Impure Language(s)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Organizer Name
Linde M. Brocato
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Memphis
Presider Name
Linde M. Brocato
Paper Title 1
The Latinity of an Arabic Gospel: Corruption by Assimilation or Counterclaim by Approximation?
Presenter 1 Name
Jason Busic
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Denison Univ.
Paper Title 2
Parsing the Pecado Sodomítico in Siete Partidas 7.21
Presenter 2 Name
Gregory S. Hutcheson
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Louisville
Paper Title 3
The Future Will be Beautiful: The Meaning of Style in the Barcelona and Kaufmann Haggadahs
Presenter 3 Name
Abby Kornfeld
Presenter 3 Affiliation
City College of New York
Start Date
13-5-2016 1:30 PM
Session Location
Fetzer 2016
Description
Across the disciplines of Iberomedieval Studies, impure language is actually the given; it is the experiential reality we encounter, in all its possible meanings and instances, when we lay hands on the material objects of our study. Obvious examples include documents with features of many of the languages in play in cultural, confessional, political, and familial encounters in medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean, whether the mixtures of Castilian, Catalan, Aragonese, Italian, and Greek in the fourteenth-century translations of Thucydides and Plutarch commissioned by Juan Fernández de Heredia around 1380, or aljamiado manuscripts in Romance written with Hebrew or Arabic characters. Indeed, one of traditional philology’s self-appointed tasks has been the depuration of such traces in creating editions, even when such linguistic impurities have larger significance. Such impurity extends to the moral realm as well, and poesía de escarnio, satirical and parodic works, or even heretical works might well be included under this rubric -- particularly since their impurities are often expressed in a different language from the main body of the text. This panel thus invites work on historical, theological, literary, epistolary, and even visual texts in which any form of impurity is at play, in order to both scrutinize "impure language" and perhaps even further mobilize it through the interplay of texts and issues brought together in this panel.
Impure Language(s)
Fetzer 2016
Across the disciplines of Iberomedieval Studies, impure language is actually the given; it is the experiential reality we encounter, in all its possible meanings and instances, when we lay hands on the material objects of our study. Obvious examples include documents with features of many of the languages in play in cultural, confessional, political, and familial encounters in medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean, whether the mixtures of Castilian, Catalan, Aragonese, Italian, and Greek in the fourteenth-century translations of Thucydides and Plutarch commissioned by Juan Fernández de Heredia around 1380, or aljamiado manuscripts in Romance written with Hebrew or Arabic characters. Indeed, one of traditional philology’s self-appointed tasks has been the depuration of such traces in creating editions, even when such linguistic impurities have larger significance. Such impurity extends to the moral realm as well, and poesía de escarnio, satirical and parodic works, or even heretical works might well be included under this rubric -- particularly since their impurities are often expressed in a different language from the main body of the text. This panel thus invites work on historical, theological, literary, epistolary, and even visual texts in which any form of impurity is at play, in order to both scrutinize "impure language" and perhaps even further mobilize it through the interplay of texts and issues brought together in this panel.