Medieval Disputations Research Articles

The Epistemology of Difference: Caste and the Question of Natural Kinds in the Courts of Medieval India

Abstract Philosophy mattered in medieval India, with philosophers serving as officials in the political landscape of the Paramāra and Cāḷukya states. And caste mattered for these philosophers. This article explores how three Jain philosophers writing in Sanskrit—Anantavīrya, Vādirāja and Prabhācandra—raised the question of how a convention created by humans could ultimately be considered real. These three epistemologists followed the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti and his commentator Prajñākaragupta in critiquing the mimāṃsā position that took language and class categories to be eternal and unchanging. They took caste to be like language: a human product that is upheld by convention and history, but which has an immense impact in the world. They interrogated the possibility of cognizing a general class, and social class served as the foundation of their critiques. Turning to medieval disputes about the epistemology of caste provides an opportunity to revisit contemporary debates about the persistence of caste through changing evidentiary regimes in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

For the Love of the Truth: The Dissertation as a Genre of Scholarly Publication in Early Modern Europe

The “dissertation,” a text prepared for public disputation, constituted a special but expansive genre of scholarly publication in early modern Europe. This article explicates the significance of the dissertation in the production, communication, and organization of knowledge in this period, especially in Protestant Germanic countries. It shows how different the early modern dissertation was from its descendant today and places it in the context of development from the medieval disputation to the modern dissertation. It also explicates the importance of the dissertation in intellectual, cultural, and publication history and supplements the literature on the Republic of Letters.

Dietrich von Freibergs Kritik an der Transsubstantiationslehre

Summary Since the early church, theology has taught that in the Lord’s Supper we receive the body and blood of Christ by the power of the words of Jesus Christ at his last supper. Although there have been various attempts at explanation, this fact was uncontested. Only through two medieval disputes about the Lord’s Supper (Radbertus/Ratramnus; Berengar) did the Western church find it necessary to attain clarity. The church did so in 1215 with an established doctrine of transubstantiation based on Aristotelian categories. Thomas Aquinas strengthened the dogma, but there was opposition. The fundamental opposition came from Dietrich von Freiburg, who argued that the philosophical foundation of transubstantiation was impossible („absque omni distinctione, quod non“). After the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic theology attempted various reinterpretations of this doctrine. Lutheran theology grounds the Lord’s Supper in Scripture alone and in the incarnation to which Scripture is a witness. In bread and wine, the communicant receives the body and blood of Christ, and thereby the most intimate connection with Jesus Christ.

El preguntar y su papel en la argumentación

The ancient disciplines of argumentation (Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian dialectics, medieval disputation) reserved a central place for the activity of questioning. This has not been much less the case in modern argumentation theory. This paper puts forwards, illustrate, and discuss eight propositions that aim at bringing back questions and questioning to its ancient position at the core of argumentation. Although for this purpose the pragma-dialectical ideal model of a critical discussion is a very useful point of reference, the paper’s argument tries to show that questioning should be a priority for any argumentation theory.

Potentia dei absoluta et potentia dei ordinata u Orygenesa? Nowa próba wyjaśnienia kontrowersyjnych fragmentów "De principiis"

The medieval dispute over the absolute and the ordered, power of God (poten­tia Dei absoluta et potentia Dei ordinata) began with a tract by Peter Damian entitled De divina omnipotentia. One of the questions posed in this work was whether God could indeed do everything, including those things that God did not in fact do. The same question, and a similar answer, appears in Origen’s work Contra Celsum: God can do everything except that which is evil. The impossibi­lity of doing evil, however, does not diminish the omnipotence of God, because evil, is by its very nature, non-being. Beyond that, Origen, in numerous statements appearing in his exegetical works, distinguishes between the absolute power of God, which is infinite, and the power of God that creates the world and operates within it, which has a certain God-given limit – that is, this power is adapted to the abilities of the creatures who receive it. The purpose of this article is to show that, in the light of the distinction of the potentia Dei absoluta and the potentia Dei or­dinata, fragments of De principiis (II 9.1 and IV 4.8), in which a finite world and finite power of God are posited, can be interpreted in a new way. Many contem­porary scholars, on the basis of these fragments, conclude that Origen inherited from the Greek philosophers a negative understanding of infinity as something imperfect, but the analysis carried out in this article shows something different. In talking about a certain range of God’s power, which is available to creatures, or in which creatures participate only partially, Origen does not actually exclude the proposition that, in God himself, power – existing in an absolute way – can be infinite.

Rozum myślący w służbie woli, wola wybierająca pod dyktando rozumu

A starting point of this paper is a consideration and confrontation of the various meanings of the term “will” formulated and discussed in twelfth century anthropology. A significant part of this historical research is devoted to such issues as the characteristics and specific activity of the human will, its relation to the whole domain of the desire, particularly that of the sensual desire, and especially the mutual—functional and hierarchical—relationship between will and reason as the cognitive faculty. On the ground of the critical and comparative analysis of the text-sources (including the works of Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of Saint-Victor, as well as the collections of sentences of known and unknown authors), author of the paper explores the views of just mentionnned and other thinkers of this time on the belonging of the will to the domain of human rationality, on the participation of the intellect in the will’s decisions and choices, one the one hand, and on will’s autonomy and its possibility of self-moving, on the other. He focuses his scrutiny on how the twelfth century thinkers try to explicate a phenomenon of free choice or free decision and to answer to a questions concerning a proper subject, source, efficient cause or necessary and sufficient condition of the human freedom in the context of the medieval disputes between voluntarism and intellectualism in the domain of anthropology.

Ioannis Duns Scoti Collationes Oxonienses eds. by Guido Alliney e Marina Fedeli

Reviewed by: Ioannis Duns Scoti Collationes Oxonienseseds. by Guido Alliney e Marina Fedeli Mary Beth Ingham Ioannis Duns Scoti Collationes Oxoniensesa cura di Guido Alliney e Marina Fedeli. Union Académique internationale/Unione Accademica Nazionale, Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Testi e studi xxiv. Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2016. 318 pp. ISBN 978-88-8450-737-2. As the final volumes of John Duns Scotus's Opera Omniaare published by the International Scotistic Commission (Vatican), this volume of the Subtle Doctor's Oxford Collationesare a welcome addition to all the texts we now have at our disposal. Indeed, we can enumerate the corpus of critical works now available: the Opera Philosophica(Noone et al) along with the 'safe' texts of the ReportatioIA (Wolter/Bychkov) and, at this writing, the first seventeen distinctions of ReportatioIV (Bychkov/Pomplun). The Oxford and Parisian Collationesoffer the remaining pieces to the scholarly puzzle around Scotus, and a clearer portrait of his development as philosopher and theologian is slowly coming into view. The scholarly debates around the Collationes(their authenticity as well as their dating) have been alive since the beginning of the 20 thcentury. While the Wadding (III: 339-430) and Vivès (V: 131-317) editions reproduce the Collationesunder one title ( Collationes Parisienses), there is textual evidence from Scotus himself that some of these belong to the period during which he was a student in Oxford, at the Franciscan house of studies. As early at 1927, Carlo Balić claimed that it was a mistake to consider all these as part of his Parisian years, and that, indeed, the greater part were from his earlier years in Oxford. It was later established that the Wadding/Vivès editions did not contain all the Collationes. Between 1927 and 1929 various additional Collationeswere discovered. As a result, the listing of (what would become) the first fourteen was established on the basis of Magdalen Codex 194 (discovered by Longpré) and the ordering of numbers fifteen to twenty-four were the result of the discovery of Merton Codex 65 and Balliol Codex 209 (Balić). To these we can add the discoveries of Merton Codex 90 and Peterborough Codex 241 (Cambridge), both by Balić. Collationeswere student exercises, held outside of ordinary university work and most often in the houses of studies of the various religious orders. Ephrem Bettoni held them to be authentic but not important to our understanding of Scotus's teaching. Palémon Glorieux thought they [End Page 537]were a type of sermon or student exercise. Over the past twenty years, scholarly investigation and debate regarding Scotus's Collationeshas intensified, thanks to the electronic resources that enable deeper textual study and identification of sources and interlocutors. Recent studies by Stephen Dumont (Coll. 14), Richard Cross (Coll. 17), Olivier Boulnois (Coll. 24) and Guido Alliney (Coll. 18-23) frame the context for this present volume and its effort to contribute to the ongoing discussion around the role of these 'student exercises' in the development and clarification of Scotus's positions. Indeed, as the editors explain (p. xvi), their purpose is to provide a critical 'instrument de travail' for the future work that is still needed. In their lengthy introduction (178 pp.), the editors explain the modalities that guided the work of the team of international scholars who have contributed to this project. They followed four axes of analysis: 1) study of manuscript traditions; 2) provisionary edition to identify the typology of genre of each Collatio; 3) thematic study of the diverse groupings; and 4) reconstruction of the doctrinal positions held by the protagonists in the debate. The debates themselves fall into groupings that range from student exercises (that follow the methodology of a medieval disputation) to critical analyses of a particular doctrinal position, studied according to a 'pro' and 'con' approach. A cluster of the texts focus on metaphysical and theological questions, particular in terms of the question of relationships. Several focus on questions relating to the human will. The editors agree with Anton Vos' dating the Oxford Collationesto 'no later than 1301.' As a result of their work, and in light of the ongoing debate...

Samuel Beckett and the Physical Continuum

The word ‘continuum’ invokes a controversy that endured for more than two millennia. Aristotle contended in his Physics that a continuum (such as length, time or movement) cannot be constituted by indivisibles nor be resolved into them. Though Augustine decreed the thought of Epicurus long dead, interest in Atomism persisted into the late medieval period, long before its ‘rediscovery’ in the Renaissance. Given Beckett's marked empathy for Atomism, and the wide assumption that Atomism anticipated the radical paradigm shifts of the new physics of his day, a scrutiny of this School and of ‘the incoherent continuum’ is warranted. Beckett found in Leibniz a compelling image of how the ‘soul’ (the self conceived as an atomist monad) might reify its relation to the contingent world; and in Windelband a sense of the petites perceptions as unconscious mental states that translated his aesthetic from an attractive but unsatisfactory Atomism to a monadic awareness in which indivisibles are simultaneously limited (indivisibilities of substantial form) and unlimited (a continuum infinitely divisible). The advantage of the Monad over the Atom, with respect to medieval disputes over the nature of the physical continuum or its existence as discrete or continuous, was that he did not need to commit himself to either the physical or the metaphysical, as the continuum could be simultaneously ‘both’ and/or ‘neither’.

Obligations and Conditionals

The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations (positio, rei veritas) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true counterfactual conditionals. As these different kinds of consequences are spelled out by means of obligational disputations, it appears that the genre of obligations is indeed useful for the “knowledge of consequences,” as the anonymous Obligationes parisienses claims.

Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate ed. by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (review)

HOLLY A. CROCKER AND D. VANCE SMITH, eds., Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 534. isbn: 978-0-415-66789-6 (cloth), 978-0-415-66790-6 (pbk). $125 (cloth), $55.95 (pbk).Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate is a powerful collection for long-standing professionals and graduate students alike. Unlike most essay collections consisting entirely of new scholarly work, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate (MLCD) provides a rich contextual slice of medieval studies over the past twenty five years. While most essays were first published after the millennium, a few notable essays from the 1990's are also included (David Lawton's iconic essay, for example, 'Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,' first published in 1987), signaling the way in which these earlier essays have continued to exert significant influence in the field of medieval literary studies well into the 21st century. There are essays here from David Wallace, Bruce Holsinger, Patricia Clare Ingram, Christine Chism, the hardworking duo of Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, well-known to Arthurian scholars, and many other fine scholars of medieval literature. Re-published essays from esteemed colleagues are worth reading for the first or fourth time. The resulting collection is akin to aggregating the best plenary lectures of Kalamazoo, Leeds, The New Chaucer Society, The International Arthurian Society, and the MLA all into one volume. For graduate students, the volume is essential reading as a means of entering the conversations that have shaped and are currently shaping the field of late-medieval studies, and each chapter offers suggestions for further reading that includes other important essays published in the last 25 years. The majority of the volume, however, consists of newly-commissioned work across a provocative range of constructs, grouped together to spark critical dialogue.Editors Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, both contributors to the volume, attribute their inspiration for their methodological approach to medieval debate poetry. As the editors assert, 'Scholastic method . . . is a mode of critique, a testing of the possibility of what is being asserted, and an analysis of how it is thought about' (4). In this spirit, MLCD does not have one theoretical perspective but provides, instead, a spirited (rather than 'bloodless' [5]) celebration of polyphonic voices and debate. The volume is thus organized 'around a series of counter-posed topics' with the goal of enacting 'the capacious dynamism that is present from the outset of the medieval disputation' (3).Essays are grouped so as to enhance dialectical exchange within conceptual categories such as 'Form and History,' 'Belief and Thought,' 'Gender and Sexuality,' 'Memory and Matter,' 'Nation and Language,' 'Time and Place,' 'Science and Embodiment,' 'Period and Politics,' and 'Desire and Performance.' Within these groupings are essays on chronicles, ballads, romance, Chaucer, religious texts, conduct books, the Pearl Poet, the Ancrene Wisse, Hoccleve, fabliau, Mandeville's Travels, Malory, Christian-Jewish relations, and more. …

A Late Medieval Dispute about the Conditions for Knowledge

A Late Medieval Dispute about the Conditions for Knowledge

Disputation and Logic in the Medieval Treatises De Modo Opponendi et Respondendi

AbstractIn 1980 L. M. de Rijk edited some texts connected with medieval disputation (Die mittelaterlichen Traktate De modo opponendi et respondendi), towards which he showed a strikingly contemptuous attitude. The reason for his contempt was that the treatises did not fit the obligationes and sophismata tradition. In this article I focus on the original version, the Thesaurus Philosophorum, to highlight the distinction of this family of treatises with respect to the “modern” tradition. First, I study the features of the disputation that can be recognised through the collection of fallacious arguments contained in the Thesaurus. Second, I briefly examine the contents of the treatise and their arrangement, showing that they are closely related to the kind of disputation in question. I hope to support the idea that neither the technique of disputation nor the contents and their arrangement deserve a straightforward rejection.

Levinas and Maimonides: From Metaphysics to Ethical Negative Theology

AbstractAfter an initially sympathetic reading of Maimonides, Levinas develops an ambivalent attitude toward the Great Eagle, whom he views as a champion of intellectualist Judaism. Nevertheless, insights from the early engagement with Maimonides are carried forth into the central claims of Totality and Infinity regarding freedom, creation, particularity and transcendence. Levinas' arguments are directed at Heidegger but can also be seen as a phenomenological repetition of the medieval dispute about the eternity of the world. Later, Levinas continues this engagement with Maimonides by transforming the latter's negative theology into what I call ethical negative theology.

Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution and The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure

Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 182p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.No undergraduate public administration course would be complete without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to “scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues. Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs (as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins. If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or even what it is?

Rabbenu Tam's tefillin: an Ancient Tradition or the Product of Medieval Exegesis?

The claim that Rabbenu Tarn tefillin were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls indeed that both the Rashi and Rabbenu Tarn types were found was first made close to fifty years ago, and has since become a staple of encyclopedia entries that discuss tefillin} While some writers have dated the existence of the two parallel traditions to second century CE cave contents, others associate the phenomenon with finds at Qumran, which pre-date the destruction of the Second Temple. In either event the Scrolls thus seem to provide remarkable evidence that a halakhic dispute, otherwise unknown before the Middle Ages, was actually of considerably greater antiquity.2 This article will begin by contesting the above-mentioned claims regarding the nature of the evidence from the Judean desert, and will then elaborate on an exegetical backdrop to the medieval dispute. The first step towards evaluating the archaeological data is a precise understanding of the dispute between Rashi (11th century) and his

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (review)

Reviewed by: Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom Herbert W. Basser Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom, by Robert Chasan. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 379 pp. $75.00. Christianity, once an obscure Jewish sect, rose to be a major world religion. In so doing it retained the story of harsh Pharisaic suppressions and divine displeasure at them. This memory became enshrined in the New Testament's argument that adherence to the Law of Moses and dismissal of the divinity of Jesus Christ brought God to abrogate his covenant with the Jews. Succeeding generations of Christians always imaged the Jew as the powerful suppressor and enemy of Christian values. Jews, from the beginning, felt a need to dispute Christian claims (aiming to convince and convert); sometimes they were forced to debate, and a few medieval Rabbis have left us their textbooks, records, and commentaries concerning their views of the groundless claims of the Christian attack on Judaism. Robert Chazan has written a book to inform us of some details of Jewish polemical writings in Northern Spain and Southern France. Chasan does not discuss the Jewish/pagan and Christian/pagan polemics that occurred apart from the early Jewish/Christian attacks and counter attacks. The cases are not at all comparable: Jesus had sprung up on Jewish soil, physically and spiritually, and these issues cut deeper to the bone. How did Jews respond? It would seem they more than held their own in literary and actual debates. Any student of medieval polemics finds it difficult to know what precisely is literary and what was face-to-face confrontation. The author, a prominent medievalist, has limited his scope to only a few writings of polemicists: Joseph (Northern Spain and Narbonne) and David Kimhi (Narbonne), Meir bar Simon (Narbonne), Jacob ben Reuben (time and place unknown), Moses Nachmanides [End Page 180] (Northern Spain) and a few references here and there to some minor works. He claims he has discovered a new literary genre that took form in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Jewish polemical writings. He probes the reasons of why it came to be when and where it did. Does he realize that biblical commentaries (or is this a new genre too?) from these areas are also unknown prior to the late eleventh and twelfth centuries? I suspect we have this literature from these places at this time because, for whatever reason, preservations of written materials stemming from these places date from these times and not earlier. Lack of evidence is not always evidence of lack. Connecting some earlier faint dots (which Chasan sees as garbled and rudimentary) might show us that the genre is not so new. More than anything else the Jewish mindset both in medieval Ashkenaz and Sepharad stemmed from the religiously oriented communal culture that Rabbinic leaders had nurtured for many centuries. For this reason it is fitting to note that both sides saw the medieval disputes as a continuation of past frictions, as Nachmanides claimed (referring to a talmudic story about the Sanhedrin's debates with Jesus' disciples—who were, in the end, executed by it) in the written introduction to his famous disputation in Barcelona. Now, however, the debates often ended in real-life dire consequences for Jews. Christians judged the outcome of the debates. In France, cartloads of valuable Talmud manuscripts were burned as debates began to center on the anti-Christian teachings of the Talmud. In Spain, whole communities were forced to convert. Although Chasan does not discuss these burnings and conversions at length, it is noteworthy that the anti-Christian teachings of the Talmud that migrated in fuller form into Toldot Yeshu (purporting to give the authoritative account of Jesus as a blasphemous sorcerer) and similar dismissive stories formed the Jewish attitude to Christianity no less than the New Testament and Church Fathers had formed the Christian attitude to Judaism. Whatever ancient rubrics in talmudic law existed to separate Jew and pagan were used by Jews as constant reminders that Christians were in no wise their monotheistic brothers and sisters. In their subjugation to Christianity, Jews even saw themselves as forced participants in the worship of foreign gods (Rashi to Deut...

Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Pp. x + 185. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. isbn 1 4051 1931 4. Paper £19.99/$34.95

The editors of this book open their preface on a note of surprise: ‘In our era of dialogue and heightened awareness of the other, theologians seem to be discovering a rather odd resource: the thought of the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas’ (p. vii). One cannot help remarking that this surprise may itself seem rather odd to those who have spent time and energy reading and teaching the works of the great theologian and finding in them profound riches of theology and philosophy. However, it is, perhaps, understandable to those who have not been professionally engaged in this activity for, as the editors point out, there still persists a perception of Thomas Aquinas as the supreme Scholastic: one for whom, it would seem, dialogue ‘has become unnecessary because there is nothing new to learn’. After all, as Charles Williams observed in his history of the Church, The Descent of the Dove, the excitement of medieval disputation ‘lay in pointing out that your opponent's arguments, if prolonged, would result in a denial of the formally correct answers with which he was supposed to concur’ (p. 109). On these grounds one can see why it might seem that any attempt at bringing the Angelic Doctor into dialogue with anyone outside the charmed circle of those who shared the same suppositions would be singularly unrewarding. What kind of conversation could there be? For it has to be admitted that Thomas, like many of his contemporaries, was for a long while confined within a historical and theological framework which hindered any fruitful encounter with any system of thought that was perceived to be beyond the boundaries of that framework. It is only relatively recently that these boundaries have been recognized as permeable. The opening out of this closed system gathered pace during the last century and the present volume of essays represents another stage of the process of releasing the medieval thinkers, and Thomas in particular, from the constraints of former ages. It is a striking demonstration of the fact that the strict forms under which the Schoolmen conducted their theological investigations need not prevent the richness of their thought from informing, in interesting and helpful ways, many of our contemporary problems and preoccupations.

Charters as weapons. On the role played by early medieval dispute records in the disputes they record

This paper seeks to shed more light on how written records were used during the Carolingian period by examining the role played by records of property disputes in the disputes they record. In it I argue that dispute records were important tools that clerical scribes could use to further their church’s interests, to undermine the interests of their opponents, and to help their church take advantage of changes in the regional political landscape. My examples come from the Bavarian cathedral church at Freising in the first decades of the ninth century. These charters indicate that Freising’s scribes crafted their dispute records to enhance the image of their church and bishop, to undermine the image and reputation of their opponents, and to help the Freising community realise what it saw as its property rights. They also sought to take advantage of Charlemagne’s recent conquest of Bavaria by appealing as much as possible to the sympathies of Carolingian judicial authorities. In addition, the scribes used their dispute records to create useful histories for their church’s property, to mask potentially competing histories, and to reward landholding kindreds who allied themselves with Freising’s interests by guaranteeing them a positive written memory.

Beastly Colloquies: Of Plagiarism and Pluralism in Two Medieval Disputations Between Animals and Men

Beastly Colloquies:Of Plagiarism and Pluralism in Two Medieval Disputations Between Animals and Men Lourdes María Alvarez The recuperation of the riches of medieval Catalan literary history was an essential element of the 19th-century Renaixença, which promoted the revival of the Catalan language and culture. While the cause of Catalan nationalism served agendas on both the political right and left, progressive, modernizing sectors conceptualized catalanisme as the restoration of a pluralistic culture that had fallen victim to Castilian expansionism and intolerance. As posited by nineteenth-century nationalists such as Valentí Almirall, the founder of the influential Diari Català, the rediscovery of Catalan history and literature brought new riches to the Peninsula as a whole.1 Among those treasures was Anselm Turmeda's Disputa de l'Ase (1417-18),2 which medievalists celebrated as a bawdy, yet deeply philosophical text in the spirit of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a proud precursor of Rabelais. It mattered little that the original Catalan version was lost and could only be reconstructed using the 1544 French edition; indeed, its loss at the hands of the Castilian Inquisition only served to reinforce the latent subtext of the Catalanist revival: that a narrow-minded Castilian centralism had long ago squelched the more cosmopolitan and universalist Catalan world view.3 Yet the prestige of Turmeda's work was dealt a serious blow when in 1914 the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios condemned his work as a "plagio estupendo"/ "fantastic plagiarism"4 citing its similarities to a tenth-century Arabic text, Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā' [The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity].5 Turmeda's moral virtues had already been cast in doubt late in the nineteenth century, as evidence mounted that the stories of his saintly martyrdom—after abjuring the Islamic faith he had adopted upon his arrival in Tunis—were fabrications. If some Catalanists had once seen in him [End Page 179] a figure of the stature of Ramón Llull (only with a better sense of humor), Asín Palacios' condemnation of Turmeda's literary—and other—duplicities seriously tarnished his reputation as a writer and framed all subsequent discussion of his works. The accusation of plagiarism is, of course, especially problematic when applied to works created in the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. Some of Turmeda's defenders have simply dismissed the charge, arguing that copying and "borrowing" were commonplace in that environment so alien to our modern notions of intellectual property.6 Yet such a defense functions as a tacit acknowledgement of the "crime," thus foreclosing a reading which would highlight the radically different textual strategies and interpretative contexts of each work.7 Moreover, in this case, which traverses the culturally and politically fraught boundary between East and West, further reflection is especially necessary on the question of how plagiarism (or mere imitation) is to be distinguished from satire or intertextuality, or other legitimated relationships with literary ancestors. How do we define the legitimate or authentic "inheritors" of any literary, philosophical or cultural tradition? Are those outside of that lineage simply usurpers, plagiarists or servile copyists? Notwithstanding the fact that philological source studies, catalogues of "influences," and the creation of literary genealogies, (so fashionable among positivist historical critics) have been repudiated by most medievalists, it is still the case that the "originality" of any literary, cultural and scientific patrimony remains central to many discourses of national, ethnic and religious identity. Thus, the scholarly concerns of Asín Palacios, who focused on the points of literary and religious contact between medieval Christian and Islamic civilizations, remain central to current debates about Islamic authenticity and the Arab world's relations with the "West." While he charged Turmeda with plagiarism, in other cases he valued Islamic "influence" much more positively. In his posthumous ŠSādilīes y alumbrados he argues that the sudden efflorescence of Spanish mysticism in the 16th century, emblematized by two of Spain's greatest mystics: San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa of Avila, resulted from the convivencia with the inheritors of an Islamic mystical tradition dating back to 13th century al-Andalus.8 Yet Asín's efforts to bridge the...

Psychoanalysis: Clinical and Theoretical.

Psychoanalysis: Clinical and Theoretical.