Introduction: Not All Roads Lead to Rome: Anglo-Iberian Exchanges in the Middle Ages

Abstract

From a geographical point of view, England (together with Ireland) and the Iberian Peninsula constituted, respectively, the Western and Southern borders, the geographical margins, of medieval Christendom and Europe. Beyond those borders was the dangerous “other” or the unknown for the Christian. Being on the edges of the Christian world, England and Iberia did not seem as important as Rome, the religious, although not exactly geographical, center, and, France, which was arguably a fundamental cultural and political center in the high and later Middle Ages. While Muslim Iberia played a vital cultural and intellectual role in the high Middle Ages, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, partly due to the gradual defeat of the Muslims, intellectual activity became more important in other countries. Moreover, even if some medieval thinkers may have recognized the intellectual importance of Muslim Iberia, for most Europeans Iberia was a liminal area, the border where crusading activity took place; it was the margin of Europe that separated Christians and Muslims. Medieval England also seemed marginal. Englishmen themselves, as Nigel Saul has noted, did not see themselves as central: “[f]or most Englishmen of the day the places that gave meaning to their lives [Rome, Paris and Jerusalem] lay far from their shores.”1