Trajectos poéticos da imagética mariana no Al Andalus

Abstract

Among the several motifs used by women who wrote poetry from the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 13th centuries in al-Andalus, Mary the mother of Jesus becomes a main reference. In the exchange of poetic arguments between Walladah and Muhjah bint Attayan, the scene of Mary giving birth next to a palm-tree is explicitly mentioned. This narrative is unknown to the Western culture, although it springs from the Greek and Latin apocrypha Saint-James Proto-Gospel and Pseudo-Matthew. This article proposes to elucidate how these texts relate to each other and to highlight the specificities of the imagistic/imaginary constructs concerning Mary in the Quran, considered in the broader context of a narrative archetype also known to the European culture.