Between Arabic Letters, History and Enlightenment: The Emergence of Spanish Literary Nation in Juan Andrés 1

. The culture of the eighteenth century played a crucial role in proposing a positive image of Islam. The Valencian Jesuit Juan Andrés was particularly engaged in this re-evaluation of Arab culture in order to stress how much Iberian Arabs had contributed to the renaissance of Western culture and civilisation. In his treaty Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (1782-1799) Andrés committed himself to outlining specific elements of the Medieval renaissance nurtured by Spanish Arabs between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. His interpretation on Al-Andalus concealed a «patriotic» intent, namely that of glorifying the historical role of Spain (rather than Italy or France) in the development of the European literary canon.

I will begin by saying a few words about Andrés. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the work and thought of the Valencian Jesuit, which has emerged particularly in the wake of the bicentenary of his death . From my point of view, Andrés is the archetypal eighteenth-century enlightened, rather than Enlightenment, Jesuit, open to the moderate currents of the Enlightenment and engaged in an effort to reconcile two traditions: that of the Catholic culture (whether official or not), and the culture of the Enlightenment, or more precisely the «moderate mainstream» elements of the Enlightenment, to use Jonathan Israel's definition 6 . Along with hundreds of other Jesuits throughout Europe, Andrés pursued a strategy of consciously creating an accommodation between ideas, methods and theories (such as Locke's sensism and natural law) 7 that were at the foundation of the Enlightenment with Catholic dogma and culture 8 . This attempted appropriation, or, if one prefers, this hybridisation of Catholicism and Enlightenment, could already be seen in certain parts of the Society of Jesus in the first half of the century, but it accelerated considerably after the order's canonical suppression in 1773, when a substantial sector of the dissolved Order of St. Ignatius worked to block the work of the Jansenists and of reformist groups within the Catholic Church (so-called Reform Catholicism according to the label adopted by Dale K. Van Kley) 9 , whom it blamed for the demise of the Society. At the heart of this moderate acceptance of the cultural tendencies of the century was an express desire to ascertain with which of the Enlightenment's interlocutors it might have been possible to enter into dialogue 10 . Within the culture of the European Enlightenment the enemy, meanwhile, was unmistakably «the spirit of irreligion» that the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal, Mercier and other philosophes had already disseminated in every sector of ancien régime society. Andrés's adhesion to the moderate Enlightenment can be clearly seen in his obvious criticism, clearly present in all his main works, of Aristotelian philosophy and in his adoption of the new French genre of the encyclopaedia: he was among the various former Jesuits (the Venetian confrere Alessandro Zorzi comes to mind) who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, reworked the taxonomy of knowledge introduced by the Encyclopédie in the light of Catholic orthodoxy (and, therefore, defended the scientific status of metaphysics and theology) 11 . As the author of dozens of scholarly and popular pamphlets, Juan Andrés's literary fame was based in particular on his encyclopaedic Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale d'ogni letteratura (On the Origin, Progress and Present State of All Literature), whose first edition was made available in seven volumes in Parma by the Bodoni press between 1782 and 1799 12 . In the same years the book was translated into Spanish by his brother Carlos, although the two volumes relating to the religious sciences were excluded, and in 1805 a French version of the first volume was published 13 .
Andrés's treatise was a historical account of universal culture that aimed to fuse philosophical-conjectural history with erudite history 14 . He took the cosmopolitan and global approach of the first (including, therefore, its analysis of non-European cultures) 15 , along with its faith in the progress of human knowledge, its interest in comparing the salient traits of different civilisations and its tendency to provide general interpretations, in part through analogy 16 . From the second he adopted, apart from an interest in chronological succession ( historical context), a philological rigour in the interpretation of documents and critique of sources.
The Jesuit's comparative approach is undoubtedly one of the more interesting aspects of his methodology 17 , but it should be made clear that his adoption of it did not imply any rejection of Eurocentricism, which in fact ended up greatly reinforced. Andrés considered Western culture, classical and modern, to be superior to that of any other civilisation, past or present 18 . His main preoccupation was therefore to understand how Europe had gained its primacy in the arts and sciences, first in the classical and then in the modern age. According to Andrés, human progress was best measured in terms of human chronology and advanced by means of the transfer of cultural hegemony from one civilisation to another. The course of civilisation, from the Flood onwards, had basically followed the path of the sun, that is, it had started from the East in Asia, before reaching the West in Egypt and Greece 19 . The genuine danger that the Jesuit feared was that this astronomical revolution would continue its journey towards the West and that cultural primacy would shift from Europe and settle in America. Thus when in his work he used the noun "West" and the adjective "Western", he was thinking above all of Europe while considering American culture to still be in an immature phase comparable to childhood 20 .
Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale d'ogni letteratura was not, however, merely a universal history of human culture, but was also a 'literary' history. As such, it belonged to a genre that from the end of the seventeenth century had enjoyed prolonged success in Italy, from Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni and Giacinto Gimma to Girolamo Tiraboschi 21 . In this context Andrés might have taken inspiration from Denina's Discorso sopra le vicende della letteratura (Discourse on the Events of Literature, 1760) 22 23 . It should be added, however, that the Valencian Jesuit's philosophy of history did not entirely chime with the theories put forward by his Modenese former confrere; in particular Andrés believed there was potential for further improvement in the belles lettres and liberal arts, just as there was in the sciences 24 .
As for matters of taxonomy, Andrés appreciated the division of human knowledge theorized by Bacon and later reworked and refined by D'Alembert in the Discours préliminaire, with its outline of the faculties of Man (history/memory, poetry/imagination, philosophy/ reason) 25 . However, he believed it unsuited to those taking a historical approach. While D'Alembert's taxonomy was «completely correct if we consider the relationships between the sciences and the faculties of our mind […], it is not very useful in following the progress made in the sciences» 26 . Put another way, the tree of knowledge and disciplines adopted by the Encyclopédie did not provide «a general philosophical history of literature», in other words a historical account of the development  26 Andrés, Dell' origine, cit., vol. 1, p. iv. of human understanding 27 . This absence of historical sequencing meant that Andrés's own taxonomy was instead inspired by a more traditional classification that divided knowledge into two major branches, that of the belles lettres and that of the sciences. Individual disciplines and genres all fitted within these two major categories 28 .
As Dainotto has argued, the approach taken by Andrés in Dell'origine may certainly be considered typical of the 'historicism' favoured particularly by eighteenth-century intellectuals belonging to «subaltern Europe», and was a reaction against the cultural dominance of France and its idea of a single, unstoppable form of technical-scientific progress. In essence Andrés's notion of progress was very similar to that of Giambattista Vico, aspects of which were also shared by Tiraboschi in his Storia della letteratura italiana: for Vico the history of mankind was a series of events and recurrences that followed a physiological cycle (childhood, maturity, old age). Progress was therefore not linear, nor was it a unique and continuous process of improvement: not only were setbacks, slowdowns and decadence entirely possible (although never irreversible), but all civilisations or «nations» followed distinct paths marked by their own periods and staging posts. As a result, it was even possible to discern some progress in the «dark times», including in the high Middle Ages 29 . Finally, the progress of civilisations was the result of a series of «extrinsic» and «intrinsic» natural, political, economic and moral causes that could be reconstructed ex post through historical research 30 . Andrés therefore rejected the climactic determinism theorised by Montesquieu and accepted by numerous Italian thinkers, including Saverio Bettinelli, another fellow Jesuit 31 .
Andrés's knowledge of Arab culture emerges above all in the first volume of his work, although he also analyses its various branches in later volumes, in particular at the beginning of the second, dedicated to 27 It is perhaps necessary to make clear at this point that Andrés and his contemporaries used the word 'literature' to denote all culture, i.e. the sum of knowledge acquired, and cultural artefacts produced by humanity. 28 32 . It was not a question of yielding to one of the most popular literary fashions of the eighteenth century, nor did the Jesuit adopt an affected Orientalism: Andrés's Arabism, far from being a literary artifice with which to criticise the customs and values of ancien régime European society (as in the well-known cases of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes or José Cadalso's Cartas Marruecas) 33 , was instead an interpretative paradigm helpful in explaining the origins of «modern European culture» and, at the same time, in defining a new concept of the Spanish «nation» 34 .

«ARAB LETTERS» AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPEAN CIVILISATION
In the first volume of Dell'origine Andrés provides an annotated synthesis of the entire work, and thus a general historical and philosophical overview of world culture and of every major civilisation, from the origins of humanity to the modern day, that is to the eighteenth century. A large portion of the volume -chapter VIII to chapter XI, or 215 pages out of 524 -is given over to an examination of the central role played by the Arabs in the development of Western European society. In these chapters Andrés, making use of the information and interpretations offered by the contemporary «Republic of Arabic Letters», issues a resolute call for a new interpretative canon relating to the birth of Western modernity. His essential idea is that «modern literature, not only in the sciences but also in the belles lettres, recognises 32 34 Andrés had probably developed an interest in Arab culture even before the expulsion. In addition to being a native of the Kingdom of Valencia, one of the two places where the Arab past was still very visible in the local architecture and material culture, the Jesuit considered himself a disciple of the foremost Iberian scholar of the period, namely the Valencian Gregorio Mayans, who had also studied Arab antiquities and the link between Arab culture and Catalan-Provençal rhyming poetry (specifically in the Arab culture as its mother» 35 . I will attempt to provide a very brief outline of the Jesuit's arguments in support of this interpretation. Firstly, Andrés distinguishes very clearly between Islamic religion and Arab culture. While defining Islam in well-worn terms as a «blind superstition» and Mohammed as an «impostor» 36 , he professes his approval for one of the principal methodological developments in seventh-and eighth-century scholarly research (as put forward by Edward Pococke, Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville, Simon Ockley, Thomas Hyde, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, Albert Schultens, Miguel Casiri and others): Islam was worthy of being considered one of the greatest civilisations to have ever existed, and its history and cultural production deserved to be studied on their own merits, independently of any judgment that might be made of the Muslim faith and the Quran 37 . Thus Andrés separates the examination of Arab culture from that of the Muslim religion, an approach that allows him to avoid any analysis of the most problematic question relating to the history of the Arabs, namely that of the existence of a causal link between their military conquests (or attempts to civilise others) and their religion. This had hitherto been a subject that occupied the minds of many European thinkers, beginning with Machiavelli's Il Principe and Discorsi.
Secondly, Andrés argues that before the emergence of humanism in the fifteenth century and the Renaissance in the sixteenth, the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries had witnessed another cultural «rebirth», one that came about thanks to the Arabs and whose epicentre was in the Iberian Peninsula. The true achievement of the Arab sovereigns and intellectuals -beginning with those of the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), which had turned «Baghdad into a true emporium of science» 38 -had been the recovery of Greek philosophy and science and the ability to transmit this 35 Andrés, Dell'origine, cit., vol. 1, p. xi. On the Arabism cultivated by several expelled Jesuits, especially Catalans and Valencians, cfr. Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana, cit., pp. 36-38, 301-403. 36 Andrés, Dell' origine, cit., vol. 1, pp. 120 and 131. It should be remembered that in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756) Voltaire had defined Mohammed as a prophet, conqueror and legislator: war had been the means by which he spread the religion he had founded. On this, cfr. Bevilacqua, The Republic, cit., pp. 178-182. 37 The removal of the religious element present in many aspects of Arab culture was a typical measure taken by the Catholic scholars who in the eighteenth century occupied the Arabic language professorships in numerous Roman colleges, starting with the Maronite one (directed until 1773 by the Jesuits): A. Girard, L' enseignement de l' arabe à Rome a XVIII e siècle, in Maghreb-Italie. Des passeurs médiévaux à l'orientalisme moderne, sous la dir. de B. Grévin, École Française de Rome, Rome 2010, pp. 209-234: 232. 38 Andrés, Dell' origine, cit., vol. 1, pp. 118-120. legacy to all of Europe 39 . Indeed, Andrés observes, the Arabs even added to Greek knowledge, supplementing it with that of the Persians, Indians and Chinese 40 . This was demonstrated by a myriad of inventions, many of Chinese origin, to which Andrés dedicates the whole of chapter X, entitled Delle invenzioni tramandateci dagli Arabi (On the inventions handed down to us by the Arabs), including paper produced from linen, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the pendulum, and, of course, Arabic numerals 41 .
In this way, at least in the fields of chemistry, algebra, geometry, botany, and natural history in general, in optics, geography, astronomy and medicine, the Arabs managed to improve «the disciplines they got from the Greeks» 42 . Their achievements, however, did not end there: apart from bringing about the «recovery» and providing «sacred asylum» to classical Greco-Roman culture, which had been «brutally chased out of Europe» by the barbarian invaders after the end of the Roman Empire, and thus saving it from obscurity and paving the way for new developments, the Arabs also established new educational structures, namely the academies (by which Andrés meant the madrasas), colleges and astronomical observatories that were then handed on to European society, especially via Spain 43 .
The Iberian Peninsula had played a central role in this process of transmitting Arab culture to Western Europe. In fact, in the Spain of the Umayyads (755-1031), Almovarids (1086-1147) and Almohads (1150-1250) the preservation and acquisition of the knowledge of classical antiquity had morphed into a cultural mediation that was not brought to an end even by the Reconquista, during which the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula continued to absorb the learnings, texts, literary tastes and scientific inventions of the Islamic kingdoms that they confronted on the battlefield. Among the many examples of this phenomenon, Andrés pointed to the widely known case of the support given by the Castilian king Alfonso X to the Toledo School of Translators 44 . Andrés was aware, however, that the weak point of his interpretation concerned philosophy: in this context many eighteenth-century scholars, such as Jacob Brucker 45 , had accused the Arabs of having corrupted the study of philosophy as they had been responsible for the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle (particularly his Logic) 46 and thus for providing Saint Thomas with the material needed to found Christian scholasticism 47 . Andrés asserts that «the abuse of ingenuity and reason» that Aristotelianism had undoubtedly caused could not be imputed to the Arabs of Al-Andalus but was instead the fault of the Christian theologians of the fifth to eighth centuries. At the most, he admits, Arab commentaries on the works of Aristotle, such as those by Al-Farabi and Avicenna, had contributed to the development of scholasticism prior to the systematisation carried out by Saint Thomas, who then made «Christian the doctrine of Aristotle and the Arabs» 48 . The greater truth, however, was that Christian scholasticism had been born in France during the time of the Frankish kings and that the first scholastic thinkers in Europe had been French. Andrés therefore set out to overturn the prevailing interpretative paradigm of the eighteenth century by adopting the unmistakably patriotic strategy and argumentative approach that is the key to understanding all his work, one based on removing Spanish culture from any blame for the cultural decadence of Western Europe, which was placed instead on France and in this case on Alcuin and the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne. This overtly Francophobe approach was clearly intended as a criticism of the theories put forward by various important philosophes on this and other issues: on this particular occasion Andrés's target was Montesquieu and all those who had traced the origin of the rebirth of Western Europe back to Carolingian France.
The heart of Andrés's interpretation, however, concerned literature, in particular poetry, which he wrote about in chapter XI, entitled Dell'influenza degli arabi nella moderna coltura delle Belle Lettere (On the influence of the Arabs on the modern cultivation of the belles lettres) 49 . After having shown, in the preceding chapters, that the rebirth of European science and philosophy was owed to Arab intellectuals (particularly those from Spain), Andrés attempted to apply the same interpretative structure to the humanae litterae, above all to poetry. In this chapter he proposes a total reversal of the Between Arabic Letters, History and Enlightenment predominant interpretative canon, according to which the renewal of European culture had been stimulated by the emigration of Byzantine scholars following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks 50 , with the libraries that they brought with them making possible a rediscovery of a significant part of Greek culture. Andrés's task was certainly not an easy one, and in fact he warned his readers, beginning in the preface, that the argument that the rebirth of letters was owed to the Arabs might seem «to many a ridiculous paradox» 51 . In effect, the Valencian Jesuit was obliged to discuss and challenge theories that had emerged within a series of important debates held in Italy during the eighteenth century, such as those relating to the birth of the vernacular, the cultural decadence of the Italian peninsula and the crisis of «good taste» 52 . These had been the issues against which the peninsula's leading intellectuals had measured themselves, from Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi to Tiraboschi by way of Scipione Maffei, Giacinto Gimma, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Saverio Bettinelli, Carlo Denina and Francescantonio Zaccaria 53 . However, unlike his confreres Francisco Javier Llampillas and Juan Francisco Masdeu, Andrés sought to avoid any open conflict with those of his literary contemporaries, in particular the former Jesuits Bettinelli, Tiraboschi and Andrea Rubbi whose works had argued for the primacy of the Italian humanist and Renaissance culture.
Once again Andrés put forward a thesis running counter to the prevailing current without being provocative, making use of his undoubted rhetorical skill. First of all he did not call into question the fact that the «revival» («risorgimento») and «rebirth» («rinascimento») of the humanae litterae could be ascribed to the recovery of the classical tradition 54 , although he did argue that the translatio studii had not been from Greece to Italy (and thus within Europe) after 1453, but instead from Spain to Italy from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries 55 . The roots of modern European civilisation could be traced back to Arab culture and to Spain (in other words to Al-Andalus). This interpretative paradigm involved a clear alteration to the timeline of modernity, whose beginning was obviously moved back significantly. For Andrés the early modern age, which he defined as a break with the darkness of the Carolingian Middle Ages and as a recovery of the Greco-Roman cultural legacy, did not begin (in Italy) in the middle of the fifteenth century but (in Spain) between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries 56 . True modernity, understood as the overcoming of the classical legacy, had instead blossomed fully throughout Europe during the seventeenth century, when «there was no part of the sciences and the belles lettres that did not take on new appearances, and when on the foundations of the ancient a new literature arose». In fact, up to the end of the sixteenth century, «the taste and profit in science and the belles lettres was almost entirely reduced to understanding and imitating the ancients» 57 .
At the same time, although he did not cast any doubt on the fact that the Provençal troubadours had been responsible for encouraging a taste for vernacular poetry in Europe from the twelfth century onwards 58 , Andrés argued that the birth of modern rhyme poetry was due to the transposition of this style of Arabic poetry to the European vernaculars 59 , thanks to the cultural 55 Andrés did not deny that the arrival of the Byzantine scholars in Italy after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople had played a positive role, but argued that the conditions for the acceptance of the legacy of the classical age in the peninsula were established by the Arabs and by the Council of Florence to the early fifteenth century. Furthermore, like Tiraboschi, Andrés recognised the spread of movable type printing as an essential contribution to the development of humanist culture: idem, vol. 1, pp. xi, 348, 356-377. 56 Idem, vol. 1, pp. 262, 271, 308. For Andrés the Middle Ages broadly coincided with the Early Medieval period and could be placed between the seventh and tenth centuries: idem, vol. 1, p. 173. 57 Idem, vol. 1, pp. 488-489. Andrés concluded his argument by stating that the eighteenth century had limited itself to perfecting the arts and discoveries that emerged in the previous century, introducing «a severity of criticism and a flavor of philosophy to all subjects». 58 Idem, vol. 1, pp. 259-331. The Valencian Jesuit, following Vico and in opposition to D' Alembert's Discours préliminaire, attached great importance to poetry, which he considered (together with history) the first manifestation of the «human spirit» and therefore of the imagination: Andrés, Dell'origine, cit., vol. 1, pp. 1-2, 16, 41-42; vol. 2, pp. 1-7. As is known, Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1744 edition), had argued that from the «age of heroes», the «poetic logic» had been the foundation of literature and of common languages themselves: cfr. G. Vico, Scienza Nuova, a cura di P. Soccio, Garzanti, Milano 1983, pp. 228-230, 343-362 (Idea dell' opera; book II, section II, chpts. 1-5). and political ties in place in the twelth century between Catalonia and Provence 60 . Naturally, the Valencian Jesuit also rejected the theory that modern poetry/literature, linked to the development of vernacular languages, had originated among the Nordic peoples of barbarian origin, beginning with Ossian 61 . In the context of a perspective that continued to be Eurocentric, Andrés set himself the goal not so much of the Quran was composed (known as saj') would have predisposed the Arabs to develop a rhymed lyric rather than one based on a syllabic meter: cfr. Bevilacqua, The Republic, cit., pp. 71-72, 165, 184, 193. Even Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, subscribed to this theory. 60 Andrés, Dell' origine, cit., 1, pp. 293-297. Pointing out the political ties that linked Provence to Catalonia (at the beginning of the 1100s the counts of Barcelona had become regents of Toulouse and Occitania), Andrés implicitly supports the thesis -strongly advanced by Francisco Javier Llampillas in his Saggio storico apologetico della letteratura spagnola (Genoa, F. Repetto, 1778-1781, 6 vols.) -that the Occitan language in fact originated from Catalonia. On the other hand Tiraboschi (echoing the theories of Giovanni Maria Barbieri and Ludovico Antonio Muratori) maintains that it had been the Arab Sicilians, through the mediation carried out in the court of Frederick II of Swabia, that transmitted rhyming poetry to Petrarch and Dante: cfr. Dainotto reducing Europe's position within the universal history of culture, but rather that of «decentring» France's position at the origins of Western civilisation and modernity. He therefore used the Arabist Theory to support an argument which placed the Mediterranean at the centre of the Western world, and which had the added value of enabling a pro-Spanish patriotic interpretation of the birth of modern European culture, since it exalted the role of Spain in the recovery of the legacy of the classical world 62 . Put differently, Andrés used Arabist Theory to challenge certain arguments belonging to another powerful paradigm connected to Iberian history, namely that of the anti-Spanish Black Legend 63 . Emphasising the civilising role of Spain in the Middle Ages meant challenging the idea, shared by many philosophes, that from the medieval period to the Counter-Reformation Spain had always been a place of ignorance and superstition.
According to Andrés, civilisation was born in the Orient, in China, and then took up residence in the Mediterranean, first with the Egyptians, then with the Greeks, then the Arabs and finally, in the early modern age, with the Spaniards and Italians. While arguing patriotically in favour of the primacy that Spain could boast over the rest of the Mediterranean world precisely because of its Arab past, throughout his literary history Andrés nevertheless hesitated to employ the bitter tones towards Italian scholars and men of letters that instead characterised the publications of his confreres Francisco Javier Llampillas, Tomás Serrano and Juan Francisco Masdeu. The implicit message that he sent to Italian intellectuals -some of whom, like Tiraboschi and Bettinelli, were also former Jesuits -was that they should unite forces against their real enemy, that is the France of the philosophes: it was necessary to demonstrate that European identity was rooted neither in a concept of progress calibrated around French history, nor in the notion of reason theorised by the Philosophie 64 . Instead of exhausting each other in an internal struggle, the scholars belonging to the Mediterranean cultures of Italy and Spain, which had always been united by the classical tradition and a shared religion, would do better to join forces against the real enemies of Western civilisation: catalogue was the product of the official culture of the kingdom and the Spanish Bourbons, who, especially during the reign of Charles III (1759-1788), had mobilised all Spanish intellectuals (including the former Jesuits expelled to Italy) 69 in a propaganda campaign aimed at defending the image of Spain and its history in European public opinion 70 . The ultimate objective had been to praise the all the «glories» of Spanish history (in particular that of Castile) and their influence on the history of Europe 71 . While, for example, the royal historian Juan Bautista Muñoz and the Academy of History had been charged with providing an apologetic perspective on the conquest of America 72 , Casiri and his pupils were given the difficult task of establishing the documentary basis that would also allow the country's Islamic history to be included among the glories of the «Spanish nation» 73 .
Despite having been exiled to Italy by Charles III, Andrés nevertheless managed to involve himself in this aspect of official Bourbon culture by reworking the main theories expounded by the Maronite scholar in his introduction to the catalogue 74 . Included in these, apart from the central role played by the Spanish Arabs in the rebirth of European science and literature, was also the theory according to which all the Arab authors that Casiri recorded and studied should be considered «his-pani vel origine, vel patria, vel domicilio, vel schola», irrespective of the fact that they had been Muslim 75 . Through this approach, Spain's Arab past, like the periods of Roman and Gothic dominance, could be justifiably used to construct an idea of a Spanish literary «nation» in which the geographic aspect, overlapping with the etymological meaning of the Latin term natio (which derives from nascĕre, «to be born»), continued to be more important than other aspects of identity, such as the religious one. Being natives and inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula and of the states of which it was composed in the Middle Ages, even the Iberian Arabs, despite their Islamic faith, could be considered «Spanish» and thus take credit for their role in the construction of the «glorias» (in other words the historical achievements) of the «nación española». Andrés, in other words, took part in the process of founding an idea of the Spanish nation in which the Iberian ilustrados were engaged during that period: this was still a geo-literary commitment, but one which, perceiving itself as an exaltation of a cultural superiority and of certain salient elements that Spanish culture had given to Western European civilisation, already possessed certain clearly political and ideological connotations 76 .
In conclusion, therefore, it is possible to argue that the interpretation set out by Andrés on the role played by Arabs in the cultural rebirth of Europe was not in itself original, given that his statements can be traced back to the seventeenth-century sources that he used. For example, his theory on the crucial role played by the Spanish Arabs in the spread of Greek knowledge throughout Europe had already been put forward by Pococke in his Specimen Historiae Arabum 77 . However, the argumentative and methodological structure that Andrés used to transform this hypothesis into a coherent interpretative paradigm was original: he in fact systematised and explained, through an approach that verged on the controversial, the main arguments of European and Spanish oriental studies, placing them in a philosophical-conjectural historical context that took inspiration both from Philosophie and from the historical-literary tradition of Italy. In the first case Andrés's