DEAD LETTERS AND LIVING WORDS

IBERIAN ARABISM AS POLITICAL PHILOLOGY

Claire Gilbert

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

A surge of Arabic studies in Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century responded to specific anxieties connected to national identities. Philology offered a means to contend with Iberia's Islamic past through present-day geopolitics that seemed to threaten national futures. A comparison of lexicographic projects from the last decades of the century shows how philologists relied on translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to recast the history of the Arabic language and its users in Spain and Portugal. Such strategies merged historical and ethnographic techniques that mapped peoples, places, and languages. Collectively, these projects contributed to a revised emplotment of al-Andalus as a vital space for intellectual encounter and especially the translatio studii that was credited as a source of Enlightenment ideals. It became a transhistorical resource for nationalist claims within and beyond Spain and Portugal.