth section, the Appendices. Part I, “Getting Started” is a brief, ten-page introduction, beginning with the three theories of history: Dumb-Luck Theory, God Theory, and Science Theory – knowing all of which is essentially to study not only history itself, but the way in which others and other culture have interpreted history and thus how history may have been interpretively passed down. The latter pages explore the two linguistic theories – prescriptive and descriptive linguistics – and the way in which Hebrew, and to a lesser extent, Greek and Russian, transliteration works. “Antiquity,” Part II, provides the in-depth introduction to non- and alphabetical writing systems, primarily those pre-Hebraic ones of the Near East, and details the groundbreaking importance of the Hebrews’ invention of vowels, even positing that the Hebrew alphabet might have been the first complete alphabet, following the tradition of Linear A and B and other Canaanite scripts. Hoffman next introduces the Masoretes, a group of Jewish linguists and scribes working out of Tiberias, Babylon, and Israel circa the 7th century C.E. who envisioned the pronunciation of ancient Hebrew who created various vowel systems, the most famous of which, Tiberian, is still employed to some extent today. To display the difficulty and in order to investigate the Masoretes’ accuracy Hoffman examines methods of comparing and concluding the pronunciation of ancient languages – specifically, of course, Tiberian Hebrew – by comparing Modern and Semitic ancestor languages and Greek, largely by way of the Septuagint (LXX) and the Origen Hexapla. Part III, “Moving On” explores the famous Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), how they came to be and how came into scholars’ hands, and how the Hebrew and content of the DSS compares to earlier Toraic texts; also, various biblical dialects – the way in which different dialects effected writing, pronunciation, and grammar of the Torah – to further the exploration of Hebrew on a Scriptural level. Following the DSS, a section on post-biblical Hebrew introduces the effects of Greek and Aramaic on Hebrew, and vice versa, and the nature of Rabbinic Hebrew, which as a seemingly natural linguistic continuation of Biblical Hebrew confirms all that is believed about the dialects, grammar, and, to a lesser extent, the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. Finally, “Now”, Part IV, elucidates the courageous reassertion at the hands of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of Hebrew as a modern, colloquially spoken language for the Jews, which developed along with the Zionist movement and come to fruition with the creation of the Mandate of Palestine in 1917 and, at last, with the establishment of the State of Israel. Those interesting in exploring more about historical and linguistic theories, writing systems, the Masoretes, DSS, and stages of Hebrew development and dialect, may consult the to Appendices, which itself bequeaths a wealth of information to the budding scholar or interested reader.
As a piece of scholarship, Joel Hoffman’s In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands out as a crowning achievement of Hebrew language research and Scriptural history. This work champions the great triumph of Hebrew in creating an effective alphabetic writing system, replete with vowels, which promoted widespread literacy among the Hebrews, and which formed the basis for the Arabic, Cyrillic, Farsi, Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit alphabets. A Medieval Studies and Linguistics student with interest in Hebrew, and a Jew, I found Hoffman’s book within my interest, especially in terms of the historical development of Hebrew given in the latter Parts. Further, understanding the effects of Hebrew and its own genesis is a practically necessity for any student of the language or of theology. In the Beginning binds the rarely merged subjects of linguistics, history, and religion in one effective, intelligible, and outstanding piece of literature, a book that I feel will be indulged by the world of academia, students and professors alike, and likewise by anyone with a basic interest in the subjects it covers, for years to come.

Sean A. Guynes studies Medieval History, Hebrew, and Linguistics at Western Washington University.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Solomon and Marcolf

Ziolkowski, Jan M. Solomon and Marcolf. Harvard University Press: Cambridege, MA and London. 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-02842-5. (Softback)
By Hannah Hahn
The text Salomon et Marcolfus is written in Medieval Latin and has two parts. The first contains a dialogue between King Solomon, of Biblical fame, and a peasant called Marcolfus, who answers Solomon proverb for proverb until the king gives up. The second part is a narrative that is not completely synched with the previous dialogue in terms of personal details, giving rise to the theory that the two parts came down separately and eventually were put together. The narrative covers the first meeting of Solomon and Marcolf in Marcolf’s family cottage, at which time Solomon ‘invites’ Marcolf to court, where the subsequent episodes take place. Their following interactions mostly consist of Marcolf outsmarting Solomon, the so-called wise and just ruler.
Solomon and Marcolf by Jan M. Ziolkowski is an intriguing and comprehensive look at the Medieval Latin text. The Latin text replicated within is taken from another translation by one Benary, who doesn’t appear in the Bibliography. The Latin is presented side by side with the English translation, which appears to be fairly accurate, followed by the author’s commentary. The commentary follows the text line by line and explains translation choices and sources as well as choice entertaining bits of trivia. The commentary is extremely well researched, using sources from at least four different languages. It also provides context, both linguistically and culturally, which helps the reader to understand more of what the text is saying.
As I am a student of Classical Latin, there are some differences in the text that I noticed. For the most part, I could follow the Medieval Latin of the text; however, there were parts that threw me. For example, mihi had changed to michi and nihil to nichil. Sepe replaced saepe and in yma apparently meant ‘to the bottom’.
There were certain passages, especially in Part One, which I found to be particularly entertaining. For example, 1.26 reads “Solomon: ‘Between good and wicked people the house is filled.’ Marcolf: ‘Between ass-wipes and shit the privy is filled’” The philosophical takes on this response are staggering. If taken in order, good people are ass-wipes and wicked people are shit. The privy refers to the house, which refers to the world. This seems to indicate a pessimistic view of the world that agrees with other places in the text where Marcolf lends his point of view.
Line 1.101a, “He who answers before he hears will be proven a fool” reminds me of all those game show contestants who hit the buzzer before the host finishes the question and end up completely screwing up their answers.
Included in the commentary are references to several texts which sound intriguing. One of them, the anonymous text De Coniuge Non Ducenda, edited by A.G. Rigg (1986), provides a couplet:
A drip, the smoke, a wife – these three
Compel a man his house to flee.
Another, ‘Curious Word Origins: Sayings and Expressions from White Elephants to a Song and Dance’ by Charles Earle Funk (1993), is one that I’ll have to find because I am a word geek. Finally, the author references his own book, ‘Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies’ (2007) which also sounds right up my alley.
Over all, this book was long and repetitive, but provided some interesting reading. It offers in addition bonus features in the appendices, including a translation from Welsh, an alternate beginning and several alternate endings.

Hannah Hahn is working on a double major in Classics and Linguistics at Western Washington University.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Nathan Oglesby on Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word

Nicholas Ostler. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN-10: 0066210860. Pp. 640.

Perhaps there is no more effective and agreeable way to inculcate a vast and varied subject, one whose import is universal but whose informational minutiae are necessary to a conception of the whole, than to conceive of it in the most vivid possible terms. It is apparently in this spirit that Nicholas Ostler presents an overwhelming history of major world languages from the beginning of recorded history to the present, in a book that straddles the roles of linguistic first-string roll-call and epic treatment of an ongoing drama whose personae are the languages with the most star-power across history. That is to say, one with some humble degree of familiarity with linguistic science, or with a great degree of interest, may read Empires of the Word as an encyclopedic narrative with a great deal of personality; one less preoccupied with scientific specificity may instead occupy themselves with an overarching vision of the rise and fall of the empires of history through the lens of these’ empires’ spectrous concomitants, their dubiously immortal household gods, their languages. What distinguishes this work from the average heady gamut of historical linguistics is its balance of immense quantities of historical information presented systematically, and veritable storytelling—for among the reader’s principal impressions is the surprise that so great a concentration of dates, places and Romanized foreign phonetics could be presented as a coherent and memorable story, or that the history of world languages could make such a good story without reducing or generalizing that actual history.
Ostler conceives of language histories possessing both an outward aspect, in the form of variously recorded “careers…as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers” (11), and an inward, a language community being “not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language…[but] an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition” (13). Thus Ostler complicates the familiar conception of a language’s being a reflection of its speaking community’s imperial activity, its success, its spread and longevity, being proportional results of that activity—for Ostler, language history is not only a matter of who invaded whom forcing them directly or indirectly to henceforth speak, read and write what, but as much a simultaneous inquiry into the personality of a language, as that has an equal hand in constituting its “propensity to attract new users” (19).
The saga opens on the generations of Semitic languages, focusing centrally on the successions of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, the fraternal chronology of linguae francae spanning Middle Eastern history—these being by turns “the only stability this society has enjoyed[:] the substance of its ruling language” (35). Akkadian rose to prominence by virtue of the exigency of its written form, Aramaic followed it on the tongues of nomads; both are the close relatives of contemporary Arabic, which spread by conquest and perpetuated itself by virtue of religious authority. The ascendancies of these “desert blooms” are characterized by differing means of spread, but their end identity is an infusion of all three, the present flower among which is contemporary Arabic. We are told also of certain familiars in their midst—as here, among other places, Ostler presents the story of the sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew in terms of a parable of two literal sisters, “Elissa” the pretty socialite doomed to unforeseen anonymity, and “Judith” the “obscure and perhaps disreputable youth” with an unlooked-for destiny of venerability and prestige. “The world,” says Ostler, “reversed the fortunes of these two sisters” (69). Here and elsewhere the immense catalogue of linguistic succession is embossed with a memorably dramatic image, as against expectation Empires continuously offers itself to be read as a story.
Act Two opens on the Far East, where Chinese begins its spectacular career of 4000 years (and counting). This language distinguishes itself remarkably from other world languages by remaining virtually steadfast over four millennia. This feat is attributed to its pictographic writing system, which has been able to embrace and stabilize a multiplicity of dialects over a vast geography, and as much to the centralizing tendency of Chinese culture, gathering and refining the language against disunity over time.
Meanwhile Sanskrit has spread from Northern India on the shoulders of Hinduism, then through South-East Asia and into the Far East as the conduit of Buddhism, providing an example of another of the distinctions Ostler makes about linguistic personality: the double-barrel of “language prestige” and “language charm.” He offers us “the persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed” (174). Sanskrit, it is explained, has preserved itself by knowing itself.—The rigor of its religious tradition, endowing it with a grammatical and artistic self-consciousness, established and lastingly secured its identity as a “medium of learned communication and sacred expression” within and without the continent, even after the decline of its popular use.
At the center of the story, though, are the kindred courses of Greek and Latin, who in their turn “so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries” (234). Both, stubborn in their precedence, survived the civilizations that gave them life—Greek entwining itself round the broad occupation of Roman imperium in spite of Greece's curtailed political independence, Latin dying into the prodigious birth of its modern Romance progeny. While Greek persists as a living language albeit in isolation, the death rattle of Latin is its enduring resonance in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. “O death,” Ostler intones on its behalf, “where is thy sting?”
The travels (quite literally) of these offspring culminate in the overseas expansion of European nations and their languages beginning in the early 16th century. Portuguese leads off, spreading language with empire in the dubious charity of “civilizing” new worlds—ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, it takes no significant lasting root as a global language, being replaced by succeeding colonial activity.
From among its kindred successors enters the final character, whose adventure conducts us from its youth in the 5th century AD to the present day, English. This last act is divided into two subsections: English’s “formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain, and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world” (457). After being told the story (“often,” he says, “retold to its own speakers”) of the formation of English, we are reacquainted with the present situation, wherein English flourishes in its familiar ubiquity. It is a new kind of prestige, whose attraction for non-native speakers is no mere posture of erudition or exercise of class, but a symbolic opportunity for inclusion in a world of business, technology, and the swiftly globalizing medium of popular culture. And here Ostler, not knowing the end of its story any better than we do, speculates about the fate of this lingua franca—not so much to offer us his own forecast, but to chasten the extreme perspectives of those who respectively hope and fear English’s total absorption of the speaking world. “[W]e should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity…the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time” (558). It would indeed be problematic to prophecy the indefinite dominance of a major world language directly after having narrated the sometime ascensions and subsequent dissolutions of its principal predecessors. Rather, here in the closing section “Vaster than empires”, he puts even our audacious “in” language safely back in its place, emphasizing the “paradox [of] this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity.”
The marvelous thing about this document of diversity is, again, its capacity for being grasped as a vastly proportioned narrative, in which all speaking people across history play a part, represented by the collective metonymy of their myriad tongues, which seize the stage one-by-one in Empires. But in being so compelling, its tone is consistently frank and scientific; and in holding forth its treasure house of detailed data, it is yet simple, direct, conceivable and memorable. One ought to read this book, then, if one wishes to possess a picture of the lives of the world languages unhindered by the selective lens of one’s own language experience; or as much, if one is emerging from or amidst a formal education, perhaps in some language or some area touching linguistics, and yet finds oneself without a divining rod by which to order and seal the disconnected objects of this education into a coherent picture of linguistic history.—For the latter boon is what I have gotten from it: a fair and vibrant timeline of the history of language, where previously I had but vague pictures of particular languages’ triumphs and defeats in episodic isolation. But now, “[i]f this book has shown one thing, it is that world languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community” (556). Ostler’s distinction, and the distinction of his book, is that any single model for understanding a language’s history falls short of representing the whole—the only means to a total vision of the life of a language is to see it as having or having had a life as complex as the lives of those who generate it and have given it permanence.