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This is a revisionary study of Muslims living under Christian rule during the Spanish 'reconquest'. It looks beyond the obvious religious distinctions and delves into the subtleties of identity in the thirteenth-century Crown of Aragon, uncovering a social dynamic in which sectarian differences comprise only one of the many factors in the causal complex of political, economic and cultural reactions. Beginning with the final stage of independent Muslim rule in the Ebro valley region, the book traces the transformation of Islamic society into mudéjar society under Christian domination. This was a case of social evolution in which Muslims, far from being passive victims of foreign colonisation, took an active part in shaping their institutions and experiences as subjects of the Infidel. Using a diverse range of methodological approaches, this book challenges widely held assumptions concerning Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, and minority-majority relations in general.
Never before translated into English, this work presents to the reader perhaps the most important source for an intensifying medieval Christian-Jewish debate.
The focus of this collection of articles by Donald J. Kagay is the effect of the expansion of royal government on the societies of the medieval Crown of Aragon. He shows how the extensive episodes of warfare during the 13th and 14th centuries served as a catalyst for the extension of the king's law and government across the varied topography and political landscape of eastern Spain. In the long conflicts against Spanish Islam and neighbouring Christian states, the relationships of royal to customary law, of monarchical to aristocratic power, and of Christian to Jewish and Muslim populations, all became issues that marked the transition of the medieval Crown of Aragon to the early modern states of Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia, and finally to the modern Spanish nation.
Jewish Life in Medieval Spain is a detailed exploration of the Jewish experience in medieval Spain from the dawn of Sephardic society in the ninth century to the expulsion of 1492. An important contribution of the book is the integration of the rise and fall of Jewish life in Muslim al-Andalus into the history of the Jews in medieval Christian Spain. It traces the collapse of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, the emigration of Andalusi Jewry to the lands of Christian Iberia, and the long and difficult confluence of these two distinct Jewish subcultures. Focusing on internal developments of Jewish society, it offers a narrative of Jewish history from the inside out, bringing to light the various d...
Queen as King traces the origins of San Isidoro in León as a royal monastic complex, following its progress as the site changed from a small eleventh-century palatine chapel housed in a double monastery to a great twelfth-century pilgrimage church served by Augustinian canons. Its most groundbreaking contribution to the history of art is the recovery of the lost patronage of Queen Urraca (reigned 1109-1126). Urraca maintained yet subverted her family’s tradition of patronage on the site: to understand her history is to hold the key to the art and architecture of San Isidoro. This new approach to San Isidoro and its patronage allows a major Romanesque monument to be understood more fully than before.
An account of the medical world in eastern Spain in the decades before the Black Death.
Between Sword and Prayer is a broad-ranging anthology focused on the involvement of medieval clergy in warfare and a variety of related military activities. The essays address, on the one hand, the issue of clerical participation in combat, in organizing military campaigns, and in armed defense, and on the other, questions surrounding the political, ideological, or religious legitimization of clerical military aggression. These perspectives are further enriched by chapters dealing with the problem of the textual representation of clergy who actively participated in military affairs. The essays in this volume span Latin Christendom, encompassing geographically the four corners of medieval Europe: Western, East-Central, Northern Europe, and the Mediterranean. Contributors are Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Chris Dennis, Pablo Dorronzoro Ramírez, Lawrence G. Duggan, Daniel Gerrard, Robert Houghton, Carsten Selch Jensen, Radosław Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, Ivan Majnarić, Monika Michalska, Michael Edward Moore, Craig M. Nakashian, John S. Ott, Katherine Allen Smith, and Anna Waśko.
Considering a wide array of sources, this book reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network and augmented their regional success.
This highly original biography of Infante Manuel offers an intriguing and alternative perspective on one of the most turbulent eras of medieval Spain.
The volume contains highly original articles on Islamic history, law, and thought, each either proposing new hypotheses or readjusting existing ones. The contributions range from studies in the formulation of the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar to notes on the "blood-money group" in Islamic law, and to transformations in Arabic logic in the post-Avicennan period. Prepared by former students of Michael A. Cook, to whom this volume is dedicated, these studies not only shed new light on the development of the Islamic scholarly tradition from various perspectives, but together they also represent the honoree's vast, profound, and continuing impact on the field. This collection of highly empirical articles is intended for scholars and students specializing in various subfields within Islamic Studies.