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DOI: 10.1177/0265691406059610

2006 36: 7European History QuarterlyRoberto M. Dainotto

the De-Centering of Montesquieu's EuropeThe Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory: Juan Andrs, Historicism, and

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The Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory:

Juan Andrs, Historicism, and the

De-Centering of Montesquieus Europe

Roberto M. Dainotto

Duke University, USA

The history of Europe, Lindsay Waters suggested in 1997, needs retelling from

the point of view of Defoes Friday, of Shakespeares Caliban. Waters contention

was that a history of Europe can no longer be limited to the fable of Europe . . .

taming the worlds anarchy by the light of [its] culture,1 and has to start taking

into account the different perspectives offered by Europes own colonized subjects.

Since the publication of Waters piece On the Idea of Europe, Friday and

Caliban have certainly offered groundbreaking contributions to the rewriting of

such history and, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to provincializing

Europe.2 Enrique Dussell and Edgardo Lander from Latin America; Ranajit Guha

and Gyan Prakash from India; Molefi Asante from Sub-Saharan Africa all thesescholars, and many more, have taught us that looking at Europe from a subaltern

position means not only to change perspectives and points of view, but, more

radically, to interrogate the very cultural categories history, culture, civiliza-

tion, and knowledge itself on which an idea of Europe as end of history (or as its

final and Hegelian realization) has so often been predicated. As James Blaut wrote

in 1993, Eurocentrism is not a matter of attitudes in the sense of values and

prejudices, but rather . . . a matter of science, and scholarship, and informed and

expert opinion.3

A retelling of Europes history from the point of view of Fridayand Caliban, accordingly, has become, quite consistently, a re-theorization,

above all, of that body of science and scholarship that goes under the name of

history. It has been history, as Chakrabarty maintains, that has prepared the

idea of Europe (a geographical place) as modernity (a temporal category); and it

has been history, again, that has hypostatized Europe as the center, according to

european history quarterly

European History QuarterlyCopyright 2006SAGE Publications,London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 36(1), 729.

issn 0265-6914. doi: 10.1177/0265691406059610

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a logic that Blaut called diffusionism, from which events (revolution, democracy,

and so on) are diffused to other, backward or developing places.

If so much has been done already by the subaltern historiography of the new

Fridays and Calibans, even more, arguably, remains to be done from at least

another subaltern position that of Europes own PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece

and Spain, in Brussels diplomacy, quite cynical acronym). A few years ago,

Gyan Prakash suggested that It is up to the scholars . . . including Europeanists

to start using the theoretical frameworks of post-colonial and subaltern studies.4

The fact is that Europeanists have very good reasons to do just that: Eurocentrism

itself, as Antonio Gramsci well knew, does have its own margins and southern

questions. A border gnoseology is then not only possible, but also necessary to

articulatefrom within Europe as a critical reflection on knowledge production

from . . . the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system.5 This bordergnoseology intends to disprove the dominant assumption of European Studies:

that in the eighteenth century the concept of Europe is ultimately defined, and

that, with Montesquieu, Europe looked as if it had taken permanent shape.

Rather, a look at the borders of eighteenth-century Europe shows that what

contemporary interpreters have considered to be a final and permanent shape of

Europe was in fact what Denis de Rougemont with less scruples calls a French

Europe.6 Already in the eighteenth century, such a Franco-centric Europe was

coming under attack not only from its eastern7

but also from its southern margins.What follows is an attempt to recover such often-muted controversy.

Montesquieus Europe: History as Geography

In his essay, Montesquieu et lEurope Jean Goldzink asked, Is Europe but a

category effectuated by Montesquieus reflection?.8 According to his biographer,

Montesquieu had repeatedly expressed in his Penses the intention to write a

historical work.9 We know that, apart from scattered notes on what had to

become a Universal History, Montesquieu never realized such a project. A dis-

trust for history was certainly in the air of Montesquieus France, and could, at

least in part, explain his decision to abandon the work: the reformation of know-

ledge which Descartes envisaged, and actually did bring about, was designed to

contribute nothing to historical thought, because he did not believe history to

be, strictly speaking, a branch of knowledge at all. In particular, the idea of

Universal History, that Bossuet had codified in his Discourse on Universal

History (1681), sounded so much like Biblical orthodoxy that it was largely

perceived as incompatible with the new spirit of scientific enquiry stirring in thelate seventeenth century.10

European History Quarterly, .



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That Montesquieu eventually discarded his historiographical project to write

instead the Spirit of the Laws does not mean, however, that Montesquieu had

abandoned his historicist ambitions altogether: on the contrary, we are informed

in the Preface that the book intended to trace nothing less than the histories of

all nations; and by book three, we are reminded that Montesquieus was not arefutation of previous histories, but, rather, its ultimate synthesis and confirma-

tion of the entire body of historiography.11

In fact, despite Montesquieus unease with the work of Bossuet, one could

argue that both the Discourse and the Spirit had a similar understanding of

history as a chronology and teleology of great epochs carrying a precise meaning

in the great scheme of things. For Bossuet, the goal of Universal History was to

understand what Europe is in the universe and what Paris and the Ile de France

mean within Europe.12

Europe, in other words, was the climax of historys tele-ology and France its center. For Montesquieu, not altogether differently, history

was a way of understanding how Europe has come to such a high degree of power,

that history cannot compare it to anything else; and how Europe, conceived as

the ultimate epiphany of modernity (the progress towards the Law), was firmly

centered on France, most powerful nation, heart or even head of Europe.13

However, whereas Bossuets history was guided by a theological design,

Montesquieus had to make do simply with a teleological one: the progress of

humankind, aimed at affirming the superiority of the present age and of France

within it, could no longer be derived deductively from a putative will of God,

but inductively, from the empirical order of physical realities. This was

Montesquieus dialectics of history: it began from empirical observations, and

finished by arranging them into a telos pointing to the manifestation of an

intemporal truth.14

While the creation of the Lord Almighty no longer appeared perfect in all its

parts, humankinds secularized progress was then imagined as a movement from

an utterly imperfect savagery, through barbarism, and to the final triumph of

our admirable law of today.15 To grasp such a progress in some empiricalway, however, history had to be somehow re-theorized. How else could history

seriously discuss the past epochs of savagery when those very epochs could be

neither scientifically observed, nor reconstructed on the basis of any written

record? As Voltaire would declare in the Encyclopdie, with words that

Montesquieu would have certainly understood, the long and universal ignorance

of this art [history] that records facts through writing makes any history of the

origin of humankind unreliable: before writing, historical memory is transmitted

from one generation to another. Such accounts are more reliable at the beginning,and lose a degree of reliability at each passing generation. With time, the fable

Dainotto: Juan Andrs and the De-centering of Montesquieus Europe



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grows, and truth diminishes: hence, all the hypotheses of the origin of people are

absurd.16 Also, for Montesquieu, savagery was at best the fable of pre-Edenic

communities, or of Hobbes natural state. Yet savagery was also central to his

notion of progress: far from being absurd, savagery was the necessary idea to

prove how much better the laws of today are compared to the absence of any lawin savage societies. Savagery had to be postulated in order to claim the universal

law of progress. But how?

Here lies the essence of Montesquieus theory of history: if Hobbes state of

nature is, by definition, a fable transmitted from one generation to another, the

fact remains that a savage state comparable to the one described by Hobbes is

still observable today or so Montesquieu alleges in non-European tribes.

Progress, to put it differently, is understood as a series of contiguous, observable

places. History merges with geography. Savage, accordingly, no longer is themyth of a pre-historic past impossible for the scientist to observe, but an ethno-

graphic space open to the gaze of the analyst: savage is then the new world of

Louisiana and of America in general; savage is Siberia, and part of North

Africa.17 In these places was the observable origin of historical progress that the

reportages of merchants, travelers, local historians, and missionaries had but

begun, ethnographically, to reconstruct.

Geography then became the new organizing principle of Montesquieus theory

of progress. History was, like a branch of the ars memorandi, a forward motion

best represented as a movement from one place to another. Barbarity was its

second stage, observable in the farming tribes of North Africa, in the despotic

regimes of the Near East, in the customs of India, and no matter what others

say, of China. Barbarous was a place of history, where nomadic hunting

had been successfully replaced by a farming culture rooted in the communal

territory. Barbarous, more importantly, was a place where histories always feel

servitude18 and register the lack of a just Law.

History was thus spatialized, and time converted into place: Asia, Africa, and

America represented old, pre-historic moments in the geography of UniversalHistory. They were assigned a place elsewhere of the present, marginalized as

the not-yet of the European structure of time.19 It was in Europe, and in Europe

only, that true history had begun as a passage from barbarity to the laws of

today.

In the Penses Montesquieu was collecting for his eventually aborted attempt

at writing a Universal History, we read that Greece, in fact, had opened nothing

less than a new time: In those new times, the fervour for liberty gave them

[Greeks] love for the country, heroic courage, and hatred of kings and this drovethem to do great things.20 The greatest of these things was the institution of the




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Law, which protected the citizens freedom against the despotism of the powerful.

Love of freedom was the proof of the novelty of the Greeks in the telos of

Universal History. If savagery and barbarism were then pre-historical stages,

true history seemed to open, for Montesquieu, with the new times of freedom.

History was the story of freedoms unfolding, and this was a story that neverhappened in savage Africa and America, or in despotic Asia, but coincided instead

with a place Europe.

Rome, after Greece, and for only a short while, represented the second stage of

the European progress towards freedom, at least until this democracy became

corrupted. With the fall of Rome, it was then our German fathers The people

of the North of Europe, source of freedom who came to answer the historical

task of realizing liberty in Europe once and for all.21

German, like its counterpart Roman, was a term loaded with political over-tones in Montesquieus France: Romanists imagined the French monarchy as the

ideal heir of the absolute powers of the Roman emperor; Germanists, instead,

argued for a Germanic origin of France, in which the monarchs powers were

subject to a check by the intermediate (between king and people) feudal classes.

Hardly any argument about Rome and Germania, in fact, was free from political

overtones in this context. Attempts to sever France from southern and specifically

Roman origins had noticeably begun at the time of the Gallican schism of the

fifteenth century, and a politico-religious question had soon turned into a wider

cultural one concerning the relation of France with Rome. Put simply: was France

the heir of Rome, or was its ancestry to be located somewhere else, as in the

German forests?

Following Martin Thom, I should observe that this dispute had very important

bearing on theories and historical chronologies of Europe. The question was

whether Europe had originated in the Mediterranean, during classical times; or

whether it had begun in the Middle Ages, with the Northern Franks destruction

of the Roman Empire. Romanists were ready to condemn rather than celebrate

the medieval order,22 whereas the Germanists, anticipating the Romantic cult ofthe Middle Ages, made modern Europe originate from a northern overcoming of

ancient and Mediterranean Europe. In other words, the antithesis was not simply

a political one pitting against each other the Romanist defenders of absolute

monarchy and the Germanist proponents of an aristocratic middle class between

monarch and third estate. The antithesis was also, in the full sense of the word,

geopolitical: whereas Germanism celebrated the contribution of the Aryan

nomadic tribes to European culture, Romanism, instead, argued that it was the

urban traditions of Egypt, Phoenicia and Asia Minor that had created a basis forcivilization in the Mediterranean that had peaked with Rome.23




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Far from de-mythologizing24 the myth of either a Roman or a German origin

of Europe, Montesquieu was ready to take from the diatribes of Romanists and

Germanists a twofold conclusion: Roman laws belonged to an ancient cycle of

history that had by now ended with the fall of Rome; and German laws had

opened yet a new historical cycle modernity that had now climaxed in France.The admonition addressed to French monarchy was clear: in Althussers words,

absolute power was an ancient form of government, and a reintroduction of

absolutism in France today would have meant a regress into historys past;

modern times belong to feudal monarchy, and feudal monarchy belongs to

modern times.25

We notice the idiosyncratic way in which Montesquieu translated the political

split between Germanists and Romanists in his own geo-historical terms.

Germans and Romans, in other words, became for him concepts dividing Europeinto two complementary antitheses, and its history into an ancient and a

modern time. Book IV.iv had already established, in some Manichean way, the

Differences of the Effects of Education in the Ancients and the Moderns. In addi-

tion, Book XXI.iv had been devoted to The Principal Difference between the

Commerce of the Ancients and the Moderns. In truth, the Spirit of the Laws in its

entirety was committed to contrasting the tyrannical and arbitrary principles

that were guided by ancient histories to our modern reason.26 Germania and

Rome were now the places and times of all these differences. And it is not only theold Rome of empire that was, for Montesquieu, ancient. If Montesquieu, as it

has often been noticed, considered the prioritization of commerce [as] the chief

distinguishing feature of modernity,27 then also present-day Rome was, quite

consistently, a place of antiquity: in Rome, every one is at his ease except those

who labour, those who cultivate the arts, those who are industrious, those who

have land, those who are engaged in trade. Not Rome as a historical empire, but

Rome as a place is ancient. What is then Rome? Rome, simply, is the past the

time of Europes yore that archaeology and tourism are already reclaiming for the

northern gaze: We can never leave the Romans; so it is that still today, in theircapital, we overlook the new palaces and go look for the ruins of the past.28

This meant, above all, a spatialization of the idea of historical progress that had

to transcend the limited metaphoric reach of categories such as German and

Roman, and converge into the most programmatic theory of the differential

character of southern and northern Europe. In Europe there is a kind of balance

between the southern and the northern nations.29 It was now this balance that

needed to be theorized. In other words, if Montesquieus often-noticed goal was to

discover the differential character of European and Asian States,30 his mostmodern preoccupation, and one that has been but rarely noticed, was to find the




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same difference within Europe. Europe, for Montesquieu, had an internal Asia

a south of Europe [where] laws do [in the present tense!] exactly the contrary of

what European laws ought to do;31 a south of Europe, incidentally, that was

Asiatic not only in climate and political (i.e. despotic) customs, but in history

itself, from al-Andalus to Sicily.You will find, in the climates of the north, peoples who have few vices, many

virtues, and much sincerity and candor. As you move toward the countries of

the south, you will believe you have moved away from morality itself. And

then again: In northern regions a machine robust and well built but heavy finds

pleasure in whatever is apt to throw the spirits into motion.32 In the south, instead,

as for example in Italy:

a southern wind called Sirocco . . . passes through the sands of Africa

before reaching Italy. It rules that country; it exerts its power over all

spirits; it produces a universal weightiness and slowness; Sirocco is the

intelligence that presides over all Italian heads.33

What this meant was that, if mankind are influenced by various causes, and if in

each country, as any one of these causes acts with more force, the others weaken

in proportion,34one could then conclude that nature (climate) was the strongest

cause in the south, historical progress in the north. Any advancement from

ancientness to modernity remained the prerogative of a northern spirit in motion:

According to Montesquieu, climate in the north . . . is such that in the end

it has little visible effect on political institutions. It is in the zones close to

the equator, according to Montesquieu, that climate has a determining role

in a direct sense . . . it is in the south where the particular circumstances

of climate have a directly determining effect.35

Only Europe, compared to the savagery and barbarity of other continents, has a

history. In a way, history is Europe, whereas other continents are only fragments

of past and pre-historic stages. Yet, history is also a progress that goes from anancient south a bad country governed by climate to the modern north a

better one.36 A new and modern kind of Eurocentrism was thus emerging in 1748,

with the publication of the Spirit of the Law: certainly, Europe was hypostatized

as the center and even the end of Universal History; but this center had already its

own internal margin. The PIGS were already the internal Other of Europe their

negative side, or, at best, their backward past.




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Juan Andrs: A Spanish Jesuit in Italy

Montesquieus theorization of a modern Europe divided between northern and

southern peoples,37 with France at its head, was undoubtedly richest in conse-

quences. It might suffice to recall here Montesquieus influence on the Coppetgroup, and on the formation of a modern northern Romanticism Madame de

Stals distinction of two European cultures, the one that comes from the south,

and the one which descends from the north; Charles Victor de Bonstettens The

Man of the South and the Man of the North; or even Hegels Philosophy of

History, in which history a science that falls under the category of Time as well

as Space is evolution from the southern Europe to its northern half. 38

Montesquieus reification of the south as Europes nave past, however, did not go

unchallenged for long.Arguably the son of an encyclopedic age that had its roots in [Roger] Bacon,

the Encyclopdie, and the British Universal History,39 Juan Andrs began to

write the eight-volume Of the Origins, Progress, and Present State of all Litera-

tures from his Italian exile in 1780. His general goal was to oppose the implanta-

tion of the restraining Gallic literary tenets and precepts of the neoclassical school

of thought . . . [and] counteract the influence of Encyclopedism.40 Practically, this

meant to rescue Europes south from Montesquieus backwardness, which

Voltaire, like the philosophes, had made his own: The Oriental climate, nearer tothe South, obtains everything from nature; while we, in our North-West, we

owe everything to progress.41 Theoretically, this meant to undo, first of all,

Montesquieus Universal History.

Juan Andrs had arrived in Italy through quite adventurous circumstances. As

a youth, he had renounced his right of primogeniture on Christmas Eve, 1754, to

wear the robe and become a Jesuit. He could not have chosen a worse time. Since

the Order had been founded in 1540 with the implicit (though never stated) intent

to stop the Protestant Reformation, Europe had already witnessed an ideological

divide between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Protestantism and

Catholicism, Molinism and Probabilism that had typically set Jansenists and

Jesuits against each other. The accusations against the Jesuits that led to their first

expulsion from Portugal (1758), however, had struck fairly new notes. In 1750,

Sebastio Jos de Carvalho y Melo, Count of Oeyras and future Marquis de

Pombal, had escalated the campaign against the Jesuits by blaming them not only

for exercising economic control in the colonies (especially Paraguay), but also for

monopolizing education in the home country. As Franco Venturi summarizes,

Pombal had accused the Jesuits of opposing the will of the mercantilist state,which had now decided to control the economy and education, religion and




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culture.42 Control of culture and education meant for Pombal a modernization of

the curriculum: the ancient humanities history and Belles Lettres above all

had to make room for the new experimental and practical sciences that had

started to spread their hegemonic light from Paris (where the first volume of the

Encyclopdie was published in 1748) to the rest of Europe.In such a way, Pombal had prepared the terrain for the philosophes denuncia-

tions of the Jesuits backward humanistic culture in a modern world giddily

moving towards the new practical sciences43 already sung by the Encyclopdie. As

Robert Palmer noticed the expulsion of the Jesuits in France had coincided with

a growing interest on the part of school reformers La Chalotais, Rolland,

Navarre, Guyton de Morveau to create a modern and national, Gallican educa-

tional system for the preparation of citoyens:44

Their general message was that education should be nationalized, and its

object be to form citizens. Reformers complained that the schools were too

secluded from civil life, that teachers in religious orders lacked patriotic

spirit, that children were taught to see their true country in another world,

and to place their allegiance too exclusively in God and religion. The old

humanistic and literary education was condemned as useless in itself . . .

La Chalotais held, against the cosmopolitan and humanistic tradition of

the Jesuits, that education should conform to the national character, be

controlled by the government, and conducted by men who, not renounc-ing the world, practiced the civic virtues that they taught, and had

interests the same as those of the country.45

In 1762, the Order was expelled from France. The secularization and state control

of national education was again part of the decision of Carlos III to expel Andrs

order from Spain in 1767. Carlos was an attack against the Jesuits stake 669

colleges, 176 seminaries, and all the private tutoring for young aristocrats46 to

organize education against the state monopoly.47 With the expulsion of the Jesuits,

in other words, the traditional war of religion had translated into a new querellebetween an old intellectual order still busy studying an old unmovable tradition

based on the lesson and imitation of the ancients for the sole benefit of the

aristocracies,48 and a state-sponsored modern innovation of the curriculum for the

new emerging bourgeoisie. Central to the political decision of expelling the Jesuits

in Portugal, France and Spain was the cultural question of national educa-

tion49 the choice, namely, between a pragmatically utilitarian national culture

for the sciences and trades on the one hand and the Jesuits humanistic culture on

the other.When the decree of expulsion was promulgated in Madrid on 2 April 1767,




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Andrs had to leave his post at the Royal and Pontifical University of Ganda,

where he had been teaching for three years courses in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew

under the general rubric of Rhetoric. He left Spain and moved first to Bonifacio, in

Corsica, where the patriots led by Pasquale Paoli were in the midst of their never-

ending revolution for self-determination (against Genoa at that time, soon afteragainst the French). He left Corsica for the more tranquil Italian mainland in 1768,

when Pope Clement XIII offered asylum to the Jesuits in the Papal States. Here,

in Ferrara, he lived for five years, until, on 15 August 1773, the Pope changed his

mind and suppressed the Order from his lands. From Ferrara, Andrs moved to

Mantua, where he arrived in January 1774, and where he stayed until the arrival

of Napoleon in 1796. In Mantua, Andrs achieved a rather prominent status as a

learned person and as citizen of the international Republic of Letters: he was

visited by Herder and Goethe, got in touch with learned Italians, befriended hisJesuit compatriots in exile, and carried out his research to write Of the Origins and

Progress of All Literatures.

When he started writing the first pages of his eight-volume work, Andrs knew

that a criticism of Franco-centrism meant, above all, a criticism of the theory of

knowledge that had been made hegemonic by the Encyclopdie. In the Pre-

liminary Discourse, DAlembert had followed Roger Bacons taxonomy and

divided human knowledge into erudition (memory), Belles Lettres (imagination),

and philosophy (reason). Andrs began his book by questioning the possibility of

dividing one kind of knowledge from the others:

Such division is correct if we consider the relations of the various sciences

with the faculties of our mind; but it is not very fruitful if we want to follow

the progress that has been accomplished in those sciences . . . such

division . . . can serve those who want to examine the single sciences, but

not those of us who want to write their history.50

If Universal Reason and the public utility of modern education had determined

the method of the Encyclopdie, the Jesuit, feeling victim of exactly that educa-tional system, had to find a different methodological principle for his work:

history, critical history, or philosophical history51 the study of the past was

for him essential to understand the progress towards modernity. This is interest-

ing (and unsurprising), first of all because it follows what has been characterized

as a general trend of literary studies in the eighteenth century. Earlier epochs had

studied the corpus of a poetic tradition not with a properly historical . . . interest,

but from a rhetorical point of view.52 They had singled out authoritative

examples, possibly to imitate, in a given literary tradition. Only in the eighteenthcentury is a predominant rhetorical interest abandoned in favor of a chronological




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organization (alternative, incidentally, to the alphabetical one of the encyclo-

pedia). What Andrs found was that such novel interest in chronology was in fact

not so general, and had instead its own geography: the French, under the spell of

Cartesian Reason and Montesquieus General Spirit, had failed to develop

chronology into true history. Jean Pierre Nicerons Memoirs, 172945, or ProsperMarchands Historical Dictionary, 17589, were for Andrs but fragmentary and

itemized collections of biographic details. Even the French Literary History, 1733,

developed by the Benedictines under the direction of Antoine Rivet de la Grange

and Charles Clemencet, arguably the model [of literary historiography] that

other nations have taken on themselves to imitate, remained for him farthest

from the perfection that this kind of work requires.53

True historiography, for Andrs, had to be found in Montesquieus south

more precisely in his adoptive Italy, where Gian Mario Crescimbeni, already in1698, had produced a History of Vulgar Poetry. Crescimbenis history had been

followed by Giacinto Gimmas (1723), Francesco Saverio Quadrios (173952),

Francesco Antonio Zaccarias (1750) literary histories, and finally by the wise

Girolamo Tiraboschi.54 The French may have had their philosophes, Andrs

seemed to say, but Italy had its literary historians (who, incidentally, had all

belonged to the Jesuit Order):

Other writers have written biographies, have compiled factual details,

have collected monuments, which have greatly served to enlighten literaryhistory; but only Tiraboschi has given us a literary history. France [has its]

literary histories, but theirs are still imperfect; only Italy has a complete

and finished one Tiraboschis.55

What attracted Andrs to these texts was that they all presented, through history,

an explicit defense of southern culture against the accusations of French classi-

cism: that southern literature, starting with Petrarchs taste for the embellish-

ment, and more so under the influence of the Spanish baroque, had become

unreasonable.56 The historicist defense of Petrarch consisted in claiming that thesignificance of his poetry had to be measured not on the basis of exogenous stan-

dards say, Reason but as the manifestation of the particular cultural develop-

ment of Italian literature in Petrarchs own epoch. Universal Reason the Italian

historians seem to suggest is not only Franco-centric, but a-historical as well.

This point brings me to the second reason why Andrs turn to history is at the

same time interesting and unsurprising. In his 1948 Harvard lecture on Vico

and Aesthetic Historism, Eric Auerbach had already observed that historicism

practically originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a reactionagainst the European predominance of French classicism. Historicism was:




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the conviction that every civilization and every period has its own possi-

bilities of aesthetic perfection; that the works of art of the different peoples

and periods, as well as their general forms of life, must be understood as

products of variable individual conditions, and have to be judged each by

its own development, not by absolute rules of beauty and ugliness.57

In truth, we should not exaggerate the range of what Auerbach calls every

civilization and every period here. Certainly born within Europe, and certainly

short-circuited in the attempts to articulate variations on a master narrative

that could be called the history of Europe, eighteenth-century historicism can

hardly be seen as some kind of multiculturalism aimed at going beyond the strict

confines of a Eurocentric universe: Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical

subject of all histories.58 What the emergence of historicism signals, however, is

that the very center of this Eurocentric vision becomes a contested site of theoreti-

cal confrontations around the eighteenth century: against a fixed notion of

European culture promoted by French classicism and rationalism, historicism pits

its own alternative centers. The history of historicism is then the story of a battle

for the definition of Europe and its culture that a homogenizing notion of

Eurocentrism runs the risk of obliterating.

Put bluntly, historicism had emerged, by the second half of the eighteenth

century, as the ideology and methodology of a subaltern Europe Vicos Italy,

Schlegels Germany, and Andrs Spain pitted against the hegemony ofFrance.59 In this context we should understand Andrs insistence that France had

no histories: certainly, Bossuet, Montesquieu and Voltaire had written the kind

of Universal Histories that the Origin and Progress of All Literatures was now

trying to rewrite. Yet, those histories were, to use Stephen Greenblatts term,

monologic:60 they assumed there was one telos, and one direction of progress

pointing invariably towards France.

The French Universal Histories, in sum, lacked the very idea of historicism.

The latter was a concept of relativism radically opposed to the linear model ofMontesquieu. Progress was not a line that went simply from south to north. For

Andrs, who had Giambattista Vicos New Science (and at least a second-hand

knowledge of Ibn Khalduns Muqaddimah) under his belt, each place has a

history of its own and has to be judged on the basis of this local history, not from

the perspective of a putative end of history located in a western and northern

modernity. Each place traverses cycles of barbarity, excellence and decadence.

Progress is to be understood not as a teleology of continuous perfectibility,

but rather as the simple chronological passage of cultural hegemony from one

decaying nation to a rising one:




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In general, I believe that we can consider Asia as the true motherland, the

cradle of literature. Because Asia was the first country to be populated

after the Flood, it was the first to cultivate the sciences. It can also be said

that the light of letters, like that of the sun, began to enlighten the Oriental

quarters, following then its westward course, casting light first on Egypt,and then on Greece, and after that illuminating our western regions [i.e.

Europe]. God willing, this light will stay above us a little longer, or maybe

will stop its course in our hemisphere, rather than keep moving towards

the West transferring the splendor of sciences to America and leaving

Europe in the same darkness of ignorance that nowadays casts a shadow

not only on the Asiatic nations, but also on Egypt and on the eastern parts

of Europe.61

Montesquieu had notoriously denied Asia any light of culture at all let alone the

prerogative of being the cradle of literature. His cradle was of course Greece

first, and then, and foremost, Charles the Greats Frankish school system:

Charlemagnes continuous victories, the sweetness and justice of his

government, seemed to found a new monarchy . . . Arts and Sciences

seemed to reappear. One can say that the people of France were destroying

Barbarity.62

Andrs idea of progress differed from Montesquieu not only because it deniedany continuous perfecting of literature its light just moves, like the sun, from

one place to another; more importantly, Andrs history did not end with France.

The light of literature is moving westward, towards the Atlantic. Where do we

find then the light of culture now? Without being exceedingly surprised, we find

the light exactly around Spain and Portugal, where it is hesitating to jump to the

other shore of the ocean. The image is halfway jingoistic tastelessness and sheer

beauty: by reclaiming the importance of Spain as the last Thule of Europes culture

before light would move to the New World, Andrs is already hinting at wheremodern literature really is. Paris is pass; New York may be the future. Madrid,

no doubt, is the present. Modernity is a Spanish light.

Arabist Theory

Literatures light then stations, in the present of European modernity, over the

Iberian Peninsula. Spain is the present of Enlightened Europe. Andrs would have

not been happy at the way French (and, to some extent, Scottish) Enlightenmentwould soon become the antonomasia of the eighteenth century: a southern




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eighteenth century, climaxing in Spain, and rich of Italian historians, was for him

just as modern as the Age of Reason that Paris and Edinburgh had declared.

Andrs historicism was in fact aimed at reopening exactly the question of who,

besides the French Academy, the Encyclopdie, and the Parisian Republic of

Letters, had the right to produce and control the formation of a modern Europeanculture. At any rate, to say that Spain is the last Thule of European modernity is

still not enough for Andrs: what is the origin of that very modernity?

As we have seen, Asia is for Andrs the cradle of culture. Its light then moves

westward first to Egypt, then to Greece where it knows exemplary perfection.63

The next stage is Imperial Rome, and then . . .

. . . Then what? Chronology is of the utmost importance here: because, with the

fall of the Roman Empire, begins a modern Europe divided into nations and into

national (vulgar) tongues. To understand where the light of literature movesafter Rome, means therefore to understand in which language, and in which

nation, the cultural origin of modern Europe resides. Montesquieu had claimed

that Greek and Latin culture was recuperated, and translated into vulgar tongues,

in Charlemagnes Frankish schools and monastery. This was meant to give

France a key role in the configuration of modern Europe. In addition, France

(Provence) was said to be the geographic origin of both modern troubadour

poetry syllabic and in rhymes, against the non-rhyming Greco-Latin tradition

based on the stresses on the verse and of the modern genre of the vulgar roman.

Linguistic nationalism, in other words, had begun in France.

Andrs began his demolition of the Frankish myth of origins by diminishing

considerably the role of Charlemagne the same Charles, incidentally, that had

tried to invade Spain in 778, and that had occupied Barcelona in 801. In a curious

(for a man of the church) anti-clerical turn, Andrs declared that, yes, Charles had

preserved something but that something was only the pseudo-culture of

mediocre theologians, ignorant clerics, and illiterate priests. It was not culture at

all:

Because in fact the Emperor, Alcuinus, Theodulf, and all those who were

working for a reformation of studying had only one goal: service to the

church. Accordingly, their great schools taught little more than grammar

[useful only to read the psalms] and ecclesiastical singing.

In Frankish Europe, in other words:

Schools were created; but only to teach reading, singing, counting, and

little more. Teachers were formed; but it was enough that they knew somegrammar, and if one was ahead of his peers enough to know also a little bit




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of mathematics or astronomy, he was considered an oracle. But a Terence,

a Cicero, a Quintilian did not exist in all France.64

In the last analysis, what Charlemagne, quintessential Frenchman, had done, was

to submit literature to the control of instrumental reason not the instrumentalreason of enlightened nationalism, to be sure, but certainly the instrumental

reason of the church.

As for the claim of a Provenal origin of modern literature, this is, Andrs tells

us with Vico in mind, just the arrogance and pretentiousness of the French, who

brag monuments of superior antiquity both in prose and in verse. After all, what

is there to brag about such a mediocre poem as the Roman de la Rose, where

absolutely nothing happens but the picking of a rose!65 The French, for Andrs,

were essentially inept to revitalize literature. Inheriting Charlemagnes reforms,

the French, not the Spaniards, had been the center and cause of Europes dark

ages, which Andrs characterizes as a fall into sterile, sophomoric scholasticism:

None of the first scholastics was a Spaniard. None of the early contro-

versies that excited the scholastics excited Spain. And none of the early

scholastic sects was born in those places. Spaniards got scholastics from

the Gauls that scholastic, so valued and respected in France and

Germany.66

Scholasticism, rather than inventing a modern European literature, had onlydrowned Europe in so much dialectical nonsense and left the whole of Europe in

a state of total cultural disarray.67

If the French had not invented modern prose and rhyme, then who had? There

was only one answer for Andrs: Arab literature was the central influence in the

rebirth of modern Europe. With a prose reminiscent of the Thousand and One

Nights, Andrs described Baghdad as the very light of modern culture as

the locus, namely, where a shift from classical languages to the vulgar ones

accessible to the people had been transacted:One could see hundreds of camels entering Baghdad, heavy only of

manuscripts and books; and all books scholars thought should be made

accessible to the people, were immediately translated into Arabic, no

matter in which language they had originally been written.

From Baghdad, hegemonic centre of the ninth century, literature had been then

exported to the world entire:

So, throughout the vast Arab domains, in all the three parts of the world[the one known at the time: Asia, Africa and Europe] where their empire




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had been extended, we see Saracen letters enter triumphantly, and domi-

nate, like their armies, the globe. Since the ninth century of our era, the

light of Arabic literature began to shine, and for six or seven centuries it

kept glittering bright.68

Not unaware of the consequences of such an assertion, Andrs conceded that this

is a truth that many will take as a ridiculous paradox; namely, that modern

literature, not only in the sciences, but also in the Belles Lettres, recognizes the

Arab as its mother.69 Accordingly, Andrs devoted to what would later be known

as the Arabist Theory the lengthiest and most problematic chapter of his entire

treatise a chapter he was not even sure how to title in order to render it more

palatable to his European reader: vaguely, Of Arab Literature in the Parma

edition; programmatically, Of Arab Influence in the Modern Culture of the Belles

Lettres in the Venetian and Prato editions; hiding the Arab, Of the Introduction

of the Vulgar Tongues in the Belles Lettres, particularly in Poetry in the Roman

and Pisan editions.

Andrs was not the first scholar to formulate the Arabist Theory.70 In England,

Hermetics and Rosicrucians had already recognized Arabic as the linguistic

medium through which much of the Hermetic corpus had been transmitted to

Europe in the medieval period.71 Even in France, Pierre Daniel Huet, bishop of

Avranches, had begun his 1670 letter to Monsieur de Segrais by saying that the

invention of the roman was due to the Orientals,72 and that it is the Arabs, in myopinion, that have given us the art of rhyming.73 But it was especially in Italy,

where Andrs was exiled, that the question of an Arab influence in the develop-

ment of European wisdom had been tackled since Nicol Cusanos De docta

ignorantia (1440) with the patriotic aim of pointing to Pythagoras school of

Crotone as the Italic origin of western philosophy.74 Giambattista Vico had

impugned the same thesis, with clear anti-Cartesian intentions, in De anti-

quissima italorum sapientia (1710).

Following Vico, Andrs then claimed that Arab was the origin of modernpoetry, of the novel, literary historiography, modern philosophy, mathematics,

astronomy, medicine, and jurisprudence. All of modern literature came to us

from Arabia, inglorious peninsula.75

As suggested above, Andrs was not inventing the Arabist Theory. He was,

however, taking it away from the restricted domain of Arabists, theorists of

national literature, and critics of literary genres. By rearticulating an old theory,

he was positing the rather controversial hypothesis of a non-French (and in fact

non-European) origin of Europes modern culture. What for Huet was a mere

philological question, had become for Andrs a more radical re-orientation of the




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putative origin of modern Europe in the context of his new Universal History a

history with no teleology, historicist in its refusal to understand progress, which

in the 1780s would invariably end with the hegemony of France, as a necessary

betterment.

The question today is how to interpret Andrs controversial proposition. In1941, Ramn Menndez Pidal had liquidated any opposition to the Arabist

Theory as a very rooted prejudice: the belief in the lack of intellectual communi-

cation between the two worlds, the Christian and the Islamic. In more recent

times, Maria Rosa Menocal has claimed that the Arabist Theory first ceases to be

discussed and then becomes altogether taboo in the second part of the nineteenth

century, when a European sense of self emerged . . . which was the height of

the colonialist period, and the prevailing attitudes precluded, consciously or sub-

consciously, any possibility of indebtedness to the Arabic world . . . it wouldhave been inconceivable or very difficult for most Europeans to imagine, let alone

explore or defend, a view of the European as being culturally subservient to the

Arab.76

Both Menndez Pidals and Menocals reading of Andrs Arabist theory may

in fact be a little too kind: Andrs was quite far from claiming a subservient role

for Europe; it was not Europe that had to be de-centered for him, but France as the

center of a Eurocentric world. Although Domnguez Molt imagines Andrs as an

admirer, defender, and popularizer of Arab culture,77 nowhere does the Origin

show much sympathy towards the Arab, itinerant and nomadic nation, pyro-

maniac of Alexandrias library, and bamboozled by Mohammed famoso impos-

tore.78 That Andrs was not concerned with the destiny of the Arab is clear from

his total disinterest in trying to learn the language, preferring instead to rely on the

Spanish copies of the Escorial and on Miguel Casiris translations. He treated

Arab literature only insofar as it meant something for the history and genesis of

European culture. In contrast, Chinese and Indian literatures became irrelevant in

the space of one paragraph each, because unimportant for the progress of Europe.

Besides the Arabs, only Chaldeans can stay in our memory, because from theirdoctrines the Greeks drew many notions; and Egypt only deserves, from the

whole of Africa, our consideration, Egypt having been the school of the Greeks.79

In the end, a true European poetry was found by Andrs not in the places of

encounter between Europe and the Arab Moorish Spain, Fredericks Sicily but

in a second moment of translation, when whatever the Arab had given Europe was

purified and codified into a modern European idiom without any trace of the Arab

origin. So, for instance:




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where Arab science bloomed more, where the light of their knowledge

shined brighter, where the reign of their literature got fixed, so to speak,

was in Spain.

In conclusion:the first flashes, which gave blinded Europe some light, came from Spain;

therefore, we can reasonably say that the origin of modern literature

derived from Spain.80

Montesquieu, in that masterpiece of eighteenth-century Hispanophobia that is the

Persian Letters,81 had painted Spain as an old empire possessing today only the

simulacra of its old glory and culture:

The eyeglasses [that all Spaniards wear] show demonstratively thatthe one who wears them is a man enlightened by science and a profound

reader so profound indeed that his eyesight has weakened. [In Spain]

any nose adorned or weighed by [glasses] can be passed, with no one

daring to question, as a savants nose.

For Montesquieu the Spaniard of today is an inferior intellect, devoid of culture

culture being, of course, that essentially French attribute otherwise known as

raison:

Sure you can find some intelligence and some common sense people among

the Spaniards; but dont look for any in their books. Take for instance their

libraries, with their fantastic literature on one side, and the scientific works

on the other. It is as if the whole thing had been arranged and collected by

some secret foe of human reason.

Oriental in their habits, the Spaniards treat their women as if they were slaves in

the harem: They are, firstly, bigots secondly, jealous.82

Answering Montesquieus Hispanophobic prejudice that as an appendage ofthe Oriental world of Islam, the civilization of Spain did not constitute an integral

part of Europe,83 Andrs argued that its connection to the east gave Spain a

constitutive role in the cultural formation of modern Europe. And if Montesquieu

had naturalized the superiority of France and marginality of Spain according to

his much discussed theory of climates, Andrs responded:

It is quite common to attribute to climate an influence on everything, and

especially on artistic taste and on the perfection of literature. I certainly

agree that also climate has some role in all that pertains to the strengthof the spirit. But to claim that the influence of climate determines the true




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origin and essence of the culture of various nations seems to me an

assertion not backed by experience, and unconfirmed by facts. Under the

same climate, with no great planetary change, the Greeks, brutes at first,

became then for long time the wisdom of the world; and that same Greece,

which was for many centuries the garden of Europe, has lately become asterile desert . . . Cold, says Montesquieu tightens the pores, and

makes the body stronger; at the same time, makes the nutritional juices

coarser, and the spirit becomes less lively. The fame of the author would

deserve a longer confutation than the one needed by the weakness of his

reasoning. I only would like to ask Montesquieu if, France being colder

than Spain, we should conclude that the French have stronger bodies and

less lively spirit.84

Not climatology (which Montesquieu understood as a branch of the experimental

sciences) but history a critical and philosophical one can truly understand

the decline and fall of Greece. And history, more importantly, can alone under-

stand the centrality of southern and Oriental Spain in the formation of modern

Europe.

Certainly, if the scope of Andrs historicism was, in Auerbachs sense, to

debunk the myth of the center and introduce a measure of relativism in a world

ruled by (classicist) standards, then the Origin fell a little short of its goal. A

center Paris had been replaced by another al-Andalus. Moreover, the claim

of the superiority of Catholic Spain over an Arabia swindled by the famoso

impostore risks sounding like yet another Eurocentric design. One can only say

that, in his incapacity to extend the implications of his historicism beyond the

borders of his world system, Andrs was precisely the historical product of

Auerbachs individual conditions of his own place and time. A fundamental

blindness prevented him from seeing the full consequences of both his historicism,

and of his Arabist theory: that historical relativism could hardly be reconverted

into a theory of Spanish (or southern) centralism; and that the Arab origin ofEuropean poetry could hardly justify his commitment to keep East and West as

cultural antitheses of each other. In this, rather than representing any solution,

Andrs remains the allegory of the problems and difficulties that we may still face

when attempting to provincialize Europe from its interior borders. However, these

problems and difficulties should not justify any uncritical embracing of mono-

lithic notions of Eurocentrism. As for the more general question, it is not only an

idea of a Europe that ends where Christianity ends and Islam . . . begins85 that

needs to be reassessed today, starting with Andrs, and possibly going beyondthe limits of his prejudices. Also to be reassessed is the canon of the European




21/24


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8. Jean Goldzink, Montesquieu et lEurope, in Alfred Grosser and Michel Perrin, eds, Lide de

lEurope au fil de deux millnaires (Paris 1994), 141.

9. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford 1961), 227.

10. Quotes are from: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (2nd edn) (New York, NY 1956), 59;

and C. Barraclough, Universal History, in H.P.R. Finberg, ed.,Approaches to History: A

Symposium (Toronto 1962), 84. Montesquieus historicist ambitions, and his skepticism vis--

vis history, are discussed in Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA

1976), 35 and 14072.

11. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, uvres completes, Roger Caillois, ed. (2 vols, Paris 1949),

Vol. 2, 229; and Vol. 2, 251.

12. Jacques-Bnigne Bossuet, Discours sur lhistoire universelle (Paris 1681), 4.

13. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 644; Vol. 2, 375; and Vol. 2, 30.

14. Montesquieus Franco-centric philosophy of history is discussed in David W. Carrithers,

Montesquieus Philosophy of History, Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 47, No. 1 (1986),

61; and in Suzanne Gearhart, Reading De LEsprit des Lois: Montesquieu and the Principlesof History, Yale French Studies Vol. 59 (1980), 175200, 180. On Montesquieus historical

empiricism, see Roger B. Oake, Montesquieus Analysis of Roman History, Journal of the

History of Ideas Vol. 16, No. 1 (1955), 4459, 489; for the historical dialectics, the reference is

to Louis Althusser, Montesquieu; la politique et lhistoire (Paris 1959), 3758.

15. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 317.

16. Voltaire, Histoire, in Encyclopdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences et des mtiers

(Chicago, IL 2001), 8, 221.

17. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 292; Vol. 2, 536; Vol. 2, 537; and Vol. 2, 602.

18. Ibid., Vol. 2, 478; Vol. 2, 537; Vol. 2, 602; and Vol. 1, 1358.

19. Chakrabarty, op. cit., 8.20. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 1, 1364.

21. Ibid., Vol. 1, 1354; Vol. 1, 1369; and Vol. 2, 329.

22. Martin Thom, Tribes without Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern

France, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London 1990), 26.

23. Ibid., 27.

24. As claimed by Hulliung, op. cit., 60.

25. Althusser, op. cit., 645.


27. David W. Carrithers, Introduction: Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, SVECVol. 9

(2002), 18.28. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 414; and Vol. 2, 713.

29. Ibid., Vol. 2, 603.

30. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London 1979), 465.


32. Ibid., Vol. 2, 477.

33. Ibid., Vol. 2, 45.

34. Ibid., Vol. 2, 558.

35. Gearhart, op. cit., 187.


37. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley,CA 2002), 13.




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38. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of World History, trans. John Sibree

(Buffalo, NY 1991), 79 and 103. My reference to de Stal is from Anne-Louise Germaine

Necker Madame de Stal, De la littrature considre dans ses rapports avec les institutiones

sociales, Grard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink, eds, (Paris 1991), 17881.

39. Franco Arato, Un comparatista: Juan Andrs, Cromos Vol. 5 (2000), 1.

40. Guido Ettore Mazzeo, The Abate Juan Andrs, Literary Historian of the XVIII Century (New

York, NY 1965), 17.

41. Voltaire, uvres compltes, Jean Michel Moreau et al., eds, (Paris 1877), 1589.

42. Franco Venturi, Church and Reform in Enlightenment Italy: The Sixties of the Eighteenth

Century, The Journal of Modern History Vol. 48, No. 2 (1976), 224.

43. Catherine M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 17001762 (Oxford

1991).

44. Op. cit., 2, 261.

45. Robert R. Palmer, The National Idea in France before the Revolution, Journal of the History

of Ideas Vol. 1, No. 1 (1940), 1012.46. Adolfo Domnguez Molt, El abate D. Juan Andrs Morell, un erudito del siglo XVIII

(Alicante 1978), 21.

47. Gian Paolo Brizzi, The Jesuits and Universities in Italy, in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein,

ed., European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin

1998), 189.

48. Jos Antonio Valero, Una disciplina frustrada: La historia literaria dieciochesca, Hispanic

Review Vol. 64, No. 2 (1996), 192.

49. Palmer, op. cit., 100.

50. Andrs, op. cit., I.iv.

51. Ibid., I.iv.52. Giovanni Getto, Storia delle storie letterarie (4th edn), (Florence, 1981), 2.

53. Andrs, op. cit., III, 372.

54. Ibid., II, xiv.

55. Ibid., III, 385.

56. On this topic, see Gabriel Maugain, Boileau et lItalie (Paris 1912); Mario Fubini, Dal

Muratori al Baretti. Studi sulla critica e sulla cultura del Settecento (3rd edn) (Bari 1968);

Mario Puppo, Critica e linguistica del Settecento (Verona 1975), 336.

57. Erich Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, Scenes from the Drama of European

literature (Minneapolis, MN 1984), 1835.

58. Chakrabarty, op. cit., 27.59. See, for instance, Georg G. Iggers, Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,

Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 56, No. 1 (1995), 12952.

60. Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction, Genre Vol. 15, No. 12 (1982), 3.

61. Andrs, op. cit., I, 1920.

62. Ibid., 1, 1095.

63. Andrs, op. cit., II, 2631.

64. Ibid., I, 10811.

65. Ibid., I, 266; and I, 338.

66. Ibid., I, 168.

67. Ibid., I, 182.68. Ibid., I, 120; and I, 124.




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69. Ibid., I.xi.

70. Maria Rosa Menocal, Pride and Prejudice in Medieval Studies: European and Oriental,

Hispanic Review Vol. 53, No. 1 (1985), 67; Mazzeo, op. cit., 1567; James T. Monroe, The

Historical Arjuza of ibn Abd Rabbihi, a Tenth-Century Hispano-Arabic Poem, Journal of the

American Oriental Society Vol. 91, No. 1 (1971), 67.

71. N. I. Matar, Islam in Britain, 15581685 (Cambridge 1998), 89.

72. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Trait de lorigine des romans (Stuttgart 1966), 11.

73. Ibid., 15.

74. Paolo Casini, Lantica sapienza italica. Cronistoria di un mito (Bologna 1998).

75. Andrs, op. cit., I, 13753; and II, 2867.

76. References are to Ramn Menndez Pidal, Poesa rabe y poesa europea, con otros estudios

de literatura medieval (Buenos Aires 1941), 34; and Menocal, op. cit., 678.

77. Domnguez Molt, op. cit., 73.

78. Andrs, op. cit., I, 116; and I, 131.

79. Ibid., I.1417.80. Ibid., I.12274.

81. See Jos Cadalso, Defensa de la nacin espaola contra la Carta persiana LXXVIII de

Montesquieu, Guy Mercadier, ed., (Toulouse 1970).


83. Maria Rosa Menocal, Close Encounters in Medieval Provence: Spains Role in the Birth of

Troubadour Poetry, Hispanic Review Vol. 49, No. 1 (1981), 501.

84. Andrs, op. cit., I, 267.

85. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New

York, NY 1996), 158, note 17.

roberto m. dainotto is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. He is

the author of Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell University Press 2000),

and of the forthcoming Europe (in Theory).


European History Quarterly 2006 Dainotto 7 29

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