Cultural and Historical Context of Bosnian Aljamiado Literature

Abstract

Aljamiado literature, approximately at the same time (17th century) as folk oriented literature of Bosnian Franciscans, initiated native Bosnian language as a literary language for the first time since the medieval period. Appearance and development of Aljamiado literature coincided with the social crisis which took place as a result of bad attempts to reform the military Ottoman society into a peaceful model of society. As the crisis intensified, people’s chances of getting educated in elite Istanbul learning facilities deteriorated especially in marginal and border regions of the Empire which meant relying on own, very modest educational resources. Discontinuity of Bosnian Muslim literacy in relation to medieval legacy as well as constitutive isolation of cultural milieu from home and foreign language traditions puts Aljamiado writers in traumatic roles of complete autodidacts. The phenomenon of Bosnian Aljamiado poetry, in that sense, is a plausible verification of Eliot’s theses about relations between tradition and individual talent as well as Bourdieu’s theory of a cultural field as a scene of constant competition of inherited, dominant and emerging forms. Therefore, it seems that we can explain the key paradox of Aljamiado literature which is that Aljamiado texts are extremely popular (some of them have tens of transcripts) although they are very often constrained, ideologically shattered and written in an impossible Serbo-Croatian language.