Convivencia and Medieval Spain

EDITED BY MARK T. ABATE CONVIVENCIA AND MEDIEVAL SPAIN Essays in Honor of Thomas F. Glick Mediterranean Perspectives Series Editors Brian Catlos University of Colorado-Boulder Boulder, CO, USA Sharon Kinoshita University of California Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at least two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years become the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines. In shifting focus away from histories of the origins and developments of phenomena predefined by national or religious borders, Mediterranean Studies opens vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in all their complexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter- and intra-disciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and dynamic fields in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets the Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it, as well as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by networks of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes monographs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the span of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15161 Mark T. Abate Editor Convivencia and Medieval Spain Essays in Honor of Thomas F. Glick Editor Mark T. Abate Westfield State University Westfield, MA, USA Mediterranean Perspectives ISBN 978-3-319-96480-5 ISBN 978-3-319-96481-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96481-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958718 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Fig. 1 Thomas F. Glick: Honorary Judge of the Tribunal of Waters, in Judicial Robes, Plaza de la Virgen, Valencia. Courtesy of Francesc Vera Casas v FOREWORD: THOMAS F. GLICK AND CONVIVENcIA When Mark Abate approached me some time ago with his proposal to put together a volume in honor of Thomas Glick, I told him I would be delighted to collaborate. Tom has long been a mentor, colleague, and (I hope I am not presuming to say) a friend. My intention was at first to contribute a research article, of the excellent sort that the many scholars who have generously written chapters for this volume have produced— something that would reflect in some way the tremendous contribution Tom has made to the historiography of medieval Iberia and the incalcu- lable impact he has had on my own development as a scholar. But it occurred to me, on reflection, that virtually everything I have written already bears the imprint of Thomas Glick’s thought and serves as a testa- ment to his influence on my work, and given our already quite long and distinguished list of contributors, I might instead offer something of a more brief and personal reflection.Caveat lector. The name Thomas Glick is associated by many with convivencia and the history of the interaction of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in al-Andalus and the Christian Spains of the Middle Ages. The term was coined, of course, early in the twentieth century by the Spanish medievalist Ramón Menéndez Pidal and subsequently developed as a paradigm for describing the cultural/literary history of Spain by Américo Castro, who found ref- uge in the US following Franco’s fascist coup d’état in his homeland.1 His España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos, which presented Spanish 1 After teaching at several US universities, Castro ended his career at the University of California (UC) San Diego, donating many of his books to the UC library system. I recall vii viii FOREWORD: THOMAS F. GLICK AND CONVIVENCIA culture as an emerging product of the engagement of “the three cultures,” was first published in 1948 and almost immediately (eight years being “immediately” in the world of academic publishing) generated a fervent riposte in the form of España: un enigma histórico, a nationalist historical manifesto penned by his fellow exiliado, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz.2 And so, the battle lines were drawn in the “convivencia wars”—with the Platonic, essentialized “Eternal Spaniard” of Sánchez-Albornoz champi- oned by many nationalist Spanish historians of the Franco era, who found it could be made to fit their muscular, operatic, and Castilian-centric, hyper-Catholic view of their nation’s past, and Castro’s banner being taken up particularly among a newer generation of North American scholars, who saw it reflecting the cosmopolitan, lefty, agnostic, ethno-religious diversity of the world they saw themselves as living in or aspired to create.3 No need to name names. The death of the Spanish dictator in 1975 and the rapid disintegration of the authoritarian regime and democratization of Spain set the stage for a renaissance of Spanish medieval historiography—one in which the various nations and peoples who make up the modern state were able to give voice to their own roles in history and in which the ideological grip of the Church and State was loosened. The effect was particularly noticeable in regions like Catalonia and Valencia—the main non-Castilian-speaking peninsular components of what had been the Crown of Aragón—late medieval Castile’s great rival.4 The histories of these regions, long subsumed in the triumphalist, Providential grand narrative of Castile-cum-España , were now rehabilitated and recounted on their own terms and in their own languages; and here, as well as across the peninsula, Jews and Muslims, who previously had been treated as foils, bit-players, or low characters in the great drama of Spanish nation-building were now studied for their own my delight and sense of history, when as a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, I first came upon books in our library that bore Castro’s ex libris. 2 See Américo Castro, España en su historia. Cristianos, Moros y Judíos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948), and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, España: Un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1956). 3 The metaphor is borrowed from Ryan Szpiech’s “The Convivencia Wars: Decoding Historiography’s Polemic With Philology,” in A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Karla Mallette, 135–161 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 4 To be sure, Aragónese was spoken in Aragón, but Aragón has been for centuries anchored in the Castilian linguistic and cultural ambit. FOREWORD: THOMAS F. GLICK AND CONVIVENCIA ix sake and with a fresh, scientific indifference. This is not to say that the nationalist Castile-centric Christian-dominated counter-narrative disap- peared, either in Spain or abroad. This was due in part to mere inertia, both institutional and intellectual, which favors the perpetuation of estab- lished narratives even once they have been shown to be obsolete. But historians of this persuasion also benefitted from the ideologicalglasnost of the Transition, and those who see larger cultural, ethnic, and religious enti- ties as fundamentally irreconcilable or oppositional brought greater nuance and complexity to their interpretations of the history of the Peninsula. Meanwhile, over the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, as the convivencia wars raged, both sides entrenched in what became a drawn out and ultimately inconclusive static intellectual war, occasionally sniping at each other, but neither capable of scoring what might be described as a signal victory. To stick one’s head up above the parapet was an invitation to be shot at. For its part, at least in the Anglo-American scholarly world, convivencia became something of a banner for a certain political and social orientation: one which saw an inherent value in ethno- religious diversity and a critique of the status of traditionally hegemonic groups. Its critics would accuse it of being a posture, of being aspirational, and of being divorced from the reality of the past—the same criticisms lev- eled by its advocates at those who subscribe to a “clash of civilizations” view of history and the present. Worse, it became nostalgic, coming to epitomize for some an imaginary innocent time of harmonious inter- communal coexistence or a vanished “golden age of enlightenment.”5 This has only provided further ammunition for critics, some of whom in their reactionary indignation have revealed their own positions to be no less polemical, ideologically-driven, and detached from historical reality than those they set out to attack.6 5 The work of non-academic or non-specialist authors—see, for example, Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment (New York: Free Press, 2005); David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 (New York: W.W.

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