The Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory: Juan Andrés, Historicism, and the De-Centering of Montesquieu's Europe

Abstract

Expelled from Spain in 1779, the Jesuit Juan Andrés moved to Parma in Italy, and published a seven-volume history of nothing less than the literatures of the whole world – ‘Of the Origins and Progress of all Literatures’. Andrés attempted to found literary historiography as a critical method opposed to the Francocentrism of classicist aesthetics. If French classicism had labeled southern literatures (Spanish and Italian) as unreasonable and unworthy of entering modern Europe's republic of letters, historicism was the conviction that every civilization and every period has its own possibilities of aesthetic perfection. In so doing, Andrés was pitting a method of critical historiography against Montesquieu's and the philosophers’ own philosophy of history.

European regions and boundaries: a conceptual history

“…1 It was also part of a general trend of eliminating or minimizing references to extra-European infl uences on European literature: for instance, both the contribution of Egyptian culture to that of Ancient Greek philosophy and that of Arabic to medieval Romance vernacular poetry were gradually occluded in this period and eff ectively replaced by the above schema. As it was organizing its internal literary divisions, Europe was also patrolling its external cultural boundaries (see Bernal 1987;Dainotto 2006a and2006b).…”