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Full Description
In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.
Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.
Contents
Part I: Group Portrait with Language
Chapter 1: A Poetics of the Cosmopolitan Language
Chapter 2: My Tongue
Chapter 3: A Cat May Look at a King
Part II: Space, Place, and the Cosmopolitan Language
Chapter 4: Territory / Frontiers / Routes
Chapter 5: Tracks
Chapter 6: Tribal Rugs
Part III: Translation and Time
Chapter 7: The Soul of a New Language
Chapter 8: On First Looking into Mattā's Aristotle
Chapter 9: "I Became a Fable"
Chapter 10: A Spy in the House of Language
Part IV: Beyond the Cosmopolitan Language
Chapter 11: Silence
Chapter 12: The Shadow of Latinity
Chapter 13: Life Writing
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
