Overview

The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters.   In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.  

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9780226795904

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Reviews

Lives of the Great Languages is a keenly original and challenging intervention in the discussion of the life and death of languages. Anyone interested in the history of Arabic language and culture will find it informative and insightful. It is what we need in order to rethink the national and monolingual frame through which we discuss languages, literary traditions, and cultural expressions. --Wen-chin Ouyang, University of London

Author Information

Karla Mallette is professor of Mediterranean studies in the Department of Middle East Studies and professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean and The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History.

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