Ricerc@Sapienza

The question of the profound analogy between themes and motives that marked the birth and development of two cultures of courtly love in the Latin-Christian and Arab Muslim Middle Ages has long been addressed by resorting to the different articulations of the concept of influence, and often moved by instances of an ideological nature. After the fundamental discovery of Samuel Stern, in 1948, confrontation between Arabists and Romance philologists took on a radically different ground. Since then, a long history of alleged, never documented, close encounters in Andalusia finally found a wide range of textual evidence that has forced not only to rethink but to reset the debate and the dialectical ways of the respective partisanship. This article seeks to illustrate, in an attempt to critically analyze the main trends engaged in both the fields, what remains today of the debate on the relationship between the Arabic Andalusian lyric and the rise of the European love-poetry.