Debunking Eurocentric Literary History: Poetry Across Borders in Medieval Sicily

Introduction

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 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.

Current State of Research

No study to date has been capable of addressing the poetry of medieval Sicily as a whole. Literary studies on Sicily have been compartmentalized according to disciplinary boundaries, a compartmentalization which has hampered our understanding of the foundational role that Sicily's multicultural past played in literary history.

Project Objectives

The proposed project aims to address the complexities of medieval Sicilian literature by studying the totality of the court poetry produced in Sicily in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Italian between the 10th and the 13th centuries. The project thus promises to shed light on what amounts to a black hole in literary history:

1. Document over four centuries of cultural interactions.
2. Allow us to fully assess the role of Sicily's many cultures in the rise of the Italian lyric.

Methodology

Our team will collect all of the available evidence in an electronic corpus, to be published online under a Creative Commons license, and then study it using the latest IT tools.

Approach

Working across linguistic boundaries, our team will approach this poetic corpus as a whole, in order to reveal how the multiple linguistic traditions of medieval Sicily interacted with each other, shaping a unique "semiotic community" whose expressions were to contribute to the formation of Western culture.