The solitudes of the hapax-legomenon: on Shem Tov de Carrion

Abstract

Solitude is one of the classical themes of religion, mysticism, philosophy and literature and has attracted scholarly attention. Its presence in the oeuvre of the bilingual fourteenth century poet Shem Tov de Carrion de los Condes however has been largely ignored. The examination of the texts produced by him shows that he invested in literary developments of the theme. This naturally takes us to evaluate some of the problems in the critical corpus. One of these is that of extremes: extreme isolation between different critical currents separated by linguistic barriers but also overemphasis on exclusive “sources” or “traditions” in cases where the themes may be shown to be universal. In this article an attempt is made to show the possibilities of a comparative approach to the work. At the same time there is an emphasis on the need to study Shem Tov in context: historical context of course (when the evidence permits it) but also a linguistic context.