JAF Fellowship Breakfast
The Vicissitudes of Fortunes: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Iberia
Professor Luis M. Girón Negrón, Professor of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures
Over nearly ten centuries, the cultural interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula played a formative role in the historical development of several literatures, both Romance and Semitic (i.e. Spanish, Galician-Portuguese and Catalan as well as Arabic and Hebrew). Sephardic Judaism, Iberian Christianity and Andalusian Islam attained singular levels of cultural virtuosity and intellectual creativity in philosophy, theology, Scriptural studies, legal thought, etc., enabled by their complex engagement with two major civilizations: Arabo-Islamic and European Latin. Their literary record provides one of the most profound and enduring testaments to these attainments. Professor Negrón will provide a brief case study on the cultural legacy of these exchanges: the premodern fate of an Arabic wisdom poem on the fall of Fortune and the problem of evil.