You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian kings of Aragon recruited thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers to serve in their armies and as members of their royal courts. Based on extensive research in Arabic, Latin and Romance sources, 'The Mercenary Mediterranean' explores this little-known and misunderstood history.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, Christian control of the Iberian Peninsula extended to the borders of the emirate of Granada, whose Muslim rulers acknowledged Castilian suzerainty. No longer threatened by Moroccan incursions, the kings of Castile were diverted from completing the Reconquest by civil war and conflicts with neighboring Christian kings. Mindful, however, of their traditional goal of recovering lands formerly ruled by the Visigoths, whose heirs they claimed to be, the Castilian monarchs continued intermittently to assault Granada until the late fifteenth century. Matters changed thereafter, when Fernando and Isabel launched a decade-long effort to subjugate Granada. Uti...
Reading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interactions between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.
From the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, devotional music played a fundamental role in the Iberian world. Songs in the vernacular, usually referred to by the generic name of 'villancico', but including forms as varied as madrigals, ensaladas, tonos, cantatas or even oratorios, were regularly performed at many religious feasts in major churches, royal and private chapels, convents and in monasteries. These compositions appear to have progressively fulfilled or supplemented the role occupied by the Latin motet in other countries and, as they were often composed anew for each celebration, the surviving sources vastly outnumber those of Latin compositions; they can ...
This volume investigates the mechanisms (artworks, treatises, and other forms of cultural patronage) that the Marquises of Villena and their opponents used to operate in the cultural battlefield of the time with the aim of understanding how their conflicting historical memories were constructed and manipulated. Concentrating on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the book examines these two aristocrats and demonstrates that political tensions led not only to military conflicts during this period but also to conflicts fought on cultural grounds, through the promotion of artistic, religious, and literary programmes. Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin investigates why the Marquises of Villena lost in both the military and cultural battlefields and explains how the negative historical memories forged by their opponents in the late fifteenth century managed to become the official historical truth that has remained unchallenged to this day. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, medieval studies, Renaissance studies, Iberian studies, literary studies, and patronage studies.
Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor was arguably one of the great masterworks of early modern Spain. Although the work appears in five very different manuscript versions from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, most modern editions of El Conde Lucanor have neglected to account for the fact that it was part of a manuscript tradition, and that its meaning is substantially affected when its original forms are not taken in to account. With Manuscript Diversity, Meaning, and Variance in Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor, Laurence de Looze demonstrates how the meaning of Juan Manuel's work changes depending on how the work is 'performed' in particular manuscripts. This study proceeds from the assumption that, in a pre-printing press world, each new copy or 'performance' of a work creates new meaning. By adopting this approach and by focusing on Parts II-V of the texts, de Looze argues that El Conde Lucanor raises questions about the interretation, intelligibility, and the production of knowledge. De Looze's complex and nuanced reading sheds new light on an important work and makes a significant contribution to medieval studies, Spanish studies, and the history of the book.
Annually published since 1930, the International bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. The works are arranged systematically according to period, region or historical discipline, and within this classification alphabetically. The bibliography contains a geographical index and indexes of persons and authors.
None