Orientalisches Mittelalter.

• Author: Gelder, Geert Jan van

The old edition of the Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft was published in twenty-two volumes from 1923 to 1938. It included volumes on Indian, Japanese, Ancient Hebrew, Babylonian-Assyrian and ancient Egyptian literature, but, surprisingly, none on the literatures of the medieval Middle East. So the volume under review is a welcome and necessary innovation in the new edition, of which vols. 1-3 and 6-23 have already appeared since 1972. On the dust jacket three more volumes are promised, one of them on (presumably modern) Near Eastern and Central Asian literatures.

The titles both of the volume and of the series demand some clarification. Here, "Orientalisch" does not mean "Oriental"; it is an infelicitous equivalent of Middle Eastern (including, of course, Arab Spain and North Africa). "Mittelalter" or Middle Ages is a problematical term when applied to the Middle East. Here it extends from several centuries before the coming of Islam until c. 1500 A.D., or, in the case of Ottoman literature, c. 1600, in some respects rather arbitrary dates for the literatures under discussion. The editor of the volume cannot be blamed for these decisions; he explains the strictures imposed on him in an introductory chapter. Originally, the title of the volume was to be Islamisches Mittelalter; this was abandoned in favor of a regional designation, in accordance with other volumes in the series. Non-Islamic literatures are represented, yet as a whole the volume is Islamocentric. Thus the chapters dealing with Syriac and Iranian literature before Islam are conceived primarily as pointing toward Islam, a procedure that may not be quite palatable to specialists in these fields. However, the four chapters by Carsten Colpe, on Hellenization and de-Hellenization, the Iranian tradition, Judaeo-Christian literature and Gnosticism are, as far as I am able to judge, very competent.

The presence of these chapters, and that on Jewish literature within the context of Islam (by Johann Maier, pp. 524-45), excellent though they may be, makes the volume rather heterogeneous, through no fault of the authors or the editor. It is not merely a result of the greater cultural unity of Islam as set against other Middle Eastern traditions, but is also connected with the term Literaturwissenschaft of the series title. The chapters on Islamic literatures (Arabic, Persian and Turkish) restrict themselves largely to what may be called belles-lettres, excluding religious and...