Abstract

Abstract: Aljamiado manuscripts are characterized as a literature of translation designed to counteract Mudejars' and Moriscos' assimilation and persecution. Inserted into a compilation of various Islamic texts, an Arabicscript copy of sixteenth-century bestseller Dichos o sentencias de los siete sabios de Grecia (1542) stands out as an anomaly in an otherwise typical Aljamiado codex at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS Arabe 1163). In this study, I analyze the Aljamiado version alongside one of the poem's extant print editions (Zaragoza, 1549) with renewed attention to paratexts, internal framing devices, colophons, and production register. Attention to rhetorical similarities between the Dichos o sentencias and textual traditions preserved in Aljamiado manuscripts illuminates the appeal of López de Yanguas's poem, not for what it expresses, but how it does so. Reconsidering gnomic literature's material presence and rhetorical significance in sixteenth-century Iberia invites us to approach Morisco scribal activities as not only intents to preserve an Islamic past, but as dynamic involvement in current intellectual trends.

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