Medieval Iberia Research Articles

Jewish Identity, al-Andalus, and Interfaith Communities: The Medieval Legacy of Islamic Spain

The Jews of al-Andalus experienced two interconnected military conquests that constituted major shifts in the history of medieval Iberia. The Almohad invasion of 1148 resulted in mass displacement of Jews, many of whom fled to the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and Provence in modern-day southern France. Subsequently, the rapid territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon following the 1212 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa ensured that by the mid-thirteenth century, much of the remaining Jewish population in al-Andalus was now living under Christian rule. However, changes in political territory did not necessitate total cultural transformation. Indeed, legacies of Jewish life in al-Andalus continued to permeate the culture of its diaspora, but discontinuities also emerged with each succeeding generation. Ultimately, the perpetuation of cultural symbols such as ideas of exceptionalism within the diaspora, use of the Arabic language, references to admired figures of the Andalusi past, and adaptations to professional activity that enabled the continuation of trading practices demonstrates the strong presence of the idea of al-Andalus in the identity of the medieval Jewish communities of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Spain and Provence.

Painful Pageantry: The Local Circumstances of Royal Visitations in Late Medieval Iberia

Painful Pageantry: The Local Circumstances of Royal Visitations in Late Medieval Iberia

Songs of Sacrifice: Chant, Identity, and Christian Formation in Early Medieval Iberia Rebecca Maloy

Rebecca Maloy’s latest book focuses on the Old Hispanic sacrificium, an offertory chant that was sung at Mass during the procession to bring bread and wine to the altar. Maloy’s interest in the world of the Old Hispanic sacrificium should come as no surprise: she has studied the Gregorian offertory extensively (Inside the Offertory: Aspects of Chronology and Transmission (Oxford and New York, 2010)) and, in recent years, she has bravely ventured into the study of Old Hispanic chant (with Emma Hornby, Music and Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten Chants: Psalmi, Threni and the Easter Vigil Canticles (Woodbridge, 2013)). Maloy’s book is an excellent example of how a niche area of musicological research can have a wide reach, and of how to construct a compelling research narrative. Indeed, the highly specialized analysis of the text and music of the sacrificium allows Maloy to launch a broader discussion of pre-Gregorian plainchant creation and transmission, and of how Visigothic Christian identity was shaped in its early days. Last but not least, this book provides an interesting perspective on Visigothic devotional book culture, shedding some light on the cultural exchanges woven through the surviving manuscript sources. The book is paired with a companion website that has ten online musical appendices representing the material discussed in the book, and where further examples and bibliographical references are given. The appendices provide useful material for future studies in the sacrificium and similar chant genres; they also allow the reader to follow Maloy’s thought process and methodology step by step, showing the huge amount of work that has gone into this book.

Memories of Medieval Iberia in Early Modern Spain: The romancero viejo As Neomedievalism

This article proposes a new reading of four romances viejos as one of the earliest forms of neomedievalism in early modern Spain. First printed in the sixteenth century, but set between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, these romances emphasize Christian Iberia’s fragmentariness and disempowerment in relation to other medieval polities. This contrasts with other sixteenth-century neomedievalisms, from maurophile rewritings of the fifteenth-century Nasrid Kingdom of Granada to romances fronterizos. It concludes that they remind their early modern audiences of Iberia’s porosity and historic as well as ongoing interactions with other Mediterranean and northern European cultures.

E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles, eds. The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity

E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles, eds. <i>The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity</i>

A manuscript present: translatio, media, and mediation in early medieval hispanolatin book culture

ABSTRACT The culture of our digital age has a wide streak of nostalgia for digits of flesh, blood, and bone. A good present moment, then, for a present of manuscript. The manuscript codex was digital before we were—only, the digits that made it were flesh and blood fingers instead of zeros and ones. The illuminated codices of early medieval Latin Iberia are particularly articulate about their own status as handmade, handwritten objects. This essay studies what they have to offer us as we think about media, mediation, and textual mobility in our “digital” age.

Andrew Kurt, Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom: From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain. (Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 421; 5 black-and-white plates, many black-and-white figures, and many tables. €129. ISBN: 978-9-4629-8164-5.

Andrew Kurt, <i>Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom: From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain</i>. (Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 421; 5 black-and-white plates, many black-and-white figures, and many tables. €129. ISBN: 978-9-4629-8164-5.

Processional melodies in the Old Hispanic rite

ABSTRACTOld Hispanic liturgy was practised across much of medieval Iberia until c.1080. In this article we analyse the extant Old Hispanic processional antiphons, focusing on: the presence or absence of verses; amount of text and relationship with the Bible; cadence placement; number of notes per chant (melodic density) and per syllable; and melodic repetition within and between chants. We demonstrate that the processional antiphons are neither a homogenous corpus nor clearly differentiated stylistically from other Old Hispanic antiphons. In a short case study of the Good Friday Veneration of the Cross, we situate the processional antiphons within their wider ritual context, including their likely staging in the ecclesiastical architecture. As we show, the interaction between melody and ritual directed the antiphon texts towards a particular devotional end.

The Art of Medieval Iberia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Met Cloisters

Abstract: This essay reflects upon the rich holdings in medieval Iberian art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acknowledging both the organizational challenges and intellectual rewards of delving into this multifaceted collection. Focusing on the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, it highlights a selection of artworks that reveal encounters between people of different faith traditions in medieval Iberia. In so doing, it argues for the importance of looking to the visual arts for layered, complex, and nuanced testimonies of interfaith interaction in the medieval peninsula.

Humanities Computing? La corónica's 50 Years of Innovation

Abstract: Iberomedievalism in the United States has always been at the cutting edge of innovative approaches and methodologies. The development of computational, and subsequently digital, techniques corresponds almost exactly with the existence of La corónica . This article, in part a response to Kathleen Kish's update on the activities of the Wisconsin Seminary of Medieval Spanish Studies published in 1979, traces the significance of the journal as an important part of the dissemination of new techniques and methodologies in the study of medieval Iberia.

Book Review: Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel

Book Review: <i>Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia</i> by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel

Aristocratic neo-Gothicism in fourteenth-century Iberia: the case of Count Pedro of Barcelos

ABSTRACT One of the main arguments used to legitimise Christian military expansion in medieval Iberia was the location of the origin of the Christian Iberian kingdoms in the ancient Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo (507–711), which established a notion of political continuity between these entities. The legitimacy of the Visigothic Kingdom was reflected in the polities that emerged out of the process of Christian expansion, enabling military activity against Muslims to be portrayed as the restoration of Gothic Spain. In the present study, I refer to this view of the past, especially in thirteenth-century Castilian royal historiography, as the neo-Gothic myth. The neo-Gothic myth was an asset held by royalty in the cultural enactment of these social struggles. In this article, I inquire into the reaction of the seignorial aristocracy to the royalty’s neo-Gothic claims, using the historiographical work by Count Pedro of Barcelos (c. 1285–1354). More specifically, I analyse how Count Pedro adapted the neo-Gothic myth to an aristocratic perspective.

Peasants, Market Exchange and Economic Agency in North-Western Iberia, c.850–c.1050

Abstract Our understanding of the economic foundations of rural society in early medieval north-western Iberia remains wedded to explanations that emphasize the structural limitations that framed human activity while seeking to attenuate the economic agency of non-elite groups and individuals. This article argues that the early medieval peasantry of north-western Iberia was not the staid caricature presented by much of the historiography, but a much more economically dynamic section of society. To demonstrate this dynamism, it uses charters to analyse peasant productive strategies that went beyond subsistence. These reveal that peasants not only dabbled in the land market but invested in non-movable capital goods, with the result that some peasants produced surpluses for the express purpose of exchange by the tenth century, fundamentally altering the contours of their communities from within. By examining the evidence concerning peasant ownership of watermills, the article sheds new light on causal explanations for phenomena as diverse as social mobility, the possibilities of commercial integration, and the logic of market exchange. It concludes by contending that narratives focused on uncovering the beginnings of growth must more readily concede that its origins are to be found both beyond as well as within seigneurial contexts.

Rents instead of land. Credit and peasant indebtedness in late medieval Mediterranean Iberia: the kingdom of Valencia

AbstractThe literature on the rural economy of the high and late Middle Ages has long established a close correlation between three significant features of the period: the spread of rural credit, the dynamism of the peasant land market and the expropriation of peasant land by the creditors, usually yeomen or urban landowners. There has even been talk for some countries (northern Italy) of a deliberate strategy of territorial conquest, insofar as the credit provided by urban lenders would aim at the expropriation of land from insolvent debtors. This article studies for the Mediterranean Spain of the late Middle Ages, and in particular for the old kingdom of Valencia, other objectives of rural credit and other alternatives to peasant expropriation in case of insolvency. Based on the rich archival holdings of the region, mainly notarial and judicial records, the article studies the dissemination of rural credit, the different modalities (short and long term), the motivations of creditors and debtors, the types of interest, the guarantors and the goods given as collateral for the loans, their confiscation in case of delay or insolvency. It concludes that, unlike elsewhere, the creditors, rather than in land, were interested in rents, that is, in the annuities paid to them by the debtors as interest on the loans obtained. The spread of long-term credit, therefore, not only did not threaten or subvert but also strengthened a system of land ownership, tenure and management based on regular rents extraction.

The Rhetoric of Impurity in Medieval Iberia

The Rhetoric of Impurity in Medieval Iberia

The Politics of Sound and Song: Lectors and Cantors in Early Medieval Iberia

In early medieval Iberia, Suevic and Visigothic conversions to Nicene Christianity in the 560s and 580s generated ongoing episcopal and royal attention to cathedral liturgies and to the clerics who performed them. This article turns to this Iberian context to illuminate how lectors and cantors and their aural duties became increasingly central to the production of Christian orthodoxy. It is argued that in the early 600s Visigothic anxieties over the production of correct liturgical sound eventually became a focal point of longstanding episcopal efforts to clericalise the minor officers of the Church.

Text, practice, and experience: an experimental approach to the archaeology of glassmaking in medieval Iberia

ABSTRACT How might an interdisciplinary approach involving experimental archaeology improve our knowledge of glassmaking in medieval Iberia? Our current limited understanding lacks an appreciation of how surviving remains were created through the actual practice of glassmaking—herein lies the biggest single gap in knowledge. Archaeological experiments show that while the infima glassmaking recipe offers a credible guide to basic glassmaking technology, it is best interpreted as a set of learned instructions rooted in, though not describing, workshop practice. Awareness of the sensory qualities of glass, the conducting of experiments, and observation of glass production practice, all combined within a theoretical framework that embraces embodied knowledge and phenomenological aspects of space and time, suggest the potential existence of an encoded “text” of past glassmaking practice within archaeological workshop remains. The authors advocate further experimental archaeology on a more ambitious scale, exploring the sensory and performative aspects of glassmaking practice, to better learn to read the distinctive handwriting of this “text” in medieval Iberian archaeology.

The Fear of God and the Classification of Science

This article traces the association between wisdom and the fear of God in two encyclopedias of science that circulated in medieval Iberia: Enumeration of the Sciences by al-Fārābī and The Foundations of Intelligence and the Tower of Faith by Bar Ḥiyya. It offers insight into the polemical reception of al-Fārābī's work in the Iberian Peninsula; an analysis of Bar Ḥiyya's introduction to his encyclopedia, in which the fear of God occupies a central place; and an analysis of the epilogue of the only Andalusian manuscript that preserves al-Fārābī’s Enumeration, which also emphasizes the fear of God. The article argues that al-Fārābī's rather scandalous reputation in al-Andalus could explain the framing of his classification of the sciences, and those inspired by it, with pious considerations on the fear of God as a necessary condition to the study of science.

Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera

Reviewed by: Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera Miguel García-Fernández Piera, Montserrat. Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text. Brill, 2019. ISBN: 978-90-04-40037-5. Montserrat Piera nos ofrece una obra en la que la mayor parte de las escritoras estudiadas y los textos analizados son bien conocidos por los medievalistas y, muy especialmente, por quienes nos interesamos por la historia de las mujeres y la historia de la literatura bajomedieval ibérica. Pensemos en autoras como Leonor López de Córdoba, Constanza de Castilla, Teresa de Cartagena o Isabel de Villena, o en obras como Libre de les dones de Francesc Eiximenis o Triunfo de Amor de Juan Flores. Sin embargo, nos encontramos ante un estudio novedoso, inteligente y sugerente, en el que se presentan un buen número de informaciones y reflexiones metodológicas de gran interés para abordar el tema de las mujeres ibéricas como lectoras y escritoras al final de la Edad Media. Precisamente, la creación de un [End Page 249] modelo metodológico e interpretativo que permita explicar mejor la relación de las mujeres con las "textualidades" en las que se vieron inmersas y que contribuyeron a crear y dinamizar es una de las grandes contribuciones de esta obra, en la que se redefinen conceptos y se dialoga con las categorías de análisis propuestas por otros autores en sus estudios culturales y de género. A pesar del título—que podría sugerirnos estar ante una monografía de síntesis, a modo de estado de la cuestión—nos encontramos realmente ante un estudio interpretativo de primer nivel en el que se (re)sitúan en su contexto histórico y cultural las lecturas y los escritos de las mujeres medievales y se contribuye a redefinir el papel de estas en los ámbitos de análisis planteados, lo cual, por otra parte, no hace sino evidenciar la importancia de la participación y la iniciativa femeninas (su agency)—también en relación con sus resistencias—en el seno de la sociedad medieval. El sugerente subtítulo evoca la recurrente metáfora utilizada por la autora sobre la relación de las mujeres con el hilado y el tejido de textos (algo que, sin ser inédito o innovador, resulta ciertamente oportuno), planteando desde el "Prefacio" lo que se pretende con esta obra: I will put forth a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and … I will study women's writing or more precisely, women's textualities, as a process of spinning and weaving not only words but also experiences, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected. (ix-x) Estos prometedores planteamientos finalmente han cristalizado en un estudio que satisface las expectativas del lector y que, como pretende la autora (11), va más allá de ser un trabajo de historia de la literatura para conformar un estudio de historia cultural—o de historia social de la cultura, ya que analiza los textos y las autoras en su contexto de producción físico, intelectual y social—, en el que se contribuye a redefinir la relación de las mujeres con los artefactos culturales a los que tuvieron acceso, que consumieron o que crearon. Al mismo tiempo, se plantea la revisión de algunos planteamientos tradicionales—y también de otros formulados desde los propios estudios sobre las mujeres—que, directa o indirectamente, pueden condicionar la interpretación de algunas actuaciones y textos femeninos. Por ello, nos parece especialmente relevante el conjunto de propuestas y afirmaciones que se anuncian a lo largo del libro: desde la confirmación de la posibilidad de escuchar las voces femeninas a través del análisis de unas fuentes medievales que, de todos modos, no dejan de presentar una serie de problemas en cuanto a su recopilación [End Page 250] y estudio (3), hasta la necesidad de cuestionar hasta qué punto se infravalora el papel social, económico y cultural de las mujeres medievales al seguir planteando su posición como "marginal...

Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David A. Wacks

Reviewed by: Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David A. Wacks Albert Lloret Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. By David A. Wacks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. The introduction to Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World has two goals. The first is to assert the critical framework of the study—that is, researching the interaction of the territories, cultures, and politics of the Mediterranean basin—and, in subsequent chapters, the relevance of this Mediterranean-centered approach becomes apparent in the geographical background of the literary works under scrutiny as much as in their discursive and political relevance. The second is to define the place of the Iberian Peninsula with respect to the medieval wars of conquest of the holy sites of Christendom in the Middle East. The focus of this second goal is not so much placed on military or apologetical contributions coming from Iberia to the Middle Eastern Crusades. Rather, Wacks concentrates on explaining how the history of those contributions affected the way in which the military campaigns of the Iberian Christian kingdoms against Al-Andalus were ideologically conceived, imagined, and predicated as a holy war. Thus, medieval Iberian chivalric works engaged with the Crusades in clearly distinct discursive forms. Given the book’s focus on literary prose works written in Arabic, Castilian, and Catalan, the introduction pays particular attention to the ideology of the Crusades and to practices of proselytization and conversion of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Christian-dominated territories of the Iberian Peninsula. It ends with a cursory catalogue of mainly Castilian examples of Crusade fiction; and, in my opinion, a lyric subgenre such as the Occitan canso de crozada, a variety of sirventes, would also yield interesting responses to the kinds of questions the author entertains in the introduction. I mean this as a remark on the monograph’s relevance beyond its intended scope, not as critique of Wacks’s choice of works. Chapter 1 advances an interpretation of the Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani—an Andalusi work written in Granada c. 1250—as an example of Crusade fiction. Ziyad is a significant but neglected example of the complexity of cultural hybridity in medieval Iberia. The work was generically indebted to both Arab popular epic and Arab popular narrative texts such as the 1001 Nights. But its anonymous author drew, too, on Christian Crusader and Arthurian fiction to create a narrative led, paradoxically, by an Arab and Muslim hero. This reliance on Christian [End Page 143] chivalric fiction explains many of the work’s features, from its detailed descriptions of combat to the mass conversion of pagans to Islam. For Wacks, Ziyad emerges as an outstanding work in its context because of the way in which it evinces a degree of cultural assimilation of Muslim Granada to the Christian north. He argues that this assimilation was an aesthetic choice, not an ideological one, because it is exemplified in other artistic and literary products of the time. The author of Ziyad maintained the religious values of Arab epic, negotiating and adapting them to the generic features of Christian chivalric fiction. Chapter 2 centers on the Castilian Libro del caballero Zifar, dated to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. A thorough reading of a fragment of Zifar’s prologue gives Wacks a starting point for unpacking the book’s political and ideological agenda. He contends that Zifar embodies a cultural translatio. Its Christian author’s appropriation of Andalusi culture is interpreted as spolia—that is, as a way of enhancing the cultural capital of his work, one that accounts for key formal aspects of the text, such as its Arabizing toponyms and anthroponyms and its transformation of Arthurian fiction into a vehicle for sapiential literature. At the same time, the prologue of Zifar is understood to be performing a vindication of the Mozarabic elites of the Church of Toledo over adventitious Castilian dominance. This political maneuver—the affirmation of Mozarabic identity—may have been allegorized in the plot of the romance. Finally, Wacks suggests how two of the Arthurian motifs that the book contains, the only fantastic ones in the work (whose source is debated), could...