Petrus A lfonsi and his Dialogus

B a c k g r o u n d , C o n t e x t , R e c e p t io n

Edited by

Carmen Cardclle de Hartmann and Philipp Roelli

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B e r n a r d A n d e n m a tt e n (Lausanne), J e a n - P a t r i c e B o u d e t (Paris), C h ar le s B u r n e t t (London), J a c q u e s C h ifFo leau (Avignon), C h ia r a C r i s c ia n i (Paria), Paolo G al luzz i (Firenze), T u l l io G r e g o r y (Ronta), R u e d i ïm b a c h (Lausanne), D an ie l le J a c q u a r t (Paris), M ic h a e l M c V a u g h (C h a p c l H ill , N C , L iS A ) , P ie ro M o r p u r g o (Vicenza), M i c h e l Pastoureau (Paris), M ic h e la Pereira ( S I S M E L ) , F ran cesco Santi (Cassino), J e a n - C l a u d e S c h m it t (Paris), G ia c in ta Sp inosa (Ronta), G i o r g i o Stabile (Routa), J e a n - Y v e s T i l l ie t te (G en ève), B a u d o u i n Van den A b e e le (B ru xe lles-L ou vain -la-N cu vc), J e a n W ir t h (M aisons-Lajjittc)

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TABLE OF C O N T E N T S

Editors’ Preface

Francesco Santi, Pictro Alfonso e Anselmo di Canterbury

Wolfram Drevvs, Intellektuelles Kapital und sein praktischer N ut zen bci Pet rus Alfonsi

Gorge K. Fiasselhoff, Petrus Alfonsis Judentum vor dem Hin- tergrund seiner Zeit

Charles Burnett, Petrus Alfonsi and Adelard of Bath Revisited

Franz Hasenhütl, Die Muhammad-Vita bci Petrus Alfonsi und bei Walter von Compiègne

Anna Sapir Abulafia, Moyscs in Service of Petrus in Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus

Peter Schwagmeier, Zu den alttestamentlichen Bibelzitaten irn Dialogus des Petrus Alfonsi

Régula Forster, Der abwesende Dritte. Die Darstellung des Islam im titulus V des Dialogus des Petrus Alfonsi

Joanna Skwara, Proverbia and Sententiae as Argumentation Strategies in the Dialogus of Petrus Alfonsi

Michelina di Cesare, Petrus Alfonsi and Islamic Culture: Liter- ary and Lexical Strategies

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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

227 Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Darko Senekovic, Thomas Ziegler, Modes of Variability: the Textual Transmission of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus

249 Isabelle Draelants, Libellus elegans satis contra Iudeos et Sarracenos: la rédactioti du Dialogus dans le Spéculum histo- riale de Vincent de Beauvais

301 Isabelle Draelants, Hélinand de Froidmont et l ’exégèse hébraïque du Dialogus de Petrus Alfonsi

321 Ryan Szpiech, «Petrus Alfonsi ... Errcd Greatly»: Alfonso of Valladolid’s Imitation and Critique of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus

349 José Martinez Gâzquez, Titulus V of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus atid Alfonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei

371 John Tolan, Afterword

381 Index locorum Scripturae Sanctae

383 Index aliorum fontium

389 Index nominum

393 Index codicum

VI

P E T R U S A LFO N SI A N D HIS D IA L O G U S

B A C K G R O U N D , C O N T E X T , R E C E P T IO N

John Tolan

AFTERWORD

Who was Petrus Alfonsi? As Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann reminds us in the introduction to this volume, we have only the disparate pieces of information that Alfonsi himself gives us in his various works. When I wrote my Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers twenty years ago, I tried to eut away the vines of spéculation that had surrounded him, false information stipu- lating his date and place of birth and death, the dates of his works the Disciplina clericalis or the Epistola ad Peripateticos, his hypothetical return to Spain after his sojourn in England and France, or his supposed work as a translator in Toledo (on the basis of unsubstantiated speculation, he had been identified with twelfth-century author Peter of Toledo). What we do in fact know is quite modest. He was a Jew named Moses, schooled in Hebrew and Arabie, who was baptised on the feast day of Sts. Peter and Paul (June 29th) 1106, in the Cathedral of Huesca (which had been a mosque until its conversion ten years earlier). Stephen, Bishop of Huesca, baptised him and Alfonso I, king of Aragon, stood as his godfather, which suggests that Moses had been in the king’s entourage. Moses took, as his baptismal name, Petrus, in honor of St. Peter and added Alfonsi, in honor of his royal godfather. Some of his works have internai evidence that allow us to associate a year with their composition: m o for the Dialogus, 1116 for his translation of the astronomical tables of al- Klnvàrizmï. In 1120, the English astronomer Walcher of Malvern wrote De dracone, in which he mentions Petrus Alfonsi as his «master», suggesting that by that date Alfonsi was in England and teaching in some capacity. Alfonsi’s Epistola ad peripateticos attests bis presence in «Francia», probably after 1120, and lias him teach-

371«Micrologus’ Library» 66, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014

JOHN TOLANing there. These are the bare bones of biographical fact, which I was by and large content to limit myself to twenty years ago. Thanks to work over the past twenty years1, and thanks in par- ticular to the articles brought together in this volume, we are now able to put a bit of flesh on these bones.First of all, we can say more about his éducation. Peter

Schwagmeier has shown us how well he knew the Hebrew bible, knowledge which probably reflects training as a rabbi; this impression is confirmed by the paper of Gorge Hasselhoff, who has shown that Alfonsi’s familiarity with the Talmud was beyond what one could expect from an educated Jew in al-Andalus. Moses was thus probably a prominent member of his Jewish community, at least in ternis of his éducation, which may help explain why king Alfonso took an active part in his baptism. Alfonsi’s knowledge of Arabie, and of Arabie texts (literary and scientific), bears witness to a strong training, but not one that was exceptional or brilliant. R egula Forster and José Martinez remind us that the primary source for his anti-Islamic titulus five of the Dialogus was the 1oth-century Risâlat al-Kindi, which sug- gests that he was in contact with Arabic-speaking Christians, be it before or after his conversion.Why, then, did this prominent and educated Jew decide to

convert to Christianity in 1106? Here we can only speculate, beyond accepting (or rejecting) the justification he himself gives in the prologue of the Dialogus, where he presents it as an act of divine grace as God helped him shed the «tunic of iniquity» that was his Jewish faith. Beyond this rather standard trope, he affirms that Jews criticised his conversion on three grounds: (i) «I had abandoned all sense of shame»; (ii) «I had done this because I had not understood the words of the prophets and the Law appro- priately»; and (iii) «Still others accused me of vainglory and

I. See, aniong others, Ch. Burnett, «Encounters with Razi the Philoso­pher: Constantine the African, Petrus Alfonsi and Ramon Marti», Pensamiento hispano medieval: Homenaje a Horacio Santiago-Otero, ed. J.—M. Soto Rabanos, Madrid 1998, 973-92; D. J. Lasker, «Mission, Conversion, and Polemic — the Revisionist View», Jewish Quartcrly Revicw, 100, no. 4 (2010), 705-11; C. Leone, Alphunsus De Arabicis Eventibus: Studio ed edizione critica, Roma 2011; M. J. Lacarra Ducay (ed.), Estudios sobre Pedro Alfonso de Huesca. Huesca 1996.

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AFTERWORDfalsely claimed that I had done this for worldly honor»2. His stated purpose, in writing the Dialogus, is thus to defend himself from his Jewish critics; this also suggests a falling out with his former community which could predate or postdate his conver­sion. Was his previous alienation from his Jewish community one of the factors that pushed him to the baptismal font? Or was it his decision to convert (for whatever reasons) that caused the rupture with his former coreligionists? What he does not say, but what he no doubt felt (along with many other converts) was the need to prove himself to his new Christian compatriots as a sin­cere convert who understands his new faith and adheres to it. This is the unwritten subtext of many narratives of conversion and many works of apologetics and polemics by converts: to prove to their new coreligionists the sincerity of their conversion and the solidity of their new faith. Could the closing off of his former community and a frosty reception from some of his new coreligionists be among the reasons that pushed him to leave Aragon in the years following his completion of the Dialogus?For emigrate he did, sometime in the iiios. We find him in

England, as we noted, teaching Walcher of Malvern, before 1120. How and why did he cross the Pyrenees and end up in England? Here the contribution of Francesco Santi is very important. According to his hypothesis, through a Cluniac connection Alfonsi went to England (perhaps Reading). Santi has shown that Alfonsi knew (and criticized) the work of Anselm of Canterbury and Gilbert Crispin, which shows a high level of integration into the intellectual life of early twelfth-century England. At any rate, we can imagine Alfonsi, who cornes from the sunny Mediter- ranean (a land defined, for Braudel, by the cultivation of the olive and the grape), to a cold and misty island he may hâve read about in Arab geographical manuals, a land not of wine and olive oil, but of beer and of rancid butter. Like many immigrants before and after him, he may have arrived with a sense of cul­tural and intellectual superiority to those around him (what Wol­fram Drews calls his «intellectual capital»), while at the same

2. Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogus, prol. 1 §4, ed. Cardelle et al. = PL 157, 538A- B (translation Resnick, p. 41)

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JOHN TOLANtime feeling perhaps a certain inferiority, a need to prove himself by showing that he knows how to drop names (then, Anselm and Gilbert; now, football players and pop stars).It is difficult to know exactly how he assured his livelihood:

he seems never to have had any official ecclesiastical or institu- tional affiliation, as Wolfram Drews has noted. One thirteenth- century manuscripts of the Disciplina clericalis présents him as the royal physician to English King Henry I: this is possible, and indeed plausible, but it is a late and uncertain testimony. Clearly, as Francesco Santi has shown, he had access to libraries (perhaps through Cluniac connections). A clear self-image as a teacher and scholar cornes through in his works. Joanna Skwara shows how he uses proverbs and sententiae to show his own command of authority. He also presents himself as an expert on the Hebrew language, as we see in a passage of Dialogus, titulus XI4 presented by Skwara, where he explains how «co» can mean both «sic and hue». Beyond making the theological point at hand, Alfonsi is parading his own credentials as an expert. In other works, his Epistola ad peripateticos in particular, he frequently evokes the notion of experientia, often translated as «experience» but sometimes more usefully rendered as «expertise» 5. Above ail, we see this in his favorite trope of the dialogue between his nar- rator/self (Petrus in the Dialogus, a philosopher in the Disciplina clericalis, a teacher in the Epistola ad Peripateticos) and his pupil (Moyses in the Dialogus, as Anna Abulafia has shown us; a son or pupil in the Disciplina, errant or absent students in the Epistola).

Schooled in Hebrew and Arabie, when and how did he learn Latin? Here we have no evidence, but clearly, as Francesco Santi has shown, by the time he is working in England he has a good command of the language and is able to engage with recent Latin works concerning Judaism. Did he work alone or did he have collaborators for any of his works? Charles Burnett shows 3 4 5

3. Cambridge, University Library, Ii.VI.11, fol. 9jr.4. Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogus, t. 11 §29-30, Ed. Cardelle et al. = PL 157»

653C-D, transi. Resnick, 243-44.5. J.Tolan, «Ratio et experientia dans la promotion de la science arabe dans

le monde latin au XIIe siècle», Expertus sum: l’expérience par les sens en philo­sophie naturelle médiévale, ed.T. Bénatouïl & I. Draelants, Firenze 2011, 257-68.

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AFTERWORDthat there is little evidence that he worked in collaboration with Adélard of Bath or that Adelard was his student, despite what a number of scholars (including Burnett and myself) had previ- ously thought. He did, however, clearly work with Walcher of Malvern. There is no evidence of his working in collaboration on either the Dialogus or the Disciplina, but such collaboration is not implausible.Petrus Alfonsi was a key actor in what historians hâve dubbed

«the renaissance of the twelfth century». He presents himself (as do contemporaries such as Adelard) as a follower of reason (ratio), and one of his key strategies of self-promotion is to attack rival authorities as «irrational»: either explicitly (Macrobius in his astrological works, the Talmud in the Dialogus) or implicitly (Anselm and Gilbert, as we have seen). He cuts a quirky figure, though, as many of his arguments will quickly seem out of place in the context of twelfth-century theology and scholasticism. In the Dialogus, he lias Petrus and Moyses enthusiastically discuss climate and astronomy, often with little or no relevance to the theological arguments supposedly at hand, as Stefan Schrôder has shown6. He invents a bogus, original argument to explain why the Southern hemisphere is uninhabitable, complete (in a number of manuscripts) with a diagram showing that the sun’s orbit around the earth is decentered, making the sun pass doser to the Southern hemisphere than the northern; this argument (which seems to be his own) shows inventiveness and cleverness, but also lack of System. The saine carelessness cornes across in his astro- nomical work: he did such a sloppy job of the al-Khwârizmï tables that Adelard (a better mathematician and astronomer, though of course not as good an Arabist) had to redo it (as Charles Burnett has shown).I made the argument twenty years ago of the importance of

his legacy and also of its diversity. The work doue by the team in Zurich over the past few years, along with the contributions in this volume, confirm, expand and nuance that view. What is clear is that already during his lifetime, Petrus Alfonsi and his two principle works were well received in some of the most impor-

6. His presentation will be published in a separate monograph on medi- aeval cartography.

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JOHN TOLANtant intellectual circles in Northern Europe — in particular in Cluniac and subsequently Cistercian monastic networks in Eng- land and in France, as is amply confirmed and documented here in the articles of Francesco Santi and of Carmen Cardelle De Flartmann, Darko Senekovic, and Thomas Ziegler.Different readers came to the Dialogus with widely varying

interests and expectations. Some (a small number) were most interested in the scientific (particularly astronomical) passages of the Dialogus: mostly a few readers in England, as I showed in Petrus Alfousi and his Médieval Readers.Many readers turned to the Dialogus for information on

Judaism, either to help them understand the text of the Old Tes­tament or to forge new polemics against Judaism (or both). Isabelle Draelants shows how Vincent of Beauvais’s rewriting of the Dialogus and incorporation of it into his Speculum historiale, helps embody Petrus Alfonsi as an auctoritas on Judaism. In the aftermath of the Talmud burning in Paris 1239, the Dialogus, as one of the few Christian anti-Jewish sources with a firm knowl­edge of Talmudic texts, and which integrates that knowledge into a polemical anti-Jewish strategy, niust hâve seemed particu­larly important and relevant to Vincent, who has no qualms about jettisoning anything in the text which does not fit his agenda. Through the many manuscripts of the Speculum historiale, Alfonsi’s ideas (in this modified form) were introduced to thou- sands of m edieval readers. Ryan Szpiech has shown how much Alfonso of Valladolid’s fourteenth-century Flebrew anti-Jewish polemics was modeled on Alfonsi’s Dialogus, notably how he modeled his argument for the Trinity on Alfonsi even as he crit- icized it and distanced himself from it. Anxiety of influence? No doubt Alfonso, as interested in self-promotion as his 12th century namesake, wished to prove his own intellectual superiority to his mentor. But also, as Szpiech suggested, he sought to incarnate a new, more «Jewish» and «Hebrew» model of a seeker of (Christ­ian) truth, a sort of m edieval Jews for Jesus.

Other readers turned to the Dialogus because they were inter- ested in Islam, what Alfonsi refers to in titulus V as the religio muzalemitica7 (Alfonsi is rare among Latin writers to use a word

7. Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogus, t. 5 §1, Ed. Cardelle et al. = PL 157, 599B-37é

derived from the Arab word «muslim» — in general he uses the more standard Latin word sarracena). Franz Hasenhütl’s study of Walter of Compiègne shows how at the same time that Alfonsi crafted polemics based on al-Kindï and Mozarab anti-Muslim polemics, other authors in northern Europe made Muhammad into a colorful trickster figure. José Martinez has given us an overview of the importance of the Dialogus for later authors who sought knowledge of Islam: Dominicans such as Humbert of Romans, Vincent of Beauvais, Jacobus de Voragine, and Riccoldo da Monte Croce, or the Franciscan Alonso de Espina. As Miche- lina di Cesare notes, Alfonsi makes a clear distinction throughout his works between Sarraceni (Muslims), who erroneously follow the pseudo-prophet Muhammad, and Arabes, whose learning and ratio lie constantly extols.Taken together, the articles in this volume confirm the impor­

tant and unique place that Petrus Alfonsi occupies in the history of the twelfth-century renaissance: both as an important early translator and transmitter to the Latin world of Arabie and Hebrew learning (in a wide range of disciplines) and as a key actor in the promotion of ratio as the basis of intellectual endeavor. Much of his thought was quirky and some of his rea- soning sloppy, and was quickly surpassed and forgotten: the scarce manuscripts of his astronomical works fell quickly into oblivion and redactors and reviser expunged much of his astron- omy (and some of his questionable theology) from their later redactions and versions of his Dialogus. Yet his two principal works, the Disciplina clericalis and the Dialogus, remained popular and widely read, as the many manuscripts of each work (and their deployment by later authors) attests. The fortheoming crit- ical edition of the Dialogns will be a great help in deepening and nuancing our knowledge of the roles played by this key text in the intellectual history of M edieval Europe.

AFTERWORD

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