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The Presence of the Sultan Saladin in the Romance Literatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Américo Castro
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Extract

Cultural phenomena never exist except in connexion with the agents of human life that make them possible and endow them with their authentic value. Culture is not of itself a fertilising rain—nothing human can be ‘of itself, an island of abstraction. Literary themes, then, are things that happen in and to someone's historical life. Their value is manifested to its full extent when the theme that interests us is seen as the expression, through an individual, of a particular people, who, in giving life to the literary theme, achieves its self-realisation in terms of a value structure. We have rather too frequently thought about comparative literature as if its motivating force were always some theme common to several literatures, and as if these literatures were limited to the historico-geographical space in which the migratory theme takes up residence and progressively ‘evolves’. This over-abstract and anti-vital idea leads to another, the notion of the theme in its pure state, the Urtema, in many comparative studies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 2 , Issue 8 , September 1954 , pp. 13 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 For a further explanation of this idea, see my La realidad histórica de España, Mexico, 1954 (translated into English under the title The Structure of Spanish History, Princeton, 1954). The present paper was designed to offer a concrete application of the historical method expounded there.

2 The most important of the studies in question are: Gaston Paris, ‘La Légende de Saladin', Journal des Savants (May-August, 1893); by the same author, ‘La Parabole des trois anneaux', Revue des Etudes Juives, XI (1885); Mario Penna, La parabola dei tre anelli e la toleranza del medio evo, Turin, 1952. These studies contain references to still others which need not be mentioned here.

3 Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 1927, p. 174.

4 The Tarjumán Al-Ashwaq, tr. R. A. Nicholson, London, 1911, p. 69.

5 Ibid., p. 67.

6 Johannes Hartmann, Die Persönlichkeit des Sultans Saladin im Urteil der abendländischen Quellen, 1933, p. 100.

7 See B. Nardi, ‘L'averroismo del "primo amico" di Dante', in Dante e la Cultura medievale, 1949, p. 93. To question the survival of individual souls does not necessarily mean to deny God's existence.

8 ' … la vergüenza face a omne ser esforzado e franco e leal e de buenas costumbres e de buenas maneras e facer todos los bienes que face.'