Spanish Philology and the Arab Past: A Case Study

Abstract

This article studies how modern philologists have reconstructed a now lost ninth-century Arabic chronicle, the so-called Chronicle of al-Razi, through the account found in fifteenth-century Castilian chronicles of the defeat of the last Visigothic king of Iberia, Rodrigo. In addition to exploring the construction of a textual history that is populated by a series of phantasmal Iberian translators, manuscripts, and copyists, the creation of a modern Castilian edition of this lost Arabic chronicle speaks to the ideological basis and desires of modern, national philology.