Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Description

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume examine the social and cultural interaction of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain during the medieval and early modern periods. Together, the essays provide a unique comparative perspective on compelling problems of ethnoreligious relations.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain considers how certain social and political conditions fostered fruitful cultural interchange, while others promoted mutual hostility and aversion. The volume examines the factors that enabled one religious minority to maintain its cultural integrity and identity more effectively than another in the same sociopolitical setting.

This volume provides an enriched understanding of how Christians, Muslims, and Jews encountered ideological antagonism and negotiated the theological and social boundaries that separated them.

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• Medieval
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Edad Media
• Spain
• Middle Ages
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Spain (groupe)
• Islam
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268087265
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies Number VIII
Institute of Medieval Studies University of Notre Dame
Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
INTERACTION AND CULTURAL CHANGE
Edited by
MARK D. MEYERSON AND EDWARD D. ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2000 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval and early modern Spain : interaction and cultural change / edited by Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English.
p. cm. - (Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies ; no. 8)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-268-02250-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-268-02263-1 (paperback)
1. Spain-Religion Congresses. 2. Spain-Church history Congressess. 3. Islam-Spain-History Congresses. 4. Judaism-Spain-History Congresses. I. Meyerson, Mark D. II. English, Edward D. III. Series: Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies ; 8.
BL980.S7C48 2000
291.1 72 0946-dc21
99-35905
ISBN 9780268087265
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
In Memory of
JOHN BOSWELL
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
MARK D. MEYERSON
I. Christians and Jews in Muslim Spain
1. Mu ammad as Antichrist in Ninth-Century C rdoba
KENNETH BAXTER WOLF
2. Reading the Repartimientos: Modeling Settlement in the Wake of Conquest
THOMAS F. GLICK
3. Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School
JOEL L. KRAEMER
4. Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Context of Andalusian Emigration
STEVEN M. WASSERSTROM
II. Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain
5. Mudejar Parallel Societies: Anglophone Historiography and Spanish Context, 1975-2000
ROBERT I. BURNS, S.J.
6. Muslim-Jewish Relations in Crusader Majorca in the Thirteenth Century: An Inquiry Based on Patrimony Register 342
LARRY J. SIMON
7. Religious and Sexual Boundaries in the Medieval Crown of Aragon
DAVID NIRENBERG
8. History and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Spain
ELEAZAR GUTWIRTH
9. Undermining the Jewish Sense of Future: Alfonso of Valladolid and the New Christian Missionizing
ROBERT CHAZAN
III. Conversos
10. Crypto Jewish Women Facing the Spanish Inquisition: Transmitting Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Attitudes
REN E LEVINE MELAMMED
11. Relations between Conversos and Old Christians in Early Modern Toledo: Some Different Perspectives
LINDA MARTZ
12. Conversion and Subversion: Converso Texts in Fifteenth-Century Spain
DAYLE SEIDENSPINNER-N EZ
IV. Moriscos
13. The Moriscos: Loyal Subjects of His Catholic Majesty Philip III
STEPHEN HALICZER
14. Moriscas and the Limits of Assimilation
MARY ELIZABETH PERRY
15. The Moriscos and Christian Doctrine
CONSUELO L PEZ-MORILLAS
V. Epilogue
After 1492: Spain as Seen by Non-Spaniards
J. N. HILLGARTH
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The conference from which this volume emerged could not have taken place without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful to John Van Engen, Director of Notre Dame s Medieval Institute, for suggesting that I organize such a conference and to the staff and faculty of the Medieval Institute for their interest and assistance. Special thanks are due to Edward D. English, who worked closely with me in organizing the conference and in editing the present volume. The staff of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame also offered helpful advice in organizing the conference. The splendid papers of the presenters and the contributions of the other participants made the conference a success; to all of them I am especially grateful.
When the conference took place, the late John Boswell of Yale University was in the final stages of a mortal illness. An historian of Mudejars and much else, John Boswell had inspired and assisted a number of the presenters and participants through his scholarship, teaching, and friendship. On the eve of the conference, which was treating issues to which he had devoted so much attention, I wrote him to tell him that he would be in our thoughts. As I write these acknowledgments, he still is. This volume is dedicated to his memory.
INTRODUCTION
MARK D. MEYERSON
The essays comprising this volume were all originally presented at a conference on Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, which was held at the University of Notre Dame on February 27-March 1, 1994, and sponsored by Notre Dame s Medieval Institute. The great majority of the papers read at the conference have been included here in revised form.
When I began to organize the conference back in 1993, other conferences that I had attended during the previous two years were very much on my mind. One of them, also sponsored by Notre Dame s Medieval Institute, dealt provocatively with The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. 1 There I was asked to comment on the papers presented in a session entitled Judaism, Byzantium, Islam. I wondered aloud, a bit playfully perhaps, how medievalists might move these three fields from a session on what seemed to have been categorized as medieval exotica into the disciplinary sessions on history, literature, philosophy, and so on. Considering this marginalization of Jewish, Islamic, and Byzantine studies from the field of medieval studies and its constituent disciplines naturally prompted me to think in this regard about medieval Spain, the land of three religions. I reflected on how medievalists might integrate Spain more effectively into the field of medieval studies, and on how Hispanists themselves might deal with the three religions, or ethnicities in the sixteenth century, in a more coherent and inclusive fashion. Such questions did not, and still do not admit easy answers, but, with respect to the rationale for the conference that produced this volume, they usefully raised the issue of marginality in a number of different contexts.
It was not so long ago that the study of Spanish history and culture in the medieval and early modern periods had a marginal status vis- -vis the mainstream of European studies. This was due in no small part to the unwillingness or inability of many Europeanists to give careful attention to a country in whose history and sociocultural formation Muslims and Jews played such a significant role. These peoples, and hence the Iberian peninsula, did not fit easily into the master narrative of European history. More recently, however, as the master narrative is disputed, as new scholarly agendas emerge, and as the discourse of multiculturalism infuses North American campuses, what once rendered medieval Spain almost incomprehensible and was deemed its handicap-its ethnoreligious pluralism-is now perceived as its virtue, its allure. Spain is, as I have heard some students call it, the land of medieval multiculturalism, or, more pessimistically, it represents the spearhead of European world hegemony, a land where western Christians warmed up on Jews and Muslims before the main event in America, Africa, and Asia. Yet, if the study of Spain is now somewhat more central in university curricula and academic research programs, the move from the margins can bring in its wake other dangers: either a tendency to marvel at the intermingling of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish texts and bodies, or, on the other extreme, a tendency to emphasize persecution and oppression, to revive the Black Legend of Spain for purposes rather different from those of Spain s sixteenth-century enemies.
When considering how scholars approach Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in Spain, on both interpersonal and intertextual levels, the concept of marginality again comes to the fore-that is, the concept of marginality as a heuristic tool. Concepts like marginality or the other are frequently bandied about these days, yet it is not clear how useful such concepts are, at least in the manner in which Europeanists often employ them, for interpreting Spanish history and culture. The utilization of the concept of marginality can give rise to two kinds of problematic assumptions. First, if we label Christians and Jews in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), or Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain, as marginal groups, then we may be led to assume that the marginal groups all maintained the same relationships of power with the Muslim or Christian authorities, or that they all faced the same challenges to their religious identity and cultural integrity-that is, that they all shared the same marginalized or minority experience.
Second, and more problematic, is the very assumption that these groups, Jews and Christians in al-Andalus and Jews and Muslims in Christian Spain, were marginal. If we understand as marginal those groups who eventually converted to the rulers faith or were forced into exile or otherwise eliminated, then we may be engaging in a retrospective and anachronistic reading of texts and history that obscures the subtleties and complexities of ethnoreligious interaction as the groups and individuals in question experienced it. Or if we label as marginal those people who were not