  Whether or not Falaquera himself went through some sort of mid-life crisis, he tells us that his book is a “bill of divorcement” from the poetry of his youth – an art in which, by his own account, he excelled and composed some 20,000 stanzas of rhymed verse, about half of which he wrote down. In the same breath he announces his betrothal to wisdom, with the implication that a bigamous attachment to both poetry and wisdom is not desirable and should not be tolerated. Falaquera’s new attitude toward poetry reflects the concern with this art shared by ancient and medieval philosophers: Poetry is dangerous because it persuades men not by its content and its truth, but by its beauty and eloquence (on Falaquera’s attitude toward poetry, see Harvey, Falaquera’s Epistle, 128–132). While Falaquera seems, for the most part, indeed to have abandoned writing poetry, he was hardly faithful to her, even in his youth. He openly acknowledges his flirtation with wisdom in Sefer ha-Mevaqqesh, listing seven works that he calls “the progeny of my thoughts during my early years” (12; trans., 7–8). It is hard to know how seriously to take such proclamations, although it is certainly true that Falaquera’s two lengthy philosophic works, the encyclopedic De‘ot ha-Filosofim and his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, are not listed among these writings. The latter work was written in 1280 (5040) (Moreh ha-Moreh, 365), and is one of his most mature writings. Steinschneider wrote of this work that the “abundance of its citations was sufficient to confer on those who copied from it the appearance of great erudition” (Hebraeischen Übersetzungen, 422), and the same can be said regarding the De‘ot ha-Filosofim. An additional point of interest for Falaquera’s biography is his plaint in Sefer ha-Mevaqqesh (11–12; trans., 7–8) of the “difficult times under the powerful hand of the non-Jewish nations who prevailed over us.” This is a theme found in several of his works, and apparently the subject of his lost Megillat ha-Zikkaron. It is a stark reminder today of the background against which medieval Jewish thinkers such as Falaquera engaged in their writing and study.