“The Ancient Poets did not Say Everything”: A Look at Three Anthological Works from al-Andalus

Abstract

The paper examines the politics of citationality (ikhtiyār) in three Andalusī works from the fifth/eleventh and six/twelfth centuries: Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī’s (d. 542/1147) al-Dhakhīra fī maḥāsin al-jazīra (The Treasure of Excellence of the Andalusīs), Ibn Ḥazm’s (d. 456/1064) RisālatṬawqal-Ḥamāma (The Ring of the Dove) and Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusī’s (d. 426/1035) Risālat al tawābi wa-l-zawābi (The Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons). Challenging the scholarly artefacts of medieval anthologies’ indebtedness to established repertoires of knowledge, the present study investigates tendentious attitudes germane to strategies of referentiality, making visible the constructedness of the three projects through their respective departures into the local, the synchronic, and the imagined as frames of reference. © Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2023.