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Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A millennium heritage
Edited by Francesco Stella
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIV] 2024
► pp. 284–295

Chapter 17
Latin literature and the Arabic language

| Universität Konstanz
Pointing to a millennial history of Latin-Arabic entanglement, the article analyses how Latin literature and the Arabic language influenced each other mutually. It explains the preliminaries of literary entanglement and then deals in chronological order with processes of reception, which led to the Arabization or Latinization of literary works, themes, and forms. The Arabic reception of Latin works was channelled by the explicit Christian character of medieval Latin literature, geopolitical shifts, and the increasing relevance of the Romance vernaculars. Latin textual culture, in turn, has benefited more from Arabic than from any other language except Greek. However, processes of reception were much stronger in the field of scholarly works than in the field of literature proper.
Keywords: al-Andalus, Arabic–Latin translation, ecclesiastical literature, Graeco-Arabic science, historiography, Latin–Arabic translation, Latin-Christian expansionism, poetry, Romance languages, scholarly literature
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The preliminaries of literary entanglement
  • Arabic–Latin translation in Umayyad al-Andalus (ninth–eleventh centuries)
  • The Latin-Christian reception of Arabic scholarship (tenth–sixteenth centuries)
  • The Latin-Christian reception of Arabic poetry, prose, and historiography (twelfth–nineteenth centuries)
  • Ecclesiastic translations from Latin to Arabic (fifteenth–ninteenth centuries)
  • Translations of ancient, medieval, and early Modern Latin literature in Arabic academia (twentieth–twenty-first centuries)
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 2 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiv.17kon
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