The Role of Medieval Sicily in World Literature: A Mediterranean Tale

“To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

Medieval Sicily occupies a crucial position in literary history: incorporating the three monotheistic traditions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, it has a repertoire of texts in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance. In the 13th century, Sicily was also the protagonist in a pivotal event in world literature: the rise of the Italian lyric. This early Italian poetry was to influence Dante and Petrarch, as well as humanists and scholars throughout Europe until at least the 18th century.

While the role of Sicilian Italian poets in world literature may be fairly familiar to the non-specialist public, much less known is the important contribution of Islam to the history of Sicilian and European literature at large. From the 9th to the 11th century, in fact, Sicily was a predominantly Arabic-speaking, Muslim island, where Arabic poetry flourished under the patronage of local rulers and emirs. The Islamic conquest of Sicily -initiated in 827- would take decades to consolidate; yet once established, Muslim presence on the island would endure for five centuries into the Norman, Hohenstaufen and Angevin periods. First-hand accounts of medieval travellers to Sicily attest to the thriving economy of the Muslim colony. A host of factors secured such steady economic growth: the island's position at the centre of important trade routes, income from war booty and slave-trade, a favourable climate that allowed for generous harvests, which in turn was boosted by the novel farming techniques and crops introduced by the Muslims. All these factors, coupled with a spell of political stability in the second half of the 10th century, contributed to Muslim Sicily's meteoric rise in cultural production. Literary and scientific patronage soared, a large body of poetry was composed, and Sicilian scholars distinguished themselves in a variety of fields: poetry and poetics, lexicography, medicine, religion and grammar were penned, in Arabic, on the island in this period. And the fruits of this cultural ferment were not reaped solely during the Muslim age: they lasted for over two centuries after its demise.

In the 11th century, Muslim Sicily fell to the Norman invasion but, Arabic learning did not disappear from the island. On the contrary, it found a renewed impetus under the patronage of the Norman kings. New Arabic scientific and literary works were produced under the Norman aegis, and translations from the Arabic into Latin were brought to fruition. Arabic poetry was also incorporated into the Norman court apparatus: Muslim poets found a protective wing under the Norman kings, and composed panegyrics in their praise, much in the tradition of the classical Arabic ode. In the Norman period, other literary traditions also prospered in Sicily: these traditions include the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin: court poets produced encomiastic poems for the Normans, while private poems attest to a bustling literary activity in this period. 

In the 13th century, the reign of Frederick II Hohenstaufen inaugurated a new, splendid age for Sicily. Among its great cultural accomplishments, this period saw the rise of the Italian lyric. At the court of Frederick II, a group of Sicilian poets known as the Scuola Siciliana - the Sicilian School - began writing verses in their own Romance vernacular: Italian.

But while historians of literature have studied the Italian poetry of medieval Sicily in depth, much less attention has been paid to the Arabic poetry produced by the Muslims of Sicily and to its intertwinement with the rise of the Romance lyric. The Sicilian-Arabic poetic corpus remains largely untranslated, let alone studied and placed in the context of the complex cultural trajectory of medieval Sicily. Contemporary discourse in medieval literary history is therefore suffering from our imprecise knowledge of the development of Arabic literature in Sicily: the dearth of translated Siculo-Arabic poetry has led, among other things, to the scholarship's inadequate appraisal of Le Origini, that is the birth of Italian literature. According to a dominant narrative, Italian poetry began in Sicily in the 13th century, when poets at the court of Frederick II began composing poems in Italian, moulding theme on that of Provençal troubadours. This dominant narrative, crafted by a scholarship with little or no knowledge of Arabic, produced a heavily distorted, Eurocentric and by now outdated reading of the complex literary and social landscape of Muslim Sicily. 

From this year onwards, having been awarded a two million euro consolidation grant from the European Research Council, we at the University of Padua, under my direction, will attempt to revolutionise the narrative of "Le Origini". As a Harvard-trained Arabist and researcher, I maintain that by studying the literature of Sicily in all the languages spoken on the island in the Middle Ages we can begin to understand its cultural complexity and appreciate how the multiple cultures of Sicily interacted and benefited from each other. This project brings together a team of specialists who, over the course of five years, will study the poetry of medieval Sicily in its five main languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Italian. 

Such a comprehensive study has never been attempted: it promises to revolutionise the field of medieval literary studies by documenting four centuries of cultural interactions in Sicily, highlighting how what we perceive as the "Western Canon" is in fact rooted in a variety of cultural traditions spanning both "East" and "West". The study will impact not only Italian studies, by changing the traditional readings of Le Origini; it will also inform a whole new range of studies in Arabic, Hebrew, Medieval Greek and Latin by documenting how each of these traditions profited from Sicily's unique cultural milieu, and tracing how works produced in Sicily travelled and circulated, participating in ongoing processes of knowledge exchange in the Middle Ages. 

Nicola Carpentieri is an Arabist and scholar of medieval literature. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Currently teaches Arabic language and literature at the University of Padua, Italy. His latest book is entitled: The Poetics of Ageing: Writing the Twilight in Medieval Sicily and al-Andalus, and explore the poetry of old age written by Abu Ishaq of Granada and Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian.