Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia by Simon Barton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia by Simon Barton Theresa Earenfight KEYWORDS Muslims, Interfaith Marriage, Sexual Ethics, Women, Concubines, Reconquista, Medieval Iberia SIMON BARTON. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. 264 pp. The complex dynamics of interfaith relations has occupied scholars of medieval Spain for decades as they try to understand how Jews, Christians, and Muslims managed to live in close proximity for seven centuries. Although we may not all agree on what to call this relationship—convivencia (as Américo Castro argued), conveniencia (Brian Catlos) cultural hybridity (Maria Rosa Menocal), or simply getting along with ambivalent neighbors whose existence was an uneasy equilibrium punctuated by violence (David Nirenberg)—one thing we all can agree on is that people living in medieval Spain worried about sex. A lot. The anxiety of Jews, Christians, and Muslims spills out in the legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art of all three religions. Spanish Christians were not alone in their concern about Christian women having sex with non-Christian men. But, unlike Christians elsewhere in medieval Europe, physical proximity and a long war against Muslims made the concern quotidian and far more acute for Spanish Christians. In this new book, Simon Barton "seeks to elucidate why interfaith sex mattered greatly to secular and religious lawmakers" (4). To do this, he focuses on the [End Page 119] Muslim-Christian relationship and links changing attitudes towards female sexual purity with the political and military events that tipped the balance of power. Barton ultimately argues that sex, or to be precise, protecting Christian women from having sex with Muslim men, was a central feature of a masculine "national" political identity that developed in the later Middle Ages. Barton's study ranges from 711 to 1492, but his argument is centered primarily on the twelfth century and most of his sources are from the Christian perspective. His strengths as a political historian of the reconquest period are evident in his skillful synthesis of a wide range of materials. Much of this will be familiar to scholars of medieval Spain: the legendary, but fictional, payment of 100 maidens (cien doncellas) as tribute to a Muslim emir; Subh, the Christian concubine of al-Hakam in the tenth century; King Alfonso VI and Zaida. We all have our own transcriptions of archival material and heavily annotated copies of Olivia Remie Constable's collection that introduced undergraduate students to sources such as the fueros, chronicles, treaties, art, architecture, and poems that document life in a multifaith society. Barton's book treads familiar ground in a field that, since the pioneering work of Robert I. Burns, has documented the rich and complex society of medieval Spain. Scholars have plundered the rich archives of Spain and edited, translated, interpreted, analyzed, and theorized the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines encompasses this richly interdisciplinary zone of religion, politics, social dynamics, culture, art, architecture, and literature. For many Hispanists, this book will be an easy read. But just because you may already have read many of the works on the extensive bibliography does not mean you should ignore it, skim it, or simply recommend it to colleagues who study other parts of Europe. The value of the book is its vantage point. Barton pulls together this wide body of work, plus his own research, and then steps back from the fine-grained studies that take a singular literary work, legal document, or art object. He integrates all of this into a coherent political narrative that hinges on the politics of the shift in the balance of forces during the reconquista in the twelfth century. That century, he argues, was the pivot point that changed the rhetoric of the relationship between military conflict and sexual violence. The four chapters of the book follow a roughly chronological trajectory from the early to the late Middle Ages. Chapter one, "Sex as Power," examines the practice of sexual mixing in which Christian women—through marriage, concubinage, or slavery—were fundamental elements of...