Onomastics for Copy Editors

"It's not right, but people will rip you to shreds if you're not careful about transliteration."

Verbatim that's something my doktorvater has told me, and in slightly different forms it's something I've heard from other senior mentorly-type people as well. Because truth be told, I'm often not careful about my transliteration even though I recoil in the same way as many other Arabists do when I see someone else's transliteration mistakes, wondering whether it was a typo or whether the person never looked all that carefully at the original text.

I don't think it's just the major and puzzling transliteration issues that made me loathe the new article (unfortunately behind a paywall) on Hebrew and Arabic poetry just appeared in one of the British journals of Islamic Studies. There's quite a lot wrong with the content. In addition to ignoring the vast majority of the scholarship on its very subject matter that's been done in the last twenty years (and in fact predicating the value of its "intervention" on the fact of the work not having been done) it shows some real insensitivity to the types of source materials and does not engage directly with the texts, instead using the fact of their existence to make the point. It leaves out well-known history and texts that would help to contextualize the subject, but at the same time doesn't manage to say anything new.  It's really frustrating to see the material that one loves badly handled and, less so, the state of one's field so very badly misrepresented; it is especially frustrating when such work appears  < peer review hobbyhorse rant > in a publication that is supposed to adhere to high academic standards and have procedures in place to ensure that the high standards are met < /peer review hobbyhorse rant >.

A colleague of mine once posited that peer review works at least in as much as however much you might disagree with methods, theories, corpus definitions, etc., only very rarely does something truly awful or wrong end up in print. This? Truly awful and wrong. A genuine failure of the review process.

However, flaws in copy editing and particularly in transliterating and in rendering names certainly prejudiced my reading even further. It's not a good article, but the range of errors made it worse.

***

The really strange error comes when the authors of these two books are cited as Cheindlin and Baran.

Note, too, the misspelling of compunctious. It's not the only misspelling. Forget about transliteration for a moment. Nobody — not the authors and not the editors — ran spell-check. What happened here?  

It's not as though the authors misheard and mistranscribed two names; presumably they were actually looking at the books they were citing. Nor is it that they had to transliterate names that belong in non-Latin letters. (Have you ever tried to look up anything written by Nehemiah Allony? I don't know that I've ever seen his name transliterated the same way twice.) The only explanation that I can come up with for the rendering of the two surnames like that involves positing that the authors were reading the secondary literature in some kind of unauthorized, pirated Arabic translation, where the book authors would have been identified as BRN and ŠNDLN, forcing the article authors to vocalize the names as they saw fit and to choose a French transliteration system for the consonants rather than an English one. There's plenty of piracy of secondary sources, but this seems like an extra and puzzling step. Who is out there pirating and translating secondary literature on Arabizing Hebrew poetry? And, really, what kind of demand is there?

I suppose the question of why this kind of mistake throughout the text of the article is beyond the existential scope of the present discussion, why even if the copy editors weren't checking references, the peer reviewers didn't make note of something as significant as the Arabizing misspelling of the two leading figures in the field.

Maybe it's a sly commentary on cultural and linguistic Arabization that is appropriate in a discussion of an Arabized literary form?

In a way, it's reminiscent of the Paul is Dead Meatballs fiasco (though admittedly with much, much less comedic or gross-out potential) in that it requires an excessive amount of rendering a text back and forth through translation and transliteration.

Footnotes

I often think that writing without a lot of clutter and footnotes is the ideal for readable academic prose, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I also derive a lot of pleasure from really top-notch championship-level footnoting. These are my notes from chapter three of my book, which I'm presenting at Cornell next week. It's not quite done — there's a little bit of chapter to be fleshed out and a few footnotes to be fixed before I submit three chapters to the publisher — but it was done enough to circulate before the colloquium; and the footnotes are deeply satisfying.

***

¹³⁰ Ḥasan ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī. Kitāb al ‘umda fī maḥāsin al-shi‘r, ed. M. al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1967.

¹³¹ For a setting of Ibn Ezra into an Arabic poetic context, see Raymond P. Scheindlin. “Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra on the Legitimacy of Poetry,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 101-15.

¹³² Judah al-Ḥarīzī, who will factor into the next two chapters, left a similar literary footprint in prose composition, using the full range of Arabic literary models to defend and elevate writing in Hebrew.

¹³³ This is not meant to suggest that Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra represent anything like the totality of Arabizing Hebrew poetry or poetics — or even the totality of the form’s responses to the condition of exile and the status of a minority culture. However, as poets who were also authors of some of the most significant works of poetic theory to have emerged from the Andalusi milieu, both in situ and as they contemplated religious and cultural exile, they are apt as reference points for contextualizing the Tibbonim as poetic thinkers within both Andalusi and exilic contexts.

¹³⁴ For notions of local knowledge and culture, see Clifford Geertz. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1985. For the foundational statement of polysystem theory (also referred to as Tel Aviv post-structuralism), see Itamar Even-Zohar. “Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 287-310. It was Rina Drory’s work Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (originally published in Hebrew in 1988) that specifically applied polysystem theory to the Iberian context. In general, I find polysystem theory to be somewhat more productive than other current theories used for framing and contextualiziang and organizing our understanding of the cultural history of medieval Iberia. In particular, it demands particular attention to the elements that make up the polysystem, thereby yielding precise and detailed text-based readings that can account for broader cultural phenomena, moreso than theories of cultural hybridity that draw upon the work of Homi Bhaba in postcolonial studies. As a branch of post-structuralism, polysystem theory is particularly devoted to breaking down the binary oppositions of center-periphery and canonical-noncanonical, pairings that are particularly detrimental to the material within traditional study of both Semitic- and Romance-language literature in the Maghreb. Entanglement and itra-actional theory have also become increasingly popular as ways to account for cultural contact, borrowing, on the basis of the writing of Karen Barad, from particle physics for metaphyiscal purposes; however, the use of this theory for explicating cultural contacts outside the realm of the study of material and manuscript culture is, to my mind, unnecessarily elaborate and its utility and the benefit of its utility questionable.

¹³⁵ Qur’ān 12:2, trans. N. J. Dawood.

Anatomy of a Revise-and-Resubmit, part I: Writing While Female

I've just recently received word about the final disposition of an article I submitted for possible publication in the Jewish Quarterly Review: after an initial decision of revise-and-resubmit that led to some really major revision of the piece, the article was ultimately rejected. The process was flawed at every stage and doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in the value or merits of the double-blind peer review process as the sine qua non it is often thought to be. The next few posts will reflect upon the process.

***

Just for some brief contextual reference, here is the abstract that accompanied the article:

 Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the dawn of modernity, a single exemplar is identified as having been written by a woman. Modern scholarship concerning this poem has primarily been interested in it as a unique and curious artifact of a woman writer working in Hebrew. The present article will reconsider that poem in light of documents in the Cairo Genizah that deal, from a documentary perspective, with the same concerns and activities that the poet treats in verse, specifically the ways in which women supported themselves financially in the absence of their husbands. This study will argue that the work of the supposed Andalusi Hebrew poetess reflects economic and social realities faced by women in Muslim Spain and more broadly in the Mediterranean society documented in the Genizah. The exchange of personal effects between the woman depicted in the poem and her husband stands as a literary comparison for records of similar exchanges and calls for both a more historicized reading of Genizah poetry and for studies of this poem that move beyond the question of the poet’s gender.

***

As much as I wanted to ignore the question of authorship and all the attention paid to the poem because it might have been written by a woman, my methodology was, nevertheless, a little bit programatic in this respect. I was drawn, in large part, to this poem because I was really bothered by what, to me, seemed to be very condescending treatment of it and of its ostensible author in the very small amount of scholarship devoted to it. I mentioned this in the introduction to the article and offered a very brief intervention.

One of the anonymous reviewers put on his best condescending air in order to make the following comment on that section:

“So much hot air about a non-issue! It is true that Fleischer and Rosen say that there were no women poets in Hebrew since Deborah. No one made a “comparison” or “identification” with Deborah. To make an issue out of it is not to be able to discern what’s important and what’s unimportant.”

Actually, it’s not a non-issue, and here’s why, explained with text borrowed here from a footnote I added to the the article as I revised it:

“I think that it is important that when we speak about this poem we perhaps moderate more carefully the gendered language with which we describe Dūnash’s wife. For example, even though this poem is rarely given scholarly attention, when it is, some mention is always and invariably made to the gap in women’s Hebrew poetry between the biblical figure of Deborah, whose exploits are recounted in the so-called “song of Deborah” expressed in her literary voice in Judges 5 and the wife of Dūnash; the latter is described as the literary heir to the former, the heritor or lamplight or bastion of Hebrew verse ostensibly written by women. Although it has recently been suggested to me that this is never intended as a serious comparison between the two, it seems that the persistence of the juxtaposition of Deborah and Dunash’s wife ensures a certain, likewise persistent, flattening out of the distinctions between the very limited number of women authors and women’s voices in literature. Especially if the comparison is superfluous or unserious and serves no real purpose but could, rather than illuminate our understanding of the text have a deleterious effect on reading and interpreting it, I should think that it is an analogy best consigned, quite deliberately, to the literary-critical scrapheap; when the identification of the poet as a woman at all is in doubt, this is particularly important.”

Don't even get me started (and I didn't even try to address this in the article) that we in the field, both colloquially and in print, refer to the poet, known as the wife of a poet named Dunash ben Labrat as "Mrs. Dunash."

During my first year of graduate school, after a week on feminist theory in an introduction to theories and methodologies in the field course, I asked the professor what the expectations generally were for women scholars to do feminist scholarship or write on women authors. I did not, I told her in no uncertain terms, want to be pigeonholed as a “girl Arabist.” And she gave me this incredibly sensible, sensitive answer, which was to say that no, I definitely didn’t have to do feminist scholarship or write about women, although some people might occasionally ask me why. She continued that it was possible, though, that in the course of reading text in line with whatever critical schools of thought I might ultimately decide to be valid, I might, by virtue of being a “girl Arabist” (something I couldn’t ultimately do anything about being, she pointed out to me) notice things that a male colleague might overlook or that I might be sensitive to certain textual resonances by virtue of being a woman.

This is not to say that all women readers would all notice the same things, or even that all women readers are uniformly sensitive to the same elements of writing by or about women. (The aforementioned Rosen, after all, is also a woman.) But I think this is one of those cases where the critical status quo bothered me because of the complicated gender issues in the text and in the academy in a way that male colleagues — and I am only assuming that this anonymous reviewer is a man — can overlook and call a load of silly, dithering, girly hot air. Maybe being a girl Arabist isn’t such a bad thing in the end if it means getting to stick it to the guys who read carelessly because they can or because they fail to recognize a problem that doesn’t affect them.

There's no need for condescension; and it might even be worth giving authors the benefit of the doubt that they are, in fact, identifying a real problem. Seems to me that asking for clarification is preferable to dismissing the suggestion out of hand and more in keeping with the scholarly mission of the endeavor.

The Medieval Trash Heap, a Refuge from the Modern One

I'd like to share a paragraph that comes close to the end of a 1957 article I've just finished reading in the course of my research on a medieval woman poet. The article was written by the founding father of Cairo Genizah studies, S.D. Goitein:

"It is natural for woman, whose emotional life is strong and delicate, to be sensitive to religious poetry and endowed with the gift of song. In a society which does not oppress woman, especially one which does not humiliate her spirit or steal her self-worth from her, these traits find their outlet in creativity. Biblical society was such, and we have therefore found that the Hebrew woman of ancient days lifted up her voice in song. For the rule governing her was not yet 'the voice of a woman is indecent' but rather its opposite: 'let me hear your voice.' She sang in times of love and during the days of mourning, expressed the joy of victory and the agony of defeat, words of wisdom and whispers of prayer."

The whole article is a cacophony of similarly insulting, patronizing comments on women and literature that, beyond being out-and-out sexist are also just methodologically wrong and not the way we — any of us, regardless of critical school — approach literature. I don't even think it was the way we approached literature in the antediluvian 1950s when this article was originally written. (The 1988 publication date that you'll see if you follow the link above reflects the posthumous publication of an English translation of the article, which was originally written in Hebrew.) It unquestioningly lines up the Hebrew Bible with modern poetic practices, forcing and shoehorning the the Bible into corresponding with history in a way I've only ever seen amongst the farthest-gone religious fundamentalists and Levantine archaeologists of a certain school of thought:

"During his studies the present writer sometimes heard women's poetry spoken  by men and men's by women; and yet the gender of the author was always immediately apparent" (2).

"Woman's poetry sometimes took the form of prophecy. The connection between poetry and prophecy is likewise found among many ancient peoples, and is the subject of a book by a well-known woman anthropologist and literary scholar" (3).

"Nor is the reason that 'women are chatterboxes'" (31).

The irony of it is that the vast majority of Goitein's writing on the women whose lives were recorded in and amongst the sacred trash is sensitive and nuanced and thoughtful, and for many topics in women's history and literature in the Genizah remains the authoritative work. I'm at a loss to explain what happened when he sat down to write this article. Perhaps his papers might offer some clue; perhaps I'll have a chance to look into it at some point. 

But the usual approach that we expect from Goitein when writing about women still breaks through in one line in that first offending paragraph: "The rule governing her was not yet 'the voice of a woman is indecent' but rather its opposite: 'let me hear your voice." Goitein wrote this while comparing modern Yemenite women's poetry and song to the occurrence of women poets and singers in the Hebrew Bible; the contrast that he establishes between the now and the then and the place of women in each evinces sadness over what has come to be and nostalgia for what had once been.

The voice of the woman is now indecent: We are reminded of it monthly as the Israeli police arrest women worshippers at the Western Wall for donning ritual garments that they are legally but not halakhically (according to the majority of authorities) prevented from wearing — women are exempted from wearing fringed garments and phylacteries, but that exemption evolved into a prohibition over time — and for praying out loud. Kol isha, the voice of the woman, is indecent and it is criminal.

The regular arrests and imprisonments of Jewish women in Israel for praying against the law is a powerful contrast with the occasionally tin-eared mid-century historian who would pat us on the head and exoticize us but then go ahead and treat our forebearers fairly and with great humanity as he pulled their history painstakingly from the most historic of rubbish bins and lament the loss of a time when we could speak, aloud and in writing, for ourselves. Neither model, the modern Israeli legal establishment's nor the archivist's, is perfect — far from it. But I know with whom I cast my lot.

Teaching Someone Else's Students

I am precisely a week behind in blogging. I suppose that two transcontinental flights and a rollicking wedding at a nature preserve (not mine — the wedding or the preserve) can have that effect now and again.

So, precisely a week ago, I taught an undergraduate class at Penn.

The director of the center where I'm based this year was away giving a talk, and it happened to coincide with the week that his Jewish history class was going to cover the rise of Hebrew poetry in Spain; so of all the fellows here this semester, I was the logical choice to fill in. (Had this been the spring, there would have been two people who would have been even better, but no matter.) It was material I could teach with my eyes closed, so I decided to use this as an opportunity for a bit of pedagogical experimentation.

I'd already been thinking, on the basis of student feedback, that I would eventually have to get away from delivering lectures in intro classes on the basis of a prepared text and work, instead, from notes. And I was dreading the possibility. I figured I'd get flustered, forget to mention a ton of stuff and generally be inarticulate. I was also really worried that I wouldn't have a good core of materials to work from and I'd have to invest the same, insane, intense amounts of time in writing lectures every year as I did this year; and that wouldn't be feasible if I'm ever going to be this book manuscript finished. (Which I am.) So I was really resisting the change, but figured that this would be an opportunity just to see how teaching from notes would work.

I'm pleased to report that it worked really well. I hadn't planned to use a Powerpoint presentation (although that's something that I do under normal circumstances), but decided to in the end as a way of anchoring myself to the narrative arc of the class.

As I said, I do it anyway, but I didn't realize that it would also help with going off-script. There was one moment when I got ahead of myself, but it didn't seem to throw things off at all when I stopped and said, "Wait a minute, let's actually go back one step."I definitely don't think I'll have trouble carrying it forwards. It also seems like I'll be able to work from sets of notes in future years and do whatever updating I need without feeling like I have to completely rewrite each lecture each year, which was one of my major concerns.

Plus, I did a few cool things with text slides.

In a certain respect, it was very freeing to teach a one-off class. It's not to say that I felt like I could screw up the director's course and not have to worry about it because I wouldn't be the one picking up the pieces as much as it was kind of freeing to have no history with this particular group of students: no set way of doing things, no particular expectations on their parts. I could just try a few new things and see how they worked. It was surprising; I expected that it would be disorienting to walk into a classroom where the students already had a rapport with each other and a regular routine, but not so.

Beit Biyalik

This is the home of Hayyim Nahman Biyalik, one of the most important modern Hebrew poets and an important figure in the reinvention of the Hebrew language. I visited there today before the start of the conference.

Photography isn't permitted inside, but it's a lovely house, whitewashed, painted with bright colors and with dark trim — one of my favorite combinations, it reminds me a bit of Barcelona. The exhibition is done very well, too. Bialik's study and library are still set up, and much of his paper ephemera is still on display. It didn't seem to have been the intention, but the exhibit very much highlighted the ways in which modern Hebrew literature, and especially poetry, picked up where the medieval poets left off. I almost fell over to see one of Bialik's drafts where he had marked out the meter — historically, Hebrew poetry utilizes Arabic meter since it doesn't have its own native system of of quantitative metrics. And they had his copy of the Tahkemoni, an important work of literary rhymed prose from the thirteenth century, as well as a variety of other medieval texts, on display in the library.

Women Poets, Part I: How I Got the Story (or didn't quite)

One of the things I envisioned being able to do in this space is to give a bit of the background into my thought process and describe and analyze things I find interesting in my research but that ultimately fall outside the scope of what is publishable or published. So here goes:


I have just had an article rejected by Vetus Testamentum. It's a straight biblical studies journal, one of the best in fact, and since biblical literature or history is not remotely close to my field of study (although of course it has implications for it and it was really useful for me to have gotten a good grounding in it in graduate school) I'm okay with the outcome. It would have been a nice-to-have kind of thing if it had worked out, but I'm not so invested in the text or the idea that I'm going to bother continuing to work on it in the interest of having it appear in print elsewhere.


But this post isn't really about the rejection. It's more about the medieval poem that brought me to thinking about the biblical text in the way that I was. My article was entirely about the biblical text (the argument, more or less, was that the representation of Deborah in the Masoretic Text is an amalgam of pre-biblical types of diviners) but it began its life as a a graduate school seminar paper on an aspect of the book of Judges that I had arrived at because of my reading of medieval poetry. What follows here was my original introduction to the paper. It would always have been too far afield to have been included in a published version of the article, and it is also not a topic I intend to return to developing more fully in this form. Even though I do have an article on the Mrs. Dunash poem in the works, this particular interpretation — that the poet becomes Deborah only in the interpretation of later readers, in much the same way that the biblical Deborah really only became Deborah through later interpretation and editing — is too closely tied to my argument about the biblical text to stand alone, and does not coincide at all with the way I am choosing to interpret the poem on its own. Furthermore, as much as I think it's a huge milestone to be able to look back at something I wrote over three years ago and not cringe and even be kind of pleased with it, my modes and methods of thinking about text have evolved pretty substantially since then (see the added footnote below that wasn't original to the text). But I became rather fond of this introduction, and of the small contribution to its interpretation that I was able to make by pointing out that the poet envisions herself as the Shulamite, not as Deborah; and so I was loathe to consign it to some electronic Genizah, never to be seen again.


There will be a part II to this exposition of the story behind the ultimate academic production, specifically concerned with the identity politics of being a woman academic writing about women in a non-gender-studies framework. (It'll be more abstract that it would have been if the article had been accepted for publication, but it's still something worth thinking through.) But for now, here goes. This is what drew me to write about Deborah to begin with. What follows was the original interdisciplinary introduction to the paper:

Among the more unwitting literary descendants of the biblical poet-prophets is a 10^th-century C.E. Iberian woman known to history only as the wife of her husband: ’îštô šel Dûnăš, thought to have been the wife of Dunash ben Labraṭ, an Arabic-speaking Berber Jew who himself fathered the movement to stand Hebrew poetry upon Arabic metrical feet.[1] Because authorship of a single four-line poem conserved in two witnesses in the Cairo Genizah[2] is attributed to her, modern scholarship makes her to bear the heavy yoke of “the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew language since the biblical poetesses Miriam and Deborah.”[3] But in more than one way she is graceless in her assumption of that mantle.

First, her poem is perhaps more important as a historical record than as a literary triumph. It hints at the reasons for Dunash’s flight from Iberia through its allusions to a conflict between the poet’s husband and the courtier Ḥasdai ibn Shapruṭ and provides a window onto some of the domestic realities of the time and place. But as one among the first Hebrew poems written in the new arabizing Andalusi style, it falls short of what would quickly become the high standards of the form; within a century, the finest Hebrew poets would ply their trade as skillfully as their Arabic-language counterparts. At this early date, though, the meter still falters and the diction is repetitive. But she is, without a doubt, a poet as she writes:

Will her love remember his graceful doe,      her only son in her arms as he parted? On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,      on his wrist she placed her bracelet. As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,      and he in turn took hers from her. Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain,      if its prince gave him half his kingdom?[4]

It is not only feminist critics like the above-cited Tova Rosen who exclaim “Deborah!” upon reading this poem. Even a more staid and descriptive account of the poem, one without an explicit theoretical agenda, contains a punctuated measure of excitement at this bridging of a multi-generational gap: “Mrs. Dunash was apparently a Hebrew poetess, the first since the days of the prophetess Deborah!”[5] But both ends of the scholarly spectrum, from the traditional to the feminist-revisionist, fail equally to note that îštô šel Dûnăš did not cast herself in the mold of ’ēšet Lapîdôt. And so second and more critically, Dunash’s wife fails to fulfill the role of Deborah simply because she did not envision herself in those terms; she has become a latter-day Deborah, an inheritor of that literary tradition, entirely at the hands of the moderns.[6] *

One of the remarkable traits of this poet is that she was educated enough to cite the biblical text in her work. That few women were so trained goes (only!) part of the way to explaining the dearth of women poets writing in Hebrew; quoting the Hebrew Bible in poetry was de rigueur in a way that citing Scripture in Arabic poetry is not.[7] She could, though; and she put her knowledge toward painting a picture of her literary self not as Deborah but as the Shulamite, drawing upon the Song of Songs in three of the four lines of her poem.[8] She does not proclaim victory, dedicate herself to the Lord or pretend to lead or speak for her nation. Instead, she aspires to be remembered by her departing husband just as the Shulamite is inscribed on the arm and heart of her lover.

Just as a medievalist’s reading of Bocaccio might be informed equally by grappling with the works of Dante, who preceded him, as with those of Jorge Luis Borges, his literary heir,[9] one perhaps better understands the song of ’ēšet Lapîdôt for having read the poem of îštô šel Dûnăš. It is this historiography — modern medievalist scholarship’s overeager thrusting of Deborah into a certain critical light — that, perhaps more than anything else, informed the direction in which I ultimately read Deborah’s own history and song, namely the text of Judges 4-5: In the body of medieval poetry, one can see Deborah and read through her as a cipher only until peering into the depths of the poem. But it seems not to be an unfair legacy for the ancient woman who, as I will argue in these pages, is so profoundly not at the heart of the standard that later redactors and lectors have made her to bear. It is precisely in the gaps where the ineffable truest identity of Dunash’s wife does not lie flush against the one we as modern readers would wish her to embody that we can glance at the traces, the beloved ruins, of an earlier Deborah.

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[1] I say “more unwitting” because there were certainly those poets who gladly embraced the identity of their biblical counterparts. Most notable among these is Ismā’il ibn Naġrila — Shemuel ha-Nagid — who famously proclaimed from within his poem The War with Yadayyir (The Dream of the Poem, trans. Peter Cole, 52): “I am the David of my age!”

[2] A high-resolution photograph of the complete fragment (TS-NS 143.46) may be found at the Cambridge University Library’s Genizah research unit web site: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/GOLD/thumbs?class_mark=T-S_NS_143.46. The accession numbers for the two halves of the incomplete fragment, also housed at Cambridge, are Mosseiri VIII.202 and Mosseiri VIII.387.

[3] Tova Rosen. Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 2.

[4] Trans. Peter Cole, p. 27.

[5] Genizah Fragments, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GF/7/. The exclamation point is original.

[6] That there is near but not total unanimity of opinion that the author of the poem was even a woman at all only serves to underscore the way in which the poet has been used the service of the modern imagination.

[7] And we do, in fact, find women (both Jewish and not) who wrote poetry in Arabic. See: Abdulla al-Udhari. Classical Poems by Arab Women. London: Saqi Books, 1999; Mahmud Sobh. Poetisas arábigo-andaluzas. Granada: Biblioteca de Ensayo, 1994; and Teresa Garulo. Diwan de las poetisas de al-Andalus. Madrid: Hiperión, 1986. The medieval Arabic literary critic Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyuṭī (d. 1505) also edited a treatise on and anthology of Arabic-language women poets: Nuzhāt al-Julasā’, ed. ‘Abd al-Latif al-Ashur. Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur’ān, 1986.

[8] Line 2 quotes from Cant. 8:6, line 3 from Cant. 5:7, and line 4 from Cant. 8:6-7.

[9] María Rosa Menocal. Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Bocaccio. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.  

*I'm adding a footnote here that was not original to this text as I wrote it just to stipulate that if I were going to expand it from long-form notes into something for publication, I would naturally develop my thoughts about the extent to which a medievalist is or is not obligated to understand text and circumstance as her medieval reader did or might have.