Love poetry as social practice: On the function of medieval Sicilian love lyric in Arabic and Italian

This article problematizes the traditional narrative of Le Origini , according to which the beginnings of Italian literature were based on Provençal examples. I contend that this narrative is incomplete, as it overlooks entirely the rich heritage of Sicilian Arabic poetry that predates the Sicilian romance lyric by only a few decades. Based on a comparative analysis, I aim to demonstrate how the Sicilian romance lyric is also rooted in Sicily’s Islamic past. In support of my argument, I analyze excerpts from three Arabic poems from Islamic and Norman Sicily and then read them alongside Pier della Vigna’s canzone ‘Amor da cui move tuttora e vene’ (Love, from which always come). With my comparison, I call attention to how the poets of the Scuola Siciliana , like their Arabic predecessors at the Kalbid court of Palermo, used verse to craft a code of social competence shaped by the lore and language of the love poem. My comparison opens up a re-examination of Le Origini : can the Sicilian-Arabic poems penned in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries cast new light on the rhymes of the Scuola Siciliana ?