Medieval Andalusian County Culture in the Mediterranean: Hadith Bayad wa Riyad.

• Author: Schippers Arie
• Position: Book review

Medieval Andalusian County Culture in she Mediterranean: Hadith Bayad wa Riyad. By CYNTHIA ROBINSON. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literature, 10. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2007. Pp. x + 225. [pounds sterling]55.

The present study is based upon the only surviving manuscript copy of the thirteenth-century version of the Hadith Bayad wa-Riyad (BR), which has formed part of the collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Ris. 386) since 1535. It is an illuminated manuscript "almost certainly produced in al-Andalus, almost certainly during the first third of the thirteenth century" (p. 1). The manuscript is missing both beginning and final folios, leaving us ignorant therefore not only of some of the story but also of provenance and patronage, which accounts for the author's caveats.

The book offers a complete translation of the illuminated manuscript, which tells the story of an idyllic love, apparently based on an 'Abbasid slave-girl story. There are two variants of the manuscript available--when her study was reaching its completion, a seventeenth-century Maghribi manuscript in the collection of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin (CBL 4120), possibly containing a version of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, was brought to the author's attention. Upon traveling to Dublin, she discovered that the manuscript did indeed contain a much earlier and different version of the narrative. In the final two chapters of the volume under review she briefly presents a comparison, which she went on to address more fully in Le Repertoire narratif arabe medieval, ed. F. Bauden ct al., Geneva, 2008.

In the present book the author provides a summary of the story and translates the Arabic text into English, giving explanations of the illuminations as presented in the manuscript (fourteen of the illustrations are reproduced in black-and-white). According to the author, the manuscript text and image program belong to one and the same culture: Andalusian courtly culture. This Andalusian courtly culture stands alone and differs from "Central Islamic" culture, which is exemplified in illustrations, for instance, from the Paris manuscript of al-Hariri's Maqarnat, whose images are attributed to al-Wasiti. The story in the Andalusian manuscript is comparable to the European genre of the roman idyllique.

The volume's title, Medieval Andalusian Courtly Culture, affirms that the manuscript under study does not belong to "Central Islamic" culture. The "Andalusian" style is...