Early Medieval Spain

Abstract

After the conquest of Andalusia (Southern Spain) by the Moors in the eighth century, the three communities of Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted for several centuries, each with its own traditions. In the Muslim community, women poets are found at all levels of society, from slaves to aristocrats. The most famous of them is Wallada, a princess of the Umayyad dynasty, and evidently a woman of independent mind, who participated in the circle of male poets of the time, and was for a while the lover of one of them, Ibn Zaydun. A different kind of woman’s voice poetry developed in the context of the Andalusian muwashshaha, an Arabic genre that was also practised by Hebrew poets, and that treated amatory and panegyric themes in terms of hyperbolic admiration. The beloved breathes perfume, shoots wounding arrows from his or her eyes, seems to be made of precious stones, is like the full moon, and so on. These muwashshahas are written in literary Arabic or Hebrew, but often their kharjas (codas, literally “exits”) are composed in the Mozarabic dialect, based on the colloquial Romance speech of the Christians. In fact, some, perhaps most, of the kharjas must have had a previous independent existence. They are introduced as quotations; sometimes the same kharja is found attached to more than one muwashshaha, and occasionally a muwashshaha has more than one kharja. Frequently, too, the kharja doesn’t really “fit.” Typically, the Romance kharjas are uttered in the persona of a young woman expressing passionate feelings for her lover.