2014 Michael Camille Essay Prize Winner
Poetry on the edge: modern
medievalism ’ s marginal verses
S.J. Pearce
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures,
New York University, New York, NY.
For more information about postmedieval’s Biennial Michael Camille Prize, see http://www.palgrave-
journals.com/pmed/pmed_essay_prize.html.
Abstract This essay is a preliminary examination of the relationship between prose
and poetry in the work of modern editors of medieval texts, work that typically sepa-
rates out the two modes of writing, even where they coexist unitarily in the source
materials. The principal vehicle for this examination is a unicum manuscript (Bodl.
Mich. MS 50) of a twelfth-century Hebrew ethical will written by Judah ibn Tibbon, a
Granada-born translator of Arabic philosophical and religious texts who spent most of
his adult life in exile in the Provençal city of Lunel. The will is written in both prose and
verse; the late medieval / early modern scribe’s decision to consign the prosodic portions
of the text to a margin running down the outer edge of the page is evocative of the
unease that subsequent students and editors of this and other texts produced by the
Islamicate culture of Spain would confront when editing those texts for modern readers.
By responding to this manuscript’s provocation of format, the essay stakes out the
ground for future and continuing discussion of the marginal place of poetry with respect
to the related prose in modern and contemporary scholarship.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2015) 6, 224–240.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2015.13
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 6, 2, 224–240
www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/