The Speech of Strangers: The Tale of the Andalusi Phoenix

Several medieval Iberian authors, including the twelfth-century Andalusi author Al-Saraqustı̣ ,̄ and the fteenth-century Catalan author Anselm de Turmeda (as well as the fourteenth-century Kalonymous ben Kalonymous, a product of the Judeo-Andalsui tradition), chose imaginative ction as the critical space in which to bring together sometimes competing currents of thought regarding not only the possibility of animal speech but also the larger issues of which it was a by-product—namely, the differences between animals and humans, and the role of each in the created universe. In these Iberian works, the phoenix is the vehicle by which a series of Persian and Islamic religious and popular traditions are brought into dialogue with varying philosophic notions of the nature of animals and men in the material world.