Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric

by María Rosa Menocal

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love , as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history.
It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun , to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

Genres: Spain

312 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

María Rosa Menocal is a scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Yale University faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2002, Menocal wrote the book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into many languages, and includes an introduction by fellow Yale Sterling Professor in the Humanities Harold Bloom. The book focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through political examples as well as cultural examples.

Menocal also is the author of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), as well as Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccacio (1991) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994).

Born in Cuba and raised in Philadelphia, Menocal is currently director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and the co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series.

Reviews

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Instead, these bastard forms both lay bare the pluralisms in our cultures and play out the fundamental facts of intimacy: when the different strands come together, they work together, reshape each other, create a new poetic la different from all older ones… the hope and desire is transparently that the hybrid child will be more beautiful and vigorous than either parent. But we have forgotten that we are those children, their children!"