The Medieval Mediterranean

The Medieval Mediterranean & the Emergence of the West

Research

NEH Summer Institute for College and University Professors

June 30–July 25, 2008 • Barcelona (Spain)

A volume is currently in development which will combine articles based on faculty presentations and participant projects. Publication is anticipated for summer 2009.

Participant Projects

Fred Astren
Amy Austin
Stephen Bensch
Ibtissam Bouachrine

Peter Cowe
Theresa Earenfight
John Eldevik
Hussein Fancy
Nahyan Fancy
Eileen McKiernan González
Mary Halavais
Michelle Hamilton
Andrew Kurt
Susan Laningham
Karla Mallette
Leonard Marsh
Afrodesia McCannon

Anjela Cannarelli Peck

Jonathan Ray
Miriam Shadis
Munir Shaikh
Krista Twu
Valerie Wilhite
Nina Zhiri

Projects

Fred Astren
Professor and Director, Jewish Studies Program
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132
fastren@sfsu.edu

Project: Jews and Other Merchants

During the period of the NEH Summer Institute in Barcelona (June-July 2008) my work has moved forward in five areas:

1. Continued reading of Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea. It was appropriate that Peregrine Horden was the first of our presenters, since the premises of this book have informed my thinking throughout the month. I tried to understand each of the other presenters through the prism of this study. The best example comes from Richard Bulliet’s précis of his new work on a medieval cotton boom in Iran which turned the lands of central Islam away from the Mediterranean. In fact, the very turning away from the geographical Mediterranean reifies the conceptual notion of the Mediterranean as a zone of connectivity and exchange. This is best argued through the readings of Mazzaoui (assigned by Bulliet), which demonstrate cotton’s turn back to the Mediterranean by way of the emergence of Italian merchants and industrialists in the later Middle Ages. In an interesting aside, Bulliet maintains that the value given to cotton garments in shari‘a was a foundation for the development of the cotton boom. I read it the other way, whereby the development of shari‘a may likely reflect the economic realities of the very period during which Islamic law was being elaborated. (I am anxious to see the footnotes to this book.) Bulliet and I may both be something of the economic determinist, but our approaches are quite different. In the end, the Iranian turn away from with the Mediterranean in concert with the later Italian pull of cotton back to the Mediterranean constitutes exactly what Horden and Purcell argue for, that the development of surplus in an environment of connectivity results in exchange and distribution. Bulliet’s argument for an Iranian middle period of Islamic history can be read as a religious and cultural corollary to trade and industry.
I spent a good deal of time re-reading (not for the first time!) Horden and Purcell’s description of the late antique/early medieval contraction of the Mediterranean economy, since my current book project on early medieval Jewish history is to locate Jews in a methodological (and not merely geographical) Mediterranean in contrast to other approaches to Jewish history of this era.

2. Visigoths. With my book project in mind, I spent time reading Visigothic history. As I learn more, I am convinced that current treatments of Jews in the Visigothic kingdom (especially from the late sixth century until the Muslim conquest of 711) are inadequate, if not naïve. A careful methodology is needed for reading the historical evidence regarding Jews, which is almost entirely found in royal and ecclesiastical conciliar law. A point by point reading of these laws must take into account that they can be either prescriptive or descriptive, and as such may be shaped by precedents established by the Church Fathers and in late Roman law as well as through the unfolding of political history of the Visigoths themselves. A new approach to Jewish history under the Visigoths demands subtlety heretofore not applied to this material. My readings included Raúl González-Salinero, Judios y cristianos durante la Antigüedad tardía: entre convivencia y la controversia (2006); ibid., “Catholic Anti-Judaism in Visigothic Spain” (1999); and Luis A. García Moreno, Los Judíos de la España Antigua (2005). (I found Orlandis’ recent book less helpful than these others.)
In conjunction with this topic, and in search of mercantile characteristics of early medieval Jews, I discovered that a notion which has some currency in late antique studies may not be useful. Jean-Pierre Devroey and Christian Brouwer argue that the idea of “colonies of Eastern merchants” in the Visigothic kingdom and elsewhere in the Western Mediterranean comes from a mistake in reading the sources. Jews, Syrians, Greeks, and others should not be thought of in terms of colonies and all that such an idea entails. This in “La participation de la Juifs au commerce dans le monde Franc (Vie-Xe siècles)” (2000).

3. New bibliographic sources. I was pleased to discover that there exist modern editions of the medieval Spanish historians, Lucas de Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. Until now, I was only aware of sixteenth and seventeenth century editions of these writers’ historical works. Both Lucas and Rodrigo recount a story regarding the role of Jews in the Muslim conquest of Spain in the eighth century. In this search, I also learned of Lucy Pick’s Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (2004) and a doctoral dissertation from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2006) by Enrique Jerez Cabrero, “El Chronicon Mundi de Lucas de Tuy (c. 1238): Técnicas Compositivas y Motivaciones Ideológicas.” With the Muslim conquest of Spain in mind, I also consulted (and purchased) Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, Emires y Califas: Los Omeyas y la Formación de al-Andalus (2006).

4. An unexpected result of this institute is that reading I did in preparation for the stay in Barcelona (Bisson, Abulafia, Burns, and Hilgarth) will constitute the foundation for a new component of my course on medieval Jewish history. I plan to add a unit (perhaps two or three sessions) on Jews of Catalonia-Aragon and the south of France, which will stand in contrast to the heavy treatment that I give to Ashkenazi Jews (in the north of France and Germany). The new unit will problematize for students notions of Spain in Jewish history as well as help mitigate an overly Ashkenazi-centric perspective.

5. Finally, it must be emphasized how important private conversations with fellow participants and presenters have been in helping me grapple with difficult methodological issues in my work. This informal aspect of the institute should not be undervalued.

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Amy M. Austin
Assistant Professor
University of Texas at Arlington
701 S Nedderman Drive, Box 19557, Arlington, Texas 76019-0557
amaustin@uta.edu

Project: Translating Llull and Wielding Words in Medieval Iberia

My primary focus at the Institute was to advance my book-length project, Translating Llull in Medieval Iberia. Through my research in the archives, my access to the critical materials available in Barcelona, and my sustained conversations with visiting scholars and fellow members, I have narrowed and deepened the focus of this project. Specifically, I have begun to investigate how Ramon Llull's (1232-1316?) texts and translation practices informed reading and writing protocols in medieval Iberia. The current aim of this project is to illuminate Llull’s dialogue with Alfonso X’s (1221-1284) notions of translatio imperii and translatio studii, as well as his role in defining alternative practices of translatio. Within the context of Llull’s vast repertoire of heterogeneous texts, translatio can be viewed as a cultural phenomenon of creative reading and producing. This process refers, on the one hand, to the implications of multi-linguistic visual and written textual practices and, on the other, to the movements between media on the pages of medieval manuscripts.

While the focus of my project has been narrowed, the lens through which I view it has been widened. Given in part to my discussions with the visiting scholars, the coordinators, and the participants, I am now keenly aware that a project exploring the exchange of ideas and cultural production must also consider the economic, political, and even environmental context that aided or impeded such dialogue. For example, in the historical documents at the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA), I found information about the economic circumstances surrounding the first level of translation practices of interest to my project, those that occurred at Llull’s School of Languages at the Monastery at Miramar in Mallorca. It is well documented that King James II patronized the foundation of the monastery in 1276 and that the monetary support from the Crown of Aragon continued with King Alfonso III. However, as I discovered at the ACA, Alfonso III also donated 133 books to the Monastery, along with his regular financial contributions. I have not yet found evidence of the content or nature of these books. Nonetheless, this gift is a reminder that the Monastery was not only a site of translation production, but also a space of intellectual exchange.

The movement of ideas linked with Llull’s texts must also be viewed diachronically as his works are read and translated into multiple languages throughout the Middle Ages. These translations have called into question the genealogy of many of his works, as well as the relationship between the original and the copies or translations. But, perhaps more importantly, these translations are a window into examining how and where Llull is being read. At the University of Barcelona library, I investigated an eighteenth-century Spanish translation of a Catalan letter penned by Pope Benedict XIV regarding Llull’s canonization. My initial motivation for looking at this letter was to find evidence of the centrality of Lullian thought. However, the contents proved to be much more polemic and intriguing than I had imagined. The letter argued against Llull’s canonization, citing plagiarism, lack of reason, mistreatment of Muslims, and failure to be guided by the Holy Spirit among the most blatant offenses. This letter opened a new space in which to consider the reception of Llull, particularly within the context of eighteenth-century thought. While a bit outside the time period that I am investigating, it provided a counter view to current circles in Catalonia that herald Llull as a cross-cultural genius.

As I discovered through my research in the archives of Barcelona, Llull undoubtedly created a space for intercultural dialogue, but these cross-cultural interchanges include his multiple attempts and ultimate failure to convert all nonbelievers, thus complicating his image as a cultural bridge builder. Perhaps more important are Llull’s contributions to language and knowledge formation through his processes of conversion. For this breakthrough, I am grateful for Dr. Ross Brann’s lecture and the discussions that followed which led me to investigate to what extent the malleability of identity in the Middle Ages can be seen reflected or refracted in the form in which texts are written. The abundance of primary and secondary materials available in libraries and bookstores of Barcelona has greatly advanced my research into the impact of Lullian thought in the Middle Ages not only in the Crown of Aragon, but also throughout the Iberian Peninsula. The next step of this book project, as I have redefined it through this seminar, will draw particularly on the medieval Castilian translations of Llull’s texts. I anticipate that these manuscripts, along with the numerous references to his works throughout the Middle Ages, will offer testaments to the translatability of the Lullian knowledge structures that have been heretofore excluded from the contemporary critical consensus about the medieval literary canon.

Stephen Bensch
Professor
Swarthmore College
Department of History, Swathmore College, Swarthmore PA 19081
sbensch1@swathmore.pa

Project:
My work at the summer institute has been oriented to two basic goals, namely expanding my archival investigations in Barcelona for my research project and broadening my knowledge of the larger Mediterranean context of my field. My mornings have been spent working at the Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona and the Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, both of which contain the earliest notarial registers for the city. Although archival research demands that one have a fairly large yet tightly woven net to catch the small bits of information that the notarial materials contain, I have in particular been searching for information related to prohibited trade between Muslims and Christians. After somewhat discouraging results at first, I finally landed a nice catch, for I discovered numerous documents related to heavy fines levied on Barcelona merchants for carrying on commerce with Alexandria, the main center of Egyptian trade, in violation of the king’s orders. These are, to my knowledge, the earliest extant documents in which the king of Aragón levied on merchants for trading with Muslims. The fines specifically enumerate that any Jew, Saracen, or Christian on board must pay a proportionate share of the fine; here the royal peace trumped the complex rules of interfaith commercial exchange. This aspect of the problem will be incorporated into my future publications into prohibited trade.

The summer institute also allowed me through contact with scholars in different fields to broaden my own basis for teaching my senior seminar on the Medieval Mediterranean at Swarthmore College. In particular I found the session on technology and art useful and intend to incorporate both readings and different approaches into my syllabus. The summer institute has clearly provided a productive and invigorating forum for my work, from which both my students and an academic readership should profit in the near future.

S. Peter Cowe
professor
UCLA
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
368 Humanities Building
UCLA
415 Portola Plaza,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1511
cowe@humnet.ucla.edu

Project: Word, Image, and Ceremonial: Soundings in the Royal Ideology of France, Armenian Cilicia, and Serbia (12th-13th cc.)

My paper seeks to elucidate the function of the biblical motif of the ‘rod of Jesse’ as expressed in the art, literature, and ritual of the three above societies and analyze its role in the project of constructing a strong centralized monarchy. Dependent upon a powerful military, economic, and governmental substructure, the dynasties of these states further secured their position on the socio-political front by initiating a closely co-ordinated program to reinforce their legitimacy to rule in terms of lineage, embodiment of the kingly ideal, and divine election.

Large-scale ceremonial played a crucial role in manifesting the one-to-one relationship between the king and the whole body politic as sovereign and defender. The prophecy of the enduring succession of the Davidic line of kingship in Israel (Isaiah 11:1-3) is echoed in the prayers of the coronation liturgy, the parallel enhanced by sanctifying the candidate for the crown through unction (as inaugurated by Samuel) in conformity with early Frankish tradition. The trope of the Tree of Jesse also finds culturally appropriate artistic expression in various media: in France it features inter alia on the stained glass windows of Chartres and the monastery of St.-Denis, closely associated with the Capetians and a site of coronations, and in Cilicia it emerges in a set of sumptuous illuminated manuscripts associated with the court of kings Het‘um I (1224-1270) and his son Levon II (1271-1289), while in Serbia it appears in fresco on a series of royal foundations from Sopo?ani (c.1268) to De?ani (c.1350) and Matei? (post 1355). In Cilicia, the theme also forms the subject of two influential homilies of the last third of the 13th century affording a theoretical underpinning for monarchical rule in the divine dispensation and delineating the characteristics of the ideal king.

The narrower focus on Davidic traditions operates within the broader discourse of royal ideology, whose diffusion in the polities under review was enhanced by literary propaganda largely composed by ecclesiastics closely affiliated with the royal house, who emphasized the close internal cooperation of church and state. Thus, the impact of the reigns of Louis VI (1108-37) and Louis VII (1137-80) of France was significantly enhanced by their presentation in their biographies by Suger, abbot of St.-Denis. Similarly, the verse history of the Rubenid dynasty of Cilicia composed by the chancellor Vahram Rabuni in the mid-1270s highlighted the family’s successes, airbrushing most of their failures and foibles and uniting the many contingent turns of events into a single providential march of progress. In parallel with this, Nemanjid rule in Serbia is celebrated by a series of royal biographies produced by dependents of the dynasty both to confirm legitimacy and maintain political and ecclesiastical unity that had achieved an autocephalous archbishopric by 1219 and would attain patriarchal status in 1346.

The ethos of sacral kingship in each of the three states seeks to create an incontrovertible distinction between noble and royal prerogative, portraying the monarch as set apart for his exalted duty by chrismation as the ‘Lord’s Anointed’ and thereafter under the special protection of Christ, his heavenly counterpart. Moreover, the human analogue to this is hereditary succession on the principle of primogeniture. Armenian texts are exercised to inculcate this new lesson by repeated reference to the heir apparent as ciranacin (porphyrogenitus), accentuating his precondition for accession and warding off attempts to contest his claim or disturb the established order by armed revolt. At the same time, the specific manifestations of sacrality often differed. As is well known, French monarchs were perceived as possessing the ability to heal skin diseases by mere touch. In the Armenian case, the genealogy of the present dynasty was drawn from the previous Bagratid royal line (c.884-1045), the ideologues of which had traced their origins from Jewish deportees to Armenia in the 1st century B.C.E. of the Davidic line, thus rendering the current rulers direct descendants of Christ and thereby heightening the typology of Theophany as the usual feast for holding coronations.

Although all these states were multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, another facet of the dynasties’ ideology was to elicit popular allegiance by fostering a sense of unity and solidarity in the polity under their rule, overcoming regional and other particularities by appeal to collective symbols, often evoking a mythical glorious past to cast its luster on the present as a perceived continuation on some level. In the French case, the main priority was to revive the ethos of the Carolingian era by appeal to its physical remnants. Thus by the time of Louis VI the oriflamme, the French royal standard, was identified with Charlemagne, while under Philip II (1180-1223) Capetian descent from him was regarded as an article of faith. Other sources claim affinities with the very origins of the Franks as a distinct entity by affirming Louis VII was anointed with the same oil used to baptize Clovis in the 6th century. In Cilicia, meanwhile, the appeal was made to the motley population of this (for an Armenian) ‘alien’ Levantine territory to imaginatively span the bounds of time and place to identify themselves with the “race of Hayk” (mythical eponymous progenitor of the Armenians), their designation in the ideologues’ writing. Similarly, the institution of Armenian kingship is coterminous with the people’s ethnogenesis in references to it as the “throne of the rule of the House of T‘orgom.” The latter phrase is another definition of the Armenian people, this time with reference to their emergence from the line of Noah’s third son Japheth via one of his descendants T‘orgom/Togarma. In this way the ideology forged bonds between ruler and ruled to reinforce the fabric of society. It was only under the impact of modern nationalism in the 18th-19th century that Armenians were to exploit the mythical significance of the land of Armenia as the biblical paradise and Mt. Ararat as the cradle of postdiluvian humanity.

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Theresa Earenfight
Associate Professor of History and Chair, Medieval Studies Program
Seattle University
901 12th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122
Theresa@seattleu.edu

Project: The Art of Governing a Mediterranean Realm

My initial research question for the NEH Summer Institute was ridiculously ambitious: To what extent was the distinctive political culture of the Crown of Aragon a product of its location in the western Mediterranean at a crossroads of Italy, Muslim Spain and North Africa. My plan was to focus on two political groups, first, the monarchs, specifically María of Castile and her husband, Alfonso V (r. 1416–58). María governed Catalunya, and at various time Valencia and Aragón, while Alfonso conquered and governed the kingdom of Naples. She was one of seven Aragonese queen-lieutenants, but her tenure was the longest and her powers were the most extensive. What I wanted to know seemed simple: Who and what would have informed her ideas on governance? What was she reading and how was she taught the art and practice of ruling? I had done some preliminary work on three Catalan authors—Francesch Eiximenis, Tomas Mieres, Jaume Callis—but needed to know more about Italian and Muslim ideas on good governance that might have been transmitted to the kings and queens of the Crown of Aragon. The second group I wanted to study was the local elites in Barcelona. What would they have known in terms of political ideas, norms, and practices and what were they were reading? But María’s reign is so abundant in documentation and rich in ideas that I focused on the queen and never got to the elites.

My archival research revealed that María wrote roughly once a week to her mother, the formidable Queen Catalina, who had been regent of Castile twice and helped broker the deal that brought the Trastámara dynasty to the Crown of Aragon. There are several hundred extant letters in the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, dating from María’s arrival in Barcelona in 1414 and her mother’s death in 1418, (Cancillería registers 3108, 3109, 3162). These letters cover both news of the weekly events at court and personal, even intimate matters such as the onset of her first menstrual period. María learned Catalan quickly, so the letters were written sometimes in Castilian but most often in Catalan. My goal is to discern what these letters can tell me how much María knew about governance when she became queen of the Crown of Aragon and how much she had to learn on the job. This project has another side—the letters from mother to daughter—that will require a trip to the archives in Madrid next summer where I hope to get a sense of what she might have learned from her mother, both personal and in the arts of ruling.

To know what María was reading, to see if she had any books that might shed light on her own political sensibility, I turned to the inventory of Maria’s possessions at her death (the inventory is in Valencia at Arxiu Real de Valencia, Real: 473; her will is ARV Real: 472; the inventory was edited by José Toledo Girau, Inventarios del Palacio Real de Valencia a la muerte de doña Maria, esposa de Alfonso el Magnánimo [Valencia: Anales del Centro de Cultura Valenciana, anejo n. 7, 1961]). In addition to household objects, personal possessions, jewelry, painted altarpieces, tapestries, relics and reliquaries—a bit of the true cross, a rib from Saint Catherine (I’m not sure yet which Catherine), and a bit of the head of St. John—she owned seventy-one books. She gave her books to one of her ladies, Yolanda de Monpalau, for her good services to her and asked that she donate them, at her death, to the monastery of Sant Trinitat. This is clearly a gift of heartfelt affection for both Yolanda and for the monastery she so lavishly endowed while alive and where she died.

From studying this inventory, I learned something that all good literature scholars know, that Ramon Menendez Pidal gave modern titles to medieval books by Spanish authors. So I have to go through the titles of the books in this inventory, which are referred to by an intitulation such as Aci comença lo libre appellat de les Dones (Toledo Girau, Inventarios, item 31, p. 53). This could be one of at least two books with De les Dones in the title. It could be Francesc Eiximenis’s Llibre de les dones, which treats women favorably, or it could be Jaume Roig’s L’Espill, o Lo Libre de les Dones, one of the most misogynist fictional works of the later Middle Ages. Or it could be something entirely different. And, in addition to determining exactly what these books were, I need to categorize them by medium (written on paper or parchment), subject (religious or secular), and whether gifts or purchases, and then compare her collection to other queen’s libraries and to Alfonso’s library in Naples.

Unlike Alfonso, who became more Italian than Spanish and was thus perhaps more Mediterranean than his wife, this inventory reveals that María’s life and interests were deeply intertwined with Valencia, the site of her favorite royal residence and where she lived exclusively for the last four years of her life. Throughout her reign, she was at the center of the rich and important literary world of late medieval Valencia, and she was a significant patron of the poet Ausiàs Marc, the writer Joanot Martorell, author of Tirant lo Blanch, and probably the anonymous author of Curial e Güelfa (Història del País Valencià. Vol. II: De la conquesta a la federació hispànica, eds. Miquel Batllori, Ernest Belenguer, Robert I. Burns, Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1989, pp. 413–4).

This literary culture has significance implications for my research question about political culture and attitudes toward women who govern. One of the key writers in this circle was a woman, María’s niece and protégé, Isabel de Villena, the illegtimate daughter of Enrique de Villena (Castilian noble, courtier, and author). María convinced her to join a convent and paid her entrance dowry into Sant Trinitat in Valencia, a Clarissan house. Isabel later became abbess of the convent at Sant Trinitat, where she wrote the Vita Christi, what Albert Hauf called a proto-feminist response to Roig’s misogynist L’Espill. Cristina Gonázlez describes as it as a “strikingly beautiful . . . detailed description of the platonic love” between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Lola Badía says it is written in “a beautiful colloquial Catalan” that situates Mary Magdalene at the center of her narrative. This text engages in a debate with Roig, who was not just the author of the he was also María’s personal physician. María herself had no children and this affective relationship with her niece was a significant one. The debate between Roig and Villena took place in full view of a queen governing the realm that was the institutional and economic center of the Crown of Aragon. Roig has received much scholarly attention, and Villena a little, but no one has looked at them or their work from the perspective of her aunt’s very public and active work as queen-lieutenant. This crucial piece of literature differs greatly from that of conventional political theorists like Mieres and Callis who discuss delegated authority but do not address the question of a woman with that authority.

I will continue gathering archival materials—the letters between María and her mother, and the letters among María and Isabel de Villena and Jaume Roig, if any survive—and analyze this material to better understand late medieval Catalan ideas on women and rulership. I will include some of this material in a book manuscript slated for publication in 2009, but I envision that most of this research will find it’s way into two articles, one on María and her mother and another on María, Isabel de Villena, and Jaume Roig. Finally, this research, as well as much of the materials from the Institute, will be incorporated into my teaching: in my courses on medieval Spain, women and gender in the Middle Ages, and a new one I will develop on the medieval Mediterranean which will be part of our department’s World History curriculum.

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John Eldevik
Visiting Asst. Professor
Pomona College
History Department, 551 College Ave. Claremont, CA 91711
jeldevik@pomona.edu

Project:
We have talked a lot this month about the “Mediterranean” as a lens for a number of kinds of broad contacts and interactions between the diverse peoples on its litoral and beyond. Likewise, it has also served as a way of talking about smaller zones of contact and exchange that defined the life of local communities in the Middle Ages. In the spirit of both these “Mediterraneans,” my research this month has focused on a small text in an eleventh century manuscript originally from the monastery of Sant Llorenç del Munt near Barcelona, a small dependency of the Benedictines of Sant Cugat del Vallès, now in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (Barcelona, ACA, Ms. Sant Cugat 22). It contains a letter from Pope Clement of Rome (ca 80-90) to James the Apostle in Jerusalem (Jaffé-Kaltenbrunner (eds.), Regesta Pontificum, †10-11) that is immediately recognizable to canon law scholars as coming from the body of Carolingian-era forged documents known together as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. There are several things which make this small excerpt additionally interesting, however.

Sant Cugat Ms. 22 contains primarily a martyrology, along with the Rule of St. Benedict and some Augustinian sermons, as well as some later transcriptions of charters related to Sant Llorenç. Executed in a single bookhand (except the charters) of the mid-to-late eleventh century, it contains some of the most important liturgical and pastoral texts for a medieval Benedictine community. While the manuscript catalogs for Sant Cugat have noted this text, as well as what appears to be a copy of it in the cathedral library of Vic from the thirteenth century, they have overlooked its relationship to the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus. Moreover, the letter is not simply a copy of a single one of the five Clementine epistles in Pseudo-Isidore, but a rather creative editing together of at least two of them, with some new material apparently added by the copyist himself. This would apparently be a rather singular witness to the presence of Pseudo-Isidore in the Iberian peninsula before the twelfth or thirteenth century when canon law collections like Ivo of Chartes Panormia or Gratian’s Decretum were first circulated there.

The theme of the text principally concerns clerical purity, particularly celibacy and the importance of conducting the mass and handling the host and the wine in an appropriate manner. Although they had originally been generated in the context of some disputes in the ninth century, the Pseudo-Isidore material began circulating widely from the later eleventh century onwards because many of the texts spoke explicitly to issues like clerical purity, papal supremacy and other issues of importance to the ecclesiastical reform movement of the time and appeared to give them the imprimatur of the apostolic church and early popes. There are a few lines of additional material, reminiscent of penitential literature, apparently added by the copyist himself, concerning perjury and forbidding priests to wear an everyday tunic to say mass.

The extraordinary thing in this text, to my mind, is not only that it may represent the earliest evidence for interest in the Pseudo-Isidorian material south of the Pyrenese, but that the copyist was not simply compiling material, but actively creating a new text, selectively choosing passages from at least two pseudo-Clementine letters and even possibly adding some of his own. Some features of the text’s latinity also seem to betray an attempt to “Hispanize” the older Latin of pseudo-Clementine, such as changing v to b in certain initial positions, vocalizing vowels by writing ho in onus, or shifting from t to c in words like eciam, typical romance symptoms. The text has essentially become, then, a forgery of a forgery. What it means in the context of ecclesiastical or monastic reform in eleventh-century Catalonia, or what role the manuscript played in the life and thought of the monks of Sant Llorenç or Sant Cugat still needs to be fleshed out, but at least in its initial stages, this has proved to be a fascinating example for the circulation of certain texts and ideas in unexpected ways, as well an educative insight into the ways local communities could appropriate materials and ideas from far away and make them their own.

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Hussein Anwar Fancy
Junior Fellow, Michigan Soceity of Fellows
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Department of History, 1029 Tisch Hall, 435 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
fancy@umich.edu

Project:
During NEH Summer Institute, I undertook a small project connected to my broader research. Working primarily in the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, I focused on the question of slave smuggling in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Complex and changing political alliances between the Crown of Aragon and the various Muslim kingdoms of Spain and North Africa resulted in ambiguities as well as challenges in defining and enforcing legitimate trade and interaction between Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, the situation also created opportunities for exploitation reflected regularly in the documentation. In August of 1287, for example, two Christian Catalans were accused of luring fellow Christians into North Africa under the pretense of joining a legitimate trading association with two Muslims from Oran (Wahran). In truth, however, these innocent traders were imprisoned when they arrived in North Africa only to be sold at the port of Valencia as legitimate captives of war (ACA, Registro 57, fol. 170v). Critically, this document highlights the manner in which inter-confessional interaction could simultaneously transgress and reinforce religious boundaries. Over the course of a month, I managed to work through several registers and uncover more documentation for this project, revealing complex networks of trafficking that simultaneously broke and remade rigid boundaries. Ultimately, I hope to publish an article based on this material.

Methodologically, the NEH Summer Institute presented the challenge of seeing the Mediterranean neither as a violent boundary – a zone of crusade and jih?d – where Muslims, Christians, and Jews were neatly defined, nor as utopian frontier, where merchants, scholars, and diplomats moved freely, ignoring confessional and political lines. The seminars and lectures during the seminar provoked further debate, a fact that underscores the continuing relevance of the medieval Mediterranean. I also benefited greatly from regular interactions, formal and informal, with the wonderful participants in the Institute, who were willing to share research, syllabi, bibliographies, and advice.

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Nahyan Fancy
Assistant Professor
History
DePauw University, 7 E Larabee St., Greencastle, IN 46135, USA
nahyanfancy@depauw.edu

Project:
I came to the institute, primarily, with the intention of working on a syllabus on the Medieval Mediterranean world. With the help of the talks, seminars and, more importantly, individual discussions with speakers and participants, I have been making some progress in conceptualizing the course: from thinking about potential topics to potential approaches, possible readings as well as ways to introduce the materials to the students. I hope to go back and develop the syllabus more fully and have it ready to teach by next Spring. I think the best thing has been for me to conceptualize the course to address a number of popular polarities: 1. harmony and conflict; 2. the elites and the masses; 3. North and South, East and West; 4. the arts and the sciences, and; 5. the religious and the secular.

I also found Nirenberg’s comments on the political aspect of our work as historians very helpful in thinking through the arguments in my dissertation as I revise it into book form. Consequently, I have actually been rewriting the first chapter of my dissertation during this institute. I liked his way of setting the field up as one of polarities and what sort of political cache those polarities have, and one could say something similar about reducing Islamic science to Greek science or presenting it as proto-modern science. I am becoming more and more enamored with this way of introducing my work, and will continue to use it to modify and buttress my own theoretical approach.

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Eileen McKiernan González
Assistant Professor
Berea College
Art Department, 101 Chestnut St., CPO 2162, Berea, KY 40404
mckiernan-gonzaleze@berea.edu

Project: Gendered spaces and the construction of identity

The primary goal for my NEH research project was to advance my recent interest in fourteenth century monastic architecture. The focus of much of my work up to this point has been on the late twelfth and thirteenth century and royal women’s patronage of monastic sites. I looked at the Castilian and Aragonese realms as a way of addressing stylistic transfer and the deliberate appropriation of style for the meaning it might carry. I was intrigued by the quick arrival of Gothic architecture in Castilla where Aragonese architecture continues to use Romanesque and early variants of Gothic well into the thirteenth century. My early work on the communities of Las Huelgas (Cistercian, b. 1187, outside of Burgos) and Sigena (Hospitaller, b. 1188, between Lleida and Huesca) focused on their churches. I have recently moved into their enclosed spaces as I considered a new mutation is style – the early incorporation of Mudejar at these two sites.

Las Huelgas’s chapels of La Asunción and San Salvador, and the cloister of San Fernando are early examples of the adoption of Mudejar in Castilla. They use a variation of the Almohad style in stucco decoration and in the structural use of the qubba – believed to be an allusion to the qubba behind the Mihrab at the Great Mosque of Cordoba. These constructions created a stark contrast between the public, open space of the church, and the private, enclosed space of the monastery through style. Likewise, the chapterhouse of Sigena combined a Byzantinizing fresco cycle with artesonado (elaborately carved wood marquetry) associated with Taifa architecture, specifically of the Banu Hud of Zaragoza. Las Huelgas is a well-published site with extensive archaeological surveys; Sigena was burned down in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War complicating its analysis. Part of my time in Barcelona was spent completing my analysis of the chapterhouse of Sigena as a charged site that revealed an early attempt at a broader view of style in the Aragonese realm: a view that opened it to the Mediterranean, both to Byzantine forms and to the incorporation of courtly styles of the Islamic world. I was and am intrigued as I shift my focus into the fourteenth century on the dearth of this charged stylistic paradigm in the county of Barcelona.

While in Barcelona I have worked at the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya, the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, and the Institución Milá i Fontanals. I was also able to make several site visits, significantly to the Monastery of Vallbona de les Monges (c. 1153/76, Cistercian – major renovation work XIV century) and Santa Maria de Pedralbes (f. 1326, Clarissan). These two foundations had intimate connections to the court and reveal a consistent approach to architectural style and burial practices. The architectural reforms and structure also reveal a distinct approach to Gothic that connects it, not to the model established by great cathedrals such as Chartres, but a smaller more austere variant associated with southern France and Italy. The connections to Italy in particular – not only with the new religious order, but also in scale and style – reveal a new pattern of church construction, one that deliberately appears to forego the royal French style of Rayonnant (at a site such as Sainte Chapelle). My preliminary search for comparable sites in Valencia and Mallorca has revealed similar results. Both of these cities, as did Barcelona though the convent has disappeared, had major foundations of Clarissan convents in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Neither of them reveals the incorporation of Mudejar even though sources and craftsmen would have been readily available locally.

The conservative, reform minded, yet exquisite approach to Gothic at Pedralbes contrasts dramatically with the palace convent of Santa Clara de Tordesillas in Castilla. Here the incorporation of a Nasrid cloister reveals a deliberate importation of a foreign workforce to build in a courtly style coming from an Islamic court. The cloister opens to a small chapel built on the form of a qubba with Gothic-Mudejar decoration. The church continues this pattern. The county of Barcelona, and by and large modern day Catalunya, does not incorporate the use of Islamic arts either local or imported in architecture. The example of Sancha’s chapterhouse had implications for Aragón, where Mudejar became a regional style, in regions between Calatayud and Zaragoza and in Teruel further south, but does not radiate eastward to Catalunya. Furthermore, until the reforms of the Trastamara dynasty to the Aljaferia in Zaragoza, the Mudejar appears to cease as a style of royal patronage. This regional approach to royal patronage is intriguing to me and I will continue to pursue its implications.

I have benefitted enormously from my time in Barcelona, not only due to lectures and research time, but most significantly from the dialogue among my peers. The ability to ask questions that appeared as I looked at documents or secondary literature was extraordinary in the thoughtful, informed and quick responses I received. In the process I have begun to rethink the construction of my project. My original conception of the project as a comparative analysis between Tordesillas and Pedralbes as major markers of courtly style in the fourteenth century has revealed two new directions I perceive to be more fruitful. The first is a consideration of the late appearance of Gothic-Mudejar in Aragón, looking particularly at the balance between the Calatayud/Zaragoza axis with the new settlements of Mudejares in Teruel. These regions reveal the diversty of Mudejar, that which is Taifa related, versus the Almohad inspired work in Teruel. The second project would pursue the spread of Clarissan convents in the Crown of Aragón. These sites present mitigating spaces in the development of a Clarissan Gothic aesthetic that spans the Crown of Aragón’s Mediterranean reach. Both projects will involve more archival work and site analysis. The second project will by necessity be farther reaching as the Clarissan convents of Mallorca, Valencia, Naples, and Palermo are not as well documented as Pedralbes, nor as pristine in their conservation.

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Mary Halavais ( Hal-a-vay)
Associate Professor, History
Sonoma State University (California State University, Sonoma County)
1801 East Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA 94928
halavais@sonoma.edu

Project: Undergraduate Syllabus on the Mediterranean World

My project this July has been to design a syllabus for a senior-level writing seminar, The Mediterranean World. I have taught the course before at Sonoma State, but knew that a month of lectures and discussions about the Mediterranean environment would give me some new directions to go.

The syllabus, and associated materials, will be available on-line throughout the fall semester at http://www.sonoma.edu/users/h/halavais; please visit if you have a chance. Suggestions and comments from the NEH seminarians will be particularly welcome!

Here are some of the specific changes I will be making:

1. Focus upon the Mediterranean as more than a background. The last time I taught the course, students wrote some excellent papers, but they were “located” in the Mediterranean region, instead of being about it. I want students to focus on networks, reciprocity and characteristically Mediterranean cultural and social markers, as much as they (and I) can. I know much more about some of these than I did a month ago!

2. A broader and more demanding reading list. In part, this is possible now because a number of monographs are available on line, including Goitein’s Mediterranean Society. In part, it’s possible because I have become a tougher teacher! For example, students need to have finished reading Braudel before the first meeting of the course. Students will also be submitting book reviews throughout the semester, a requirement which will be unpopular in a research seminar but which will be an alternative way to develop writing skills.

3. A reading list which includes the “stories” of the Mediterranean. This is one I am still working out. Suggestions are welcome. I think some of the more comic Boccaccio, certainly the 1001 Nights, perhaps some of the animal stories/ Book of Alexander, but I need to select these so that students can see the stories being retold and elaborated upon in the Mediterranean environment. I am woefully unprepared to teach literature, so I have hesitated to do this before, but I intend to learn along with my students.

As I continue to assemble the materials for this course, I know that many of the things I’ve learned from both participants and lecturers this summer will (as Ben Franklin’s gravestone was to have read) reappear in a newly edited version.

Michelle M. Hamilton
Associate Professor
University of California, Irvine
322 HH Irvine, CA 92697-5275
michellh@uci.edu

Project:
The seminar allowed me to complete work on a series of projects, all at various states of completion. I will discuss first the project I discussed in my NEH application, then briefly comment on others.

1. “The Spectral Arab.” While in Barcelona I was able to make significant progress on a detailed reading of the primary text, La Crónica del Rey Rodrigo (also known as La Crónica Sarracina) by Pedro de Corral. The subject of this work is the last Gothic ruler of Iberia, Rodrigo, and the so-called “Fall of Spain” in 711. While Corral and this text has been paned by Hispanomedievalists such as Menéndez Pidal as containing too many elements of later 15th-century romances (such as jousts and lots of dialogue on courtly themes), its claim to be based on a Arab chronicle of the historical events of 711 has repeatedly drawn the attention of Spanish authors (including most notably Cervantes in the Quijote) and critics. In the 17th-century André de Resende begins citing the “Rasis mouro” as an authority, citing a Portuguese translation (made by meestre Mafamede mouro and the cleric Gil Perez on orders of Rey dom Dinis in the 13th century) of an Arab manuscript. The problem is that no such Portuguese translation or Arab manuscript has been found. Menéndez Pidal, however, authenticates the spectral history of this account, claiming it as an “archeological remain of Visigothic Literature.” Diego Catalán and María Soledad de Andrés came out with an edition of the Crónica del moro Rasis in 1975, claiming that Sánchez Albornoz has definitively proved beyond all doubt that the Portuguese translation and Arab original existed and were in fact the sources for works such as the Crónica de 1344 and the Crónica del rey Rodrigo. Given the ideological agendas of both Sánchez Albornoz and Menéndez Pidal I have serious doubts regarding their supposed vindication of the lost Arab authority, and think not only their work, but also that of Pedro de Corral (to whom the work is attributed only because Fernán Pérez de Guzmán in the Generaciones y semblanzas says Corral wrote it—otherwise none of the manuscript copies of the Crónica identify the author) merit further detailed study.

Interesting points in context of the seminar:
a.) the beginning chapters may be based in al-Razi’s work on geography of Iberia (from the Ajbar Muluk al-Andalus but also contains identified material from pseudo-Isidorian treatments of “Spain.” In this material the Mediterranean is used to frame the geographical identity of the Peninsula, or the “Two Spains”: “Las Españas son dos porque partieron por el mouimiento de los vientos . . . pues vna España es a leuante del sol e la otra es al poniente. E la España que es contra el poniente corren rios contra la mar Grande que çerca todo el mundo . . . E la España de luante del sol . .. e ha en ella rrios . . .e entra[n] en la mar Redonda.” cap. iiii 100n5
b.) the history of Rodrigo’s reign and events leading up to the Muslim arrival are very much framed from the south, i.e. offering a vision of a peoples whose gaze is to the south and east, to North Africa and beyond. The narrative, in fact, expects of its readership a knowledge of the Mediterranean: “E un domingo de mañana dimos vela, e todos dentro en la mar levantóse un viento ravioso . . . que ovimos de tomar la mar de oriente; e nosotros metidos en mar quanto cinco migeros, el viento saltó al través, e fue tanta la tormenta que por mucho que orceamos no nos podimos tener que no llegásemos a vista de tierra . . . tomamos tiera en Belquima.” cap. xliiii (234-35)
c.) Upper class women travel on horseback: “E antes de que entrasen dentro la Duquesa [de Loriena, whose come to Rodrigo’s court to recover her dukedom from her dead husband’s bastard son] vino ay a cavallo, e con ella muchos cavalleros que la acompañavan de casa de la Reina” cap. xlvi (238-39)
d.) The Queen rewards all the jousters (her “prisoners”) with jewels from “arquetas”: I am picturing the little decorated boxes we saw in Girona, most of Arab/Andalusi origin, as I think Corral must have, even though anachronistic for Visigothic queen to have such boxes before the arrival of the Muslims. (for ex. cap. xlii)
e. Conde Julián and Rodrigo’s perception of fighting Muslims (alarabes) is framed according to fifteenth-century perceptions of Crusade—(¿perhaps already a nostalgic vision?) “Al alto, poderoso, señor Rey don Rodrigo, acrescentador de la fe de Jhesús, sostenedor de la verdad, amenguamiento de los males, destruidor de los ereges, espada de justicia, . . . yo, el Conde don Julián, guerreador de los alarbes, e sofridor de las batallas contra los incrédulos” cap. xliiii (234)

Question for seminarees: Does the name Gonça Peral ring any bells? (Enrique de Villena in a letter says talks about a torbellino similar to the one in the Crónica “según la estoria gonça perral ha escrito” (10)

2. La Danza general de la muerte. I have completed here about half of a detailed philological comparison of the text of the Spanish Danza general as it exists in the two known exemplars (a manuscript in the Escorial Library and a printed version from Sevilla from S. XV) and an aljamiado Hebrew version now housed in Parma, Italy. More importantly I was able to consult the only existing manuscript version at the Escorial, which is currently bound with other texts such as Shem Tob’s Proverbios and the Poema de Fernán Gonzalez. Existing studies of the Danza and these other works have not addressed the relationship between them in this particular manuscript. I was able to tell that the Danza, although not on folios from the same quires or related to Fernán G., does seem to be by the same scribe who copied the Proverbios. I also found that the Danza and a following poem on death were copied in the same quire, with same ink and hand (thus at the same time by same person). Most importantly, I found from the papermarks (despite a catalogue description) that the Danza is (probably) not copied on paper from Aragón, as is the aljamiado Danza I am working with.

3. I was able to attend a poetry reading by a contemporary Saharawi poet, Ebnu. I am editing a translation of the poetry of the group of Saharawi poets to which Ebnu belongs (known as the Generación de la Amistad). I also met with Spanish scholars also working on Saharawi poetry. In addition he gave me a copy of his new book as well as this really fascinating little anthology of poetry called Os doy esto desnudo que es mi mano: Diez años de poesía en solidaridad con la República árabe saharaui democrática signed by Jorge Guillén in 1982. It includes poems dedicated to the former Spanish colony of the Western Sahara by poets such as Guillén, Mario Benedetti, Alfonso Sastre and Al Bayati. It was released in a really small printing by the Asociación Cultural de Amigos del Pueblo Saharaui (I need to do some research on this when I get home) and was found with several other copies by one of the group’s friends in a basement of a house in Madrid.

Andrew Kurt
Visiting Asst. Professor (History)
Grand Valley State University
Dept. of History, 1060A MAK, Allendale, MI 49401
kurta@gvsu.edu

Project:
The Institute was a superb occasion not only for personal enrichment on historical questions related to the medieval Mediterranean world and its cultural cross-currents, but also to pursue a project I had recently started concerning relations between Ethiopia and European rulers in the Mediterranean region in the late Middle Ages. Early in the fourteenth century thirty Ethiopian envoys visited the pope and the King of Aragon to offer ‘aid against the infidels’, as a Genoese report stated. This mission eventually prompted a stream of ambassadors, adventurers, and military expeditions from Aragon, the papacy, and Portugal lasting over three centuries. During this time Ethiopia slowly became the supposed location of the legendary Prester John, the priest-king of exceptional wealth and power believed to rule over a land of wonders somewhere in the East. Not found by the likes of Marco Polo in China or India, he became associated in Europeans’ minds with the Christian king in Abyssinia, or Ethiopia, who had monastic subjects in Jerusalem since the Third Crusade and whose representatives made their way around 1310 to visit the Mediterranean heads of state mentioned above. Such contacts, which accelerated significantly in both directions in the fifteenth century, stirred European hopes of a back-door joint Crusade against the Mamluks and other Muslim powers in the Red Sea area and beyond.

My ultimate objective is to trace the several stages of Ethiopian-European relations more fully than has been done to this point, incorporating various themes which have not been put together as a whole, a requirement for understanding the full story of the relations as they developed and the consequences for the European mentality. These themes are the following: (1) Ethiopia’s thorny relations with Mamluk rulers of Egypt, whose approval was required for the sending of an Ethiopian metropolitan from the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, on whom Christian Abyssinia had always depended (2) Ethiopia’s delicate balance with Muslim kingdoms on the western coast of the Red Sea, through whom essential trading had to pass, and the fluctuations of Ethiopian military strength in facing threats from this direction (3) the related vicissitudes of Abyssinian monarchs, who alternated between displays of dominance and signs of serious weakness (4) the fixing of belief in medieval Europe that the mysterious Prester John was actually to be found not in Asia but in northeast Africa (5) the growing number of contacts between the West and Ethiopia and the multiple purposes behind the travels (6) Portuguese ship travel to Ethiopia and the Red Sea after 1500 and the subsequent Ethiopian defeat by neighboring Muslim invaders which ended plans for a joint Crusade by the two Christian powers (7) the intellectual challenge posed to Europeans by a Prester John who was black, the color for Europeans of the degenerate race of descendents of Cush, son of the condemned Ham of Genesis X.10 (8) the story of European mapping of Prester John and increasing knowledge of Africa.

The location of the Institute provided me with the opportunity to pursue an important avenue of research concerning relations between King Alfonso V of Aragon and two different Ethiopian rulers. At the Archives of the Crown of Aragon I examined and copied the registers of letters from Alfonso to Yeshak in 1428 and to Zara Yakob in 1450. Both were in response to envoys sent from Ethiopia seeking aid and alliance. These letters will help to demonstrate that the timing on the part of the Ethiopian ambassadorial journeys is linked to difficulties in which the Ethiopian kingdom found itself vis-à-vis its eastern Muslim neighbors of Adal. The planned route and instructions regarding the Spanish embassy are evident in another register from Alfonso to the King of Cyprus in 1453. The Institute also enabled me to chat with a couple of fellow participants and senior visiting scholar who were versed in certain aspects of the topic of my research. I was also able to take advantage of library resources in Barcelona which I might not otherwise have come across or have been able to access at home. My plan is to complete this research and submit it for publication as a substantial article in the spring.

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Susan Laningham
Associate Professor
Tennessee Tech University
5 William L. Jones Dr., Cookeville, TN 38505
slaningham@tntech.edu

Project:
For my NEH project I have created a syllabus and curriculum content for a course I will be offering in the spring of 2009, entitled “Religion in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean.” The covers will focus primarily on cultural collaboration and interaction between the three major monotheistic religions of rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, although inspiration from ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman theology, deities, and ritual will also be discussed. While the title of the course seemingly confines the study to the ancient and medieval eras, the implications and application extend well into the modern age. I am framing the course for senior history majors, but the content will probably draw students from other majors who enjoy challenge and controversial topics.
The class will meet on Tuesday nights from 6:00 to 9:00, so that I can fashion it along the lines of a graduate seminar, with discussion outweighing lecture. Assigned readings will be profuse, in order to stimulate discussion. The course emphasis is on scholarly writing, with the senior thesis (research paper) the primary goal. Throughout the course of the semester and prior to the completion of the senior thesis, students will receive plenty of writing practice and feedback/editing from the professor by way of two-page paper assignments (over required readings) in weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 14, in support of the thesis put forth by the professor the week before the paper is due. The course content is organized thematically, although it will still unfold somewhat chronologically.

Week 1: Defining Terms: ‘Religion’ and ‘Mediterranean’;
Before there was One God: Fashioning Deities & Expressing Piety in the Greco-Roman World
Week 2: The BIG THREE: A Brief Overview of Beliefs & Practices
(Reading: Peters, The Children of Abraham)
Week 3: Sacred Texts: Compilation, Transmission, and Appropriation
Week 4: Dying for God
(Reading: Boyarin, Dying for God)
Week 5: Holy Destinations, Tourists, Groupies, and Expensive Souvenirs
Week 6: Stereotypes & Racial Profiling
(Reading: Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham)
Week 7: Asceticism: Organized and Not-So-Organized
Week 8: Sexual Hierarchy and Perfect Women
(Reading: EITHER Thurlkill, Chosen Among Women, OR
Lassner, Demonizing the Queen)
Week 9: The Myth of Common Cause: Holy War
(Reading: Excerpts from Fulcher of Chartres, Ibn al-Ath?r,
Solomon bar Simson)
Week 10: Eschatological Traditions: How Does it All End?
Week 11: RESEARCH PAPERS DUE
Field Trip to Nashville:
West Side Synagogue, Islamic Center, St. Cecelia’s Convent
Week 12, 13: Research Paper Presentations
Week 14: The Myth of Tolerance: Convivencia or Conveniency?
(Reading: Constable, Medieval Iberia)
Week 15: Second Submission of Research Paper
(to be placed in student’s file in history department)

Required texts:
Alexander Knysh, Ralph Williams, Yaron Eliay, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: A Sourcebook (Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 2006) $35-65
F. E. Peters, The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam: A New Edition (Princeton, 2006) $17.95
Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999) $23.95
David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, 2005) $27.95
HALF the class: Mary F. Thurlkill, Chosen Among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi’ite Islam (Notre Dame, 2008) $27.00
HALF the class: Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender & Culture in Post Biblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (Chicago, 1993) $27.00
Olivia Remie Constable, ed., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Pennsylvania, 1997) $32.50

Every student will also need access to a Qur’an, the Torah/Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and a New Testament. Required readings will include Genesis, Exodus, Judges, I Samuel, Esther, 1st Maccabees, Mathew, Mark, Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the pseudo-Pauline letters of Timothy, part of the Apocalypse, and selections from the Qur’an and Talmud.

Required readings may also include handouts of selections from texts such as B. F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control Before the 19th Century; Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (California, 1989); Ross Shepard Kramer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (Oxford, 1994), Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton, 2007), Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal; Representation of Jews and Muslims in 11th and 12th Century Islamic Spain (Princeton, 2002), and others.

While I have directed the content of the NEH Institute toward a new course curriculum, virtually everything learned in the Institute during these four weeks in Barcelona can and will be incorporated into my existing class curriculum at both the survey and senior level.

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Karla Mallette
Assistant Professor
Dept of French and Italian, Miami University
207 Irvin Hall, Oxford OH 45056
karla.mallette@gmail.com

Project:
My research this summer was shaped by applying a fundamental question from Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea to the literary history of the medieval Mediterranean: Can we write a literary history of the Mediterranean – not a series of discrete, if interconnected, histories in the Mediterranean? Literary history complicates Horden and Purcell’s approach in a specific way. Language – the raw material of literary composition – was the fundamental taxonomy used during the Middle Ages to distinguish one people from another: it differed from nation to nation (using the medieval terminology), from region to region and even from one city to another. In the medieval Mediterranean language was the essential marker of identity, more fundamental even than religion: the rules of language – its grammatical structure and lexicon – must be respected, or communication becomes impossible.

There were, of course, trans-regional literary languages used in the medieval Mediterranean, the languages of classical written cultures: Greek, Latin, Arabic. And there must have been a spoken language of trans-regional communication, used by medieval merchants to do business across the Mediterranean and by those who traveled for pilgrimage, education or warfare.

There is a historical myth of a pan-Mediterranean language used by the merchants and travelers of the Middle Ages: the lingua franca. The lingua franca was a language of convenience. Primarily an oral language, it also left the occasional written record. It was used to communicate across linguistic boundaries in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. Merchants and diplomats used forms of lingua franca used to mediate between Arabic and the languages of Europe. But the phrase “Mediterranean lingua franca,” as used by modern scholars, generally refers to the language used among speakers of the various European languages in the port cities of the Mediterranean. European witnesses had a certain fascination with this language, especially during the early modern period. It appears in narrative accounts describing travels to the Holy Land and the Barbary Regencies, particularly starting in the late sixteenth century. And there are characters who speak in lingua franca in some early modern literary works, most notably in two plays by Molière (“Le Sicilien,” 1667; “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” 1670) and in six plays by Carlo Goldoni (1735-ca. 1760).

The term “lingua franca” is Italian – hence the plural form lingue franche. The term “franca” used in the expression does not mean French, as moderns might assume. Nor does it mean “free,” as the Latin meaning of the adjective francus would imply. The term originated in the Byzantine use of the adjective phrangos to refer to the western church following the coronation of Charlemagne as western emperor in the year 812. The Arabs borrowed the adjective to refer to Western Christians in general, in particular Romance-speaking Christians, producing the Arabized form al-ifranji. This is the origin of the term lingua franca in the Romance languages. It identifies (from the perspective of witnesses themselves situated outside the linguistic community) a language of convenience shared by Western Christians in the ports of the Mediterranean – predominately but not solely Christians who spoke a Romance tongue as their native language.

This summer I surveyed medieval and early modern written texts looking for evidence of the medieval lingua franca. Since this was essentially an oral language I wasn’t looking for records written in the lingua franca. I concentrated on narratives about travel. And I paid particular attention to how witnesses talked about language, and what language they used to communicate across linguistic boundaries, both between the Romance languages and between Romance and the other languages of the medieval Mediterranean – primarily Greek, Turkish, and Arabic. I read travel narratives written by pilgrims to the Holy Land, by diplomats who traveled between the shores of the Mediterranean, and by those who had been captives in the bagno of Algiers; Italian merchants’ manuals; an Italian poem celebrating the deeds of travelers to the east; an account of the fall of Tunis to the Turks in 1574; an intelligence report on Arab settlements on the coast of the Maghrib written by two Knights of Malta; and the records of the French consulate in Tunis.

Nowhere in these materials did I find evidence of a Mediterranean lingua franca during the Middle Ages. Travelers, including merchants and pilgrims, used translators to communicate with speakers of Arabic and (later) Turkish. These translators were typically referred to using terms derived from the Arabic tarjam?n, which generated the terms dragoman and turcman in the Romance languages. These men were often, though not always, renegades. They functioned also as guides, and their local knowledge – including the knowledge of languages – was proprietary information. The fact that they knew things that the travelers didn’t was the substance of their livelihood. Hence an economic disincentive militated against the genesis of a Mediterranean lingua franca and contributed to the fragmentation of the medieval linguistic terrain. To communicate amongst themselves, European travelers used various contact languages and languages of convenience. As a rule the default language was Italian – not a linguistically unique Italianate lingua franca, but rather Italian as lingua franca.

A Mediterranean lingua franca did emerge during the early modern period. The first descriptions of it appear in travelers’ accounts of the bagno of Algiers and pilgrimages to the Holy Land to the opening decade of the seventeenth century. As described by early modern travelers, it consisted of Italian without verb conjugations, and with a sprinkling of vocabulary from the Spanish and Arabic. This language was referred to as either corrupt Italian or lingua franca, and was used between Arabs, Turks and Europeans in the southern and eastern Mediterranean.
My ongoing research on the Mediterranean lingua franca will build on my studies this summer – including work with early modern travelers’ accounts I read at the University of Barcelona library – and the conversations I have had with other seminar participants in Barcelona. I plan to seek other sources for reports concerning linguistic usage in the medieval Mediterranean. And I am particularly interested in the reconstructions of the lingua franca found in early modern texts and its variant symbolic valence as a lost language of European unity, as the linguistic currency of Italian hegemony in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, and as symbolic of the disturbing cultural hybridity of the medieval Mediterranean.

Project:
My interest in medieval literature was renewed when I revisited an article I had published on La Chastelaine de Vergy, an anonymous mid thirteenth-century roman courtois. At the same time, I started studying Arabic and began to read María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World. Putting two and two together, I came to suspect that perhaps the Arab culture in al-Andalus could have filtered across the Pyrenees and made its way into this Burgundian romance via the activity of the troubadours which, Menocal suggests, was influenced by the booty brought across to Aquitaine after the siege of Barbastro in 1064. Specifically, I had questions about the origin of certain traits in this romance that seem not particularly characteristic of the roman courtois. One of them was the presence of a secret ritual strategy embedded in the narrative that represented a love affair and the pact of secrecy connected to it and which, when revealed, indicated the betrayal of the love affair. Here is the strategy within the context of the narrative:
A lady (the châtelaine), who is hinted at as being married, avowed her love to a certain chevalier on the condition that he keep the love secret. She trained her dog to scoot out into the garden as a signal to her awaiting lover that she was alone and that he could come in and spend the night. The bottom line is that this strategy of the trained dog, which is the textual sign of the secrecy of the pact, gets revealed when the lady’s vengeful rival for the love of the same chevalier slips this oblique remark to her as they are dressing for the Pentecost ball: “You sure do know how to train your little dog, don’t you?” At that moment the lady knows the secret love has been revealed, the pact broken and her love betrayed, and so she pours forth a magnificent monologue of despair and kills herself with a sword. On finding her dead, the lady’s lover pierces himself with the same sword. A little girl, unbeknownst to all at the foot of the bed, unwittingly hears and sees all this. Integral to the story and other layers of betrayal is that the lady’s vengeful rival for the love of the same chevalier and instigator of the betrayal was the duchess. When the little girl tells the duke what she has unwittingly heard and seen, the duke takes the sword out of the chevalier’s body, storms into the Pentecost Sunday ball, kills the duchess and explains the whole thing to a sympathetic court audience. He takes up the cross and becomes a templar.

In the three weeks since the first week’s whirlwind of activity, I did not find any noticeable influence of an Arab imprint on this romance. What I was able to do, however, was to
1. use the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Barcelona to consult Corpus de poesía mozárabe and Sobre árabes, judíos y marranos y su impacto en la lengua y literatura españolas (Josep María Solà-Solé) as well as a doctoral dissertation La Châtelaine de Vergi: estudio morfológico-sintáctico y estilístico: edición crítica y traducción (Mercedes Rolland Quintanilla).
2. have valuable conversations with the members of my small group during which I was reminded of La Chastelaine’s affinity with the Lai de Lanval as well as the existence of a course in paleography specifically designed for folks in mid career.
3. refocus my attention on the text’s noticeable complete absence of characterization and physical description and even the text’s conscious avoidance of naming. This has led me to the path of treating the text as one that is morally determined, one that speaks not to fact, intrigue or specific character development but to the larger moral issues of loyalty, secrecy and betrayal in the societal framework of a court that is getting increasingly complex.
Further reading on the Chastelaine seems to support this focus in a kind of work that structuralists, semioticians and linguists do with texts. One critic drew the analogy of the strategy of the little dog with the little girl at the end who innocently communicates the lady's monologue of despair to the chevalier and then to the duke. Both the little dog and the little girl (both have diminutive suffixes in French) are narrative devices of messaging in which the message is not understood by its enunciator (the little dog and the little girl) but is of utmost importance for its receptor (the chevalier and the duke). This is structurally significant because it is in stark contrast to the conscious betrayal of the secret strategy by the chevalier, duchess and duke, although all with different motives.
I still need to plumb this text as a sign of love and loyalty betrayed by the malicious manipulation of the truth. An example of such a sign is its very antithesis in the denouement when all the truth finally comes out and gets pieced together on Pentecost Sunday. This is significant as a semiotic event because it reflects the first Pentecost (50 days after Easter) when the Holy Spirit descends on the followers of Jesus and fires them up with passion to communicate the truth of Jesus. This is of course is represented in Christian iconography as tongues of fire on their heads.

There are “Saussurian” issues of the strategy of the little dog as a sign so completely identified with its referent that when it is revealed, the referent is revealed. And there is the issue of the class relationship between the interlocutors in a communicative act. I don’t believe this approach of mapping structural linguistics on the moral value of the text is too farfetched since the very incipit of the text sets such a path. Loosely translated, the first verses say: “There are some people who say they are loyal and can keep a secret, but when it comes to love, they just can’t keep their mouths shut.”

My intent is to write a paper on how the signs of communication imbedded in the narrative operate to comment on the moral value of love and loyalty. I then expect to submit the paper to an appropriate journal for publication.

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Afrodesia McCannon
Associate Professor
Rowan University
201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028
mccannon@rowan.edu

Project:
My project for this institute, a literary study of Jaume I's, Catalan autobiography, has been influenced by the seminar in several ways. My initial work on his text, the Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, focused on reading a slip of the tongue in the dictated text; Jaume recites his text in the majestic 'we' except for a noticeable peppering of lapses into the first person singular 'I'. These lapses occur almost entirely in recorded speech, that is when Jaume recalls what he said at a given point. My original aim in the study was to see how the slips suggested that the text was less imperial propaganda than it had been thought to be.

I came to the institute hoping to get a better sense of the cultural and historical environment that would produce such a king and text. I also wanted to follow a lead about Arab influence on the Llibre. In terms of my own research progress, I found and had copied several Catalan critical sources that I could not find in the U.S. -- my strategy in general was to try to accomplish tasks that would be hard if not difficult to do back home. I found an edition of the 1314 Latin translation of the Llibre and the scan of the original ms in which is found an important prologue of the translator. I now know that there is interesting marginalia in the 1380 ms, the scan of which I can access from home, along with all the other major early mss. There were discrepancies in the edition I was using, in terms of when Jaume switched from plural to singular first person, that by reading the earliest Catalan mss I was able to clear up. I found two sources of the suggestion that there was Arab influence on the text. An anecdote about a swallow that builds a nest on Jaume's tent has a parallel in an Arab chronicle and Robert Burns, one of the major scholars of the text suggested in an appendix that Jaume may very well have known that Arab rulers write diaries of sorts which they then give to scribes to create their biographies. Burns found this in Franz Rosenthal's History of Arab Historiography. I plan to follow up this lead with some research of Rosenthal's sources to see if, indeed a link can be forged between Jaume's text and Arab biography.

Along with my library research, I have learned something from each of the institute's speakers. I have a list, on which I will not elaborate here, of what I have learned from each of the scholars who have participated in the institute. Whether the content or methodology of their research, some aspect of each scholar can be put to use in both own research on Jaume (and beyond) and in my teaching. For my teaching in particular, I have been exposed to a range of texts and ideas that I am eager to share with my students.

To return to Jaume I and his text, the king's project is still a strange on. Josep Pujol argues that the work fell on deaf ears and no one read it until Jaume II had it made into a 'history' by having it edited and translated into Latin. It appears that it was unrecognizable in genre and no one knew what to make of it. One possibility – and this is my hypothesis of the last 48 hours (I have had many) – might be that Jaume, who may have fancied himself knowledgeable in things Muslim, knew that Muslim leaders wrote diaries which they then had turned into histories. Perhaps, though, he didn't know that in the transmission from sovereign's hand to clerk's the works became written in the third person. One of the things I have learned about the Mediterranean is that, as well as being a space where goods and ideas circulate, it was a place of mistranslations and incomplete transmissions like the subpar Astrolabe discussed by Dr. Samso or the suspect paper making treatise Dr. Bloom mentioned. This is a lead, among several that I will follow, on my return to the U.S..

Lastly, what I learned from my colleagues here was priceless, especially useful were the comments and help of my discussion group.

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Anjela Cannarelli Peck
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Hamilton College
Clinton, NY
apeck@hamilton.edu

Project:
Throughout these past four weeks, my participation in the NEH Medieval Mediterranean Institute has challenged my work on these Muslim and Christian textual wombs of pervivencia in Early Modern Iberia in several ways. My archival research, the Institute readings and lectures, as well as the formal and informal discussions with Institute participants and presenters have provided me the opportunity to dynamically rethink and better focus my project in light of the Medieval (as a time period) and the Mediterranean (as a geographic space of trade, movement and cultural trends). To sum up my project’s development, I have found new primary documents to incorporate into the project and considered ways to better frame the manuscript conceptually and methodologically.

Upon application to the Institute, I had originally planned to compile bibliography on the fifteenth-century mudejares (Muslims living in Christian-controlled territories). I felt that this was important for my project because it would allow me to better contextualize my study of these Muslim groups after their forced conversions to Christianity that began in 1501—when mudéjares were relabeled as moriscos (little Moors). Although I still think that this is important for future research, my project’s focus for the summer Institute changed before arriving in Barcelona when I discovered aljamiado manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya. After looking at these two lesser-known texts, my conversations with the manuscripts director at the BNC led me to the Museu de Lleida and Biblioteca de Lleida, where I looked at several documents discovered in the walls of 2 houses in the towns surrounding Lleida, one in 1961 and the other in 1985. These manuscripts in Lleida, composed of two aljamiado devotionary texts in Spanish and Arabic as well as talismans, were particularly interesting as they allowed me insight into morisco textual culture and readership in the northern part of the Crown of Aragón, a region that to the South contained nearly half of aljamiado texts that still exist today. Although I have not yet been able to analyze the Lleida documents in detail, my preliminary findings indicate that one of the manuscripts will be very significant for my book project. This text includes a story that I have been working with from a southern Aragonese manuscript entitled El al-hadit del alcazar del oro y la historia de la culebra con ‘Ali ibnu Talib. My discovery of this new copy was particularly important as it sheds light on the circulation of this text throughout the Crown of Aragón (another copy was also found 200 km to the West along a tributary of the Ebro). These findings, coupled with my work at the Institute, have helped me to define important conceptual and methodological questions essential to my project revolving around the themes of movement, negotiation, and change.

Conceptually, the ideas of movement, negotiation, and change were woven throughout the Institute—from Peregrine Horden’s interest in local networks of exchange to María Rosa Menocal’s re-reading of Visigoth art. Likewise, in my own work, these threads define the fluidity of Muslim and Christian exchanges throughout the Medieval and Early Modern time periods expressed through the continually shifting dream-like spaces of magic, prophecy and fantasy that saturate mudejar and morisco literature as well as other Christian Spanish texts that depict Muslim and Christian interdependence and interconnectivity. I am interested in further probing these shared activities in late Medieval and Early Modern Spain methodologically in order to further understand the debates that raged in Muslim and Christian works about questions of self-definition and the articulation of a center—politically, religiously, linguistically, culturally and racially—in the years surrounding 1492 until the morisco expulsions that began in 1609.

By documenting the circulation of aljamiado texts throughout the kingdoms, I will further examine these textual instances of Christian-Muslim pervivencia by way of the dynamic, constantly shifting spaces of change that characterize the prophetic, magical and fantastic texts. If I can prove that these morisco texts were circulated among morisco circles throughout the Spanish kingdoms, I can more confidently draw conclusions about their perceived identity at local and national Peninsular levels. I believe that this attention to conceptual and methodological detail will strengthen the project and enable me to better trace the interconnectivity of groups of moriscos in Spain and abroad, informing their conceptualizations of self-definition as interconnected.

Jonathan Ray
Assistant Professor
Georgetown University

Theology Department
37th and O streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057
jsr46@georgetown.edu

Projects:
My time at the NEH Institute has been particularly fruitful, allowing me to advance my current research in ways both conceptual and material.

One of the principal benefits of the seminar has been the opportunity to re-think my approach to medieval Jewish history. At present, the dominant approach to the study of medieval Jews is to consider them as either marginal or as hybrid. That is, the history of the Jews is generally viewed either against the more “normative” history of Christian or Muslims, or as a narrative that loses its own distinction as it combines with that of the dominant culture. Though both approaches have their merits and indeed can afford us important insights into the nature of medieval Jewish society, both carry with them significant problems. The first assumes we know what Jewishness means or looks like in a given era, usually by accepting the static nature of Jewish institutions, social structures and ideologies. Such assumptions of a discrete Jewishness allow for us to focus on Jewish interaction with Muslims and Christians (themselves typologically represented). The second, somewhat more “current” approach, is to abandon these categories altogether in favor of hybrid conceptualizations such as Arabized-Jews.

Our seminar discussions have suggested to me that one way out of this dilemma is to reassess our notions of hybridity and alterity. That is to say, it is possible to speak of the Jewish polity that is functions as a cohesive entity and as a site of cultural production without labeling it as “other,” and therefore marginal. Thus, when Andalusi-Jewish communal leaders engaged in factional disputes over the legitimacy of certain cultural and political norms, they demonstrated a dedication to internal Jewish legal and political tradition while at the same time echoing social structures and trends of their host society. In my forthcoming study on the inter-dependence of Jewish self-government in the medieval Mediterranean world I will argue that Jewish political organization provides an interesting example of how minority-majority interaction is sometimes less obvious than we might imagine. Rather than provide an illustration of a culture that is openly and obviously hybrid, the social and political structures that developed in the local kehillot of al-Andalus demonstrate how majority culture might be refracted and reproduced within the minority community while leaving the boundaries between the two intact. An example of this twist on hybridity can be seen in a re-reading the question of cultural allegiance among Andalusi Jews. One of the most often discussed test cases of such tensions over cultural and identity politics of the era is the longstanding medieval debate over adopting Arabic grammatical norms and stylistic models for the use if Hebrew literature. While the factionalism derived from this debate is often interpreted as a sign of the Kulturkampf among the Andalusi Jews over Hebrew and Arabic, I would propose that the very nature of the factionalism itself is part of a broader set of social and political tensions within Andalusi society. Thus the nature of Jewish factionalism and the way it operated was itself evidence of the impact of local Andalusi culture.

In addition to refining my approach to by subject, I have also had the good fortune to uncover new documentation at the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó here in Barcelona. Part of my larger book project on Mediterranean Jewry after 1492 has been to look at the connections between Jews and Spain in the wake of their expulsion. While here, I was able to find new information about Jews who choose exile over conversion in 1492, only to return shortly thereafter after having received baptism in the Italian cities of Naples and Genoa. These documents help to corroborate a larger trend of Jews returning to Spain from Portugal and Navarre, and raise important questions regarding the nature of religious identity and communal bonds in this epochal period.

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Miriam Shadis
Assistant Professor
Department of History, Ohio University
405 Bentley Hall Annex, Athens, OH 45701
shadis@ohio.edu

Project:

I will be thinking about and digesting the experience of the NEH Institute “The Medieval Mediterranean and the Emergence of the West,” in which I participated in the summer of 2008 in Barcelona Spain for a very, very long time: thus these reflections are tentative and superficial. The experience, however, was anything but.

I wanted to accomplish three things while attending the NEH Institute: to fill in some very real gaps in my education regarding medieval Spain and the medieval Mediterranean; to work on my syllabus for my Medieval Spain course, and related to that, to learn what I could that would be useful for the new Jewish Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University; and third, to brave the archives of Barcelona, where I have never worked, and begin a study of dower practices and women’s property holding. My initial goal was to work in the Cathedral Archive as well as the Archive of the Crown of Barcelona; I also had high hopes for using the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya as well as the CSIC library. Along with my initial study of women and property, I also wanted to revisit the history of two of the women at the court of Jaume I –his first queen, Leonor of Castile and the Countess of Urgell, Aurembiaix, who is commonly described as Jaume’s concubine. As it happened, plowing through the pergaminos from Jaume’s reign between 1216 and 1230 in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon allowed me to take a stab at both these projects.

This report will mostly focus on my time in the archives, but I’ll make a few points about my own education and teaching research as they relate to larger questions the Institute has posed for me. I have a newfound love for Catalonian history! Guifred el Pelos had a starring role in week three of my new course on the History of Medieval Spain, and the monasteries of Ripoll, Poblet and Pedralbes, along with the cities of Barcelona and Lleida became important touchstones for my class. I was thrilled to be able to explain to my students, with authority derived from experience, the distinctive and diverse nature of Catalonian geography and its relation to the region’s history. Beyond enriching my understanding of the region’s history, I found that the sea really is corrupting – or at least, challenging, provoking, undoing – the ways I have thought about Spanish history in the past, in which Catalonia and Aragon have assumed a sort of liminal space, not unlike Portugal. Thinking beyond Castile really does make Spain different. I always interpreted the bromide “España es diferente” to mean different from, say, France, or England.* What I realized with a full force is that Spain is different from itself, and this is especially true for the “medieval Spains.” I’m not ready to concede that all history is local history (which at any rate would be a disastrous premise for my undergraduates) but the specificity of what I’ve encountered will force me to rethink comfortable old generalizations. Likewise I have profoundly sharpened my thinking on how to approach the history of the Jews in medieval Spain, primarily in terms of dealing with a tiny minority of great importance, whose historical stature has been (probably forever) complicated by the experience of the Holocaust. Visiting the Jewish Museum and Quarter in Girona, walking every day through the old Jewish quarter of Barcelona, seeing the preserved mikveh in Besalu, as well as identifying Jews in the royal documents of Jaume I – were all important to this experience, which was highlighted by numerous intense conversations with NEH colleagues Fred Astren and Jon Ray.
In terms of my own research, the dower question was particularly important to me because I have long been dissatisfied with older assertions about what happened to women’s landholding, and what happened to dower practices in the medieval Mediterranean – they didn’t make sense in terms of what I observed in my own research in medieval Castile. As a result, one of the big questions for the seminar for me has been “what do we mean by Mediterranean?” and implicitly – how much of Iberia counts? Here the distinctiveness of the medieval Spains comes once again to the fore. Does my work in Castile and León, for example, reflect a Mediterranean society? (Is there, as Fred Astren suggested early on during our Institute, a “Mediterranean effect”?) The obvious thing to do was to come east, and then, perhaps, to start working westward. No one would debate, I think, that Catalonia (or at least, parts of it? And here already things begin to break down) is Mediterranean. Certainly, we know that Barcelona is! Bearing these questions in mind, I’ve begun to scratch the surface of the kinds of evidence I’m interested in, and this falls basically into two categories: the relations between men and women at court (kings and queens, primarily) and the relations between men and women in the exchange of property – both loci of expressions of power.

A few passes at the ACA, and I decided I would have to put off the Cathedral Archives for another time. To negotiate the archive effectively, I thought it would be best to begin with a subject and a set of documents with which I was already a bit familiar – those from the early reign of Jaume I and especially regarding his first queen, Leonor of Castile, and then also the Countess of Urgell, Aurembiaix. Thus, I focused on charters from 1200-1232. I was pleased to find unpublished documents relating to the queenship of Leonor, but as I suspected would be the case, they were very few. I was confirmed, therefore, in my assessment of the very restricted role played by Leonor after about 1224. More surprising, to me, however, was the lesson I received in medieval diplomatics. The intitulations, witness lists, and dating clauses of royal charter and monastic charters from Castile, León, and Portugal have been key to my research on the role of queens and other royal women in those regions, as it is in those “fringe” elements of a charter that a queen or other woman will often appear. The over 300 charters I looked at in Barcelona, with a variety of provenances, did not give up this kind of information. This suggests to me a very different view of kingship, as well as of queenship – at least from the perspective of chancery practice.

I am trying to think about the differences in these Catalonian and Aragonese charters (from the other Iberian ones I am used to) in terms which may have some interesting implications for the conception of the “Mediterranean” in terms of women’s history – especially their legal position. I have argued in the past, and I’m not the only one, that when Castilian, Leonese, and Portuguese kings acted “una cum” their wives (and potentially, their sons and daughters) that this was more than formulaic – that they were expressing a kind of shared power arrangement, one recognized for earlier times in France, for example, by Achille Luchaire, who characterized the relationship between king, queen, and heir as a kind of trinity. This was more than generosity on the king’s part, of course: what was being expressed was a) the real necessity of having more than one person at the helm of the kingdom, and b) also a way of securing the position of an heir in an ancient system in which the election of kings was in tension with the desire to promulgate a dynasty. Interestingly, Castilian queens after about 1170 did not as a rule witness royal charters – unless they issued them; sometimes Leonese and Portuguese queens did. The practice of the king acting “together with” his wife also reflected, to a degree, the Visigothic law governing the common property of husbands and wives. Likewise, a difference (which is not particularly gendered) between Aragonese and Catalonian charters, and the ones from further west, is in their dating clauses. It took me a while to understand that there was a system to Castilian dating – the base year is 38 BCE – and it was sort of a shock to arrive here in Barcelona to find everything conveniently dated according to the Common Era. At the same time, a useful Castilian practice is not followed: I looked at over one hundred monastic charters at the ACA and many more in the pergaminos related to the court of Jaume I which were not royal charters, and in none of them did I observe the (to me) usual practice of identifying the date of the charter not only by the anno domini but also by the reign of the king (and queen.) This practice is highly inconvenient for the study of queens, or at least, this particular queen. In some ways my previous ideas about Leonor, based on what published documents there are pertaining to her, were confirmed. I did expect to find documents relating to her activity outside of the court directly (patronage activity, for example) and I found none – but then, I think I barely scratched the surface of potential resources for that information. But what I had been able to discern previously from what I am calling Huici Miranda’s expurgated edition of Jaume’s charters was this: Early in Leonor’s queenship (when she was about 20 to Jaume’s 13), she appeared several times in his charters and witnessed his documents. After the first few years of marriage, she disappears completely. Interestingly, the arrival of a son in 1228 did not change this (equally interesting, Jaume did not include his son Alfonso in his intitulation or witness lists; once he gains his personal independence from his tutors, he really did act independently); The only charter issued by Leonor after 1224 is actually co-issued with Jaume and is a statement of innocence regarding the couple’s apparent consanguinity – which would bring about their divorce. (This will take more study.)

The story of Leonor is incomplete without understanding the story of the Countess of Urgell, Aurembiaix. Challenged in her rule because of her gender, and protected by Jaume (as was his “feudal” obligation) against her competitors, Aurembiaix was potentially Jaume’s concubine. I discovered, in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, two recent books – one, a more or less popular examination of the various queens, concubines and other women in Jaume’s (long) life; and the other, A la recerca d’Aurembiaix d’Urgell (Dolors Domingo, U. of Lleida, 2008) which is a detailed study of the countess’s life, informed by close examination of numerous sources from archives across Spain, and which handily includes transcriptions of many of those sources. Thus, a general study of Aurembiaix is probably not necessary – if one reads Catalan. However, I’m quite interested to use the moment of the 1220s to understand how sex and sexual relations informed the political practices of the day – first Jaume’s marriage to Leonor, and subsequent divorce, and then Jaume’s so-called concubinage contract with Aurembiaix. I went in search of the famous “concubinage contract” – which is exhibited in the Palau de Lloctinet – if it’s what I found – I’m dubious. The evidence that Aurembiaix was Jaume’s concubine is not at all clear to me and I’m left wondering about the historiography which has built up around this idea.

Future Plans: Curriculum and Publication
I thus began several projects and foresee no immediate conclusion to any of them, except for the contributions to my course on Medieval Spain, taught this fall, and my continuing contributions to our Jewish Studies Certificate. My research plans involve using my new familiarity with the ACA, and the 300-400 documents I looked at (and knowing there are many more, including untapped (by me) resources in the Cathedral Archive) to strategize a systematic, meaningful approach to the material – and then to write a grant proposal to return to Barcelona to conduct this research. What I know now is that there is a complex dynamic of property exchange for which marriage is sometimes the catalyst between men and women.

I also hope to write an article on the sexual politics of the early court of Jaume I – specifically surrounding his relationships with his first wife Leonor and with the countess Aurembiaix. Much of what I have to say about this will be historiographic, as Jaume’s sex life has long held a fascination for historians; I am more interested in the ways in which sex was a key element of the political role of women early in his reign. In preparation for this article I will deliver a paper in October, 2009 at the conference “To Have and To Hold: Marriage in Pre-Modern Europe 1200-1700,” to be held at The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto. My paper, titled “Sexual Politics: Marriage, Concubinage, Historians and the court of Jaume I of Barcelona-Aragon,” will be based on my research in the Crown of Aragon archives and the recent historiography I encountered in Barcelona this summer. According to his own Book of Deeds, King Jaume I of Aragon and Barcelona had a sexually fraught marriage to his first wife, Leonor of Castile. An (un)fortunate discovery of consanguinity enabled Jaume to divorce Leonor and turn his attention to rescuing the Countess of Urgell, Aurembiaix, from threatening neighbors. Historians have assumed this relationship was sexual, and indeed have read the charter whereby Aurembiaix handed over her county to the king as a “concubinage contract.” I argue that sex (and the promise or absence thereof) formed a key element of the evolution of the king’s power, even as it was freed from the constraints of marriage.

* I hadn’t realized, either, until this trip –although I’ve been to Spain a number of times and in fact was the first eleven-year old in my town to mark Franco’s death in 1975 – the fascist appropriation of this saying.

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Munir Shaikh
Adjunct Professor of History
University of Redlands
1200 E. Colton Ave.
Dept. of History, Gannett Center
Redlands, CA 92373
munir_shaikh@redlands.edu

Project:

The NEH summer institute in Barcelona on “The Medieval Mediterranean and the Emergence of the West” was beneficial and productive for me in three major respects.

1) Scholarly Growth
This was an exceptional opportunity to have sustained contact with a diverse group of dedicated and passionate scholars working on topics associated with the Mediterranean milieu. By and large the faculty members’ presentations and assigned readings added a wealth of new information to my knowledge base, and pushed me to reexamine the concepts and language I use to discuss inter-cultural relations and the implications of dynamic religious, ethnic, linguistic, and social factors (this seemed to me to be a common thread I could use to connect the implications of the various talks dealing with seafaring, literature, science, architecture, luxury goods, politics, etc.). It is clear that as academics we continue to struggle to accurately characterize medieval Mediterranean societies, stressing particularism on the one hand yet seeking overarching theories on the other. While no definitive solutions have been achieved, the models continue to evolve, particularly in light of cross-disciplinary conversations such as were evident throughout the seminar. It was very valuable to get a sense of the state of scholarly endeavors in this regard. Personally, with respect to Andalusi history, I hope to more successfully produce responsible scholarship that navigates the terrain between the prevailing romanticized approaches rooted in the ideal of Convivencia and the hyper-skeptical reactions that now seem to be emergent as the pendulum of debate swings once more.

2) Nasrid Studies
Considering that Barcelona did not remain a part of Al-Andalus for very long, and that (in my mind) the Crown of Aragon did not appear to figure prominently in the later history of Al-Andalus, thus far I had neglected to consider Barcelona as a place to acquire further knowledge about the Nasrid state of Granada. I had been accustomed to relying on standard Arabic sources, notably the writings of the 17th century historian al-Maqqari and the 14th century wazir and polymath Ibn al-Khatib, along with well-known secondary sources produced by Western scholars based on Andalusi texts, for the bulk of research to date. As I came to learn more about the rich archives of the Crown of Aragon in the course of this program, and realized that many of its documents were produced precisely in the time period of Nasrid rule (including correspondence between the Aragonese and Granadan courts), I understood that a substantial body of material could inform my work and enable me to bring together sources in a way rarely done previously in the field of Nasrid studies. Wonderful scholars in Catalunya such as Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol and Roser Salicrú have produced works reliant on the Latin texts in the ACA, while other scholars elsewhere have utilized Arabic sources, a situation that deserves to be bridged. This institute gave me a chance to meet Dra. Salicrú, who was extremely helpful and enabled me to obtain a photocopy of an important book called Los Documentos Árabes Diplomáticos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón edited by M. Alarcón y Santón and R. García de Linares (1940), containing almost all of the Arabic letters sent to the Crown of Aragon, the bulk of them from the Nasrid rulers and their wazirs. She also provided a copy (a real time saver) of collected articles by A. Giménez Soler on the Crown of Aragon and Granada published since 1905 in the Boletin de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, and her own book El sultanat de Granada i la Corona d'Aragó, 1410-1458 (1998). These materials are waiting to be mined and I plan to consult them to prepare one or more articles on Nasrid statecraft in the coming years. In addition, from the library of the Universitat Barcelona I was able to obtain photocopies of several journal articles on the Ibn al-Khatib that I had difficulty locating in Los Angeles, since the journals were obscure. Furthermore, I had a chance to photocopy the extremely important chapter on Historiography pertaining to the Nasrids from the relevant volume of Menendez Pidal’s relatively new and monumental Historia de España. This is sure to keep me up to date and well-grounded.

3) Teaching Resources
In addition to furthering my personal scholarly interests, I had planned to use the institute as a basis for developing web-based lesson plans and resources for K-12 world history teachers and public educators, pertaining to the medieval Mediterranean world. My recent exploration of websites such as Outreach World (www.outreachworld.org) and similar sites by universities and non-profit education organizations has revealed that there are hardly any existing lessons and resources that treat the medieval Mediterranean as a topic or as a context for studying societies engaged in exchange, circulation and communication. (Print resources are another matter, which I have not investigated yet). I did discover a set of online lessons produced by members of a 1997 teacher’s institute organized by the Archaeological Institute of America titled Cargoes from Three Continents: Ancient Mediterranean Trade in Modern Archaeology. Another project I located, titled Mapping Mediterranean Lands, features digitized maps from American overseas research centers around the Mediterranean area, produced under the aegis of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). This set of resources contains very little lesson instruction for educators, however, and most of the maps are from the 17th century onwards. Thus, for the medieval period, there is very little online in terms of designed lessons on the Mediterranean, though no doubt that are a fair number of lessons that treat various constituent cultures more or less independently (e.g. The Rise and Spread of Islam, Byzantine culture, Italian city-states, Crusaders, medieval travelers of certain backgrounds, etc.). Online resources on museum websites such as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art thus far seem to be the ones that best challenge conventional notions of isolated history, since they often feature objects exchanged between societies or produced in pluralistic environments, yet teaching materials remain limited.

My plan in the coming weeks is to use many of the faculty presentations and related readings as a basis for developing a new unit of 7-8 web-based lessons on the Medieval Mediterranean. On the suggestion of some institute colleagues I may seek out grant support for this development work, but that is not a determining factor. I expect to read additional articles and gather several other books for reference in order to have a more rounded body of knowledge upon which to design these lessons. However, I anticipate lessons could be fairly easily prepared based on the work of Julio Samsó (Scientific Transmissions), Jonathan Bloom (Paper Technology and Transmission), Maria Menocal (Poetic and Architectural Confluences), and Anthony Cutler (Gift Exchange), for example.

Conclusion
Through this institute, I have come to appreciate Barcelona’s importance as a nexus point within the Mediterranean world, past and present. I am glad to have achieved a comfort level during this month for navigating the academic resources available here, and look forward to returning in the future to conduct more targeted research at the ACA and other institutions. My thanks go to the institute directors and the many organizations and colleagues in Barcelona who welcomed us and shared their work with us.

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Krista Sue-Lo Twu
Associate Professor
University of Minnesota Duluth
English Department
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN 55812
ktwu@d.umn.edu

Project:

In preparation for undertaking a translation of Raymund of Penaforte’s Summa de poenitentia, I came to Barcelona to learn more about the local cultural, religious and political and history that informed Raymund’s service in the Dominican Order as well as his service to Innocent III and Gregory IX.

Progress: As it turns out that I knew practically nothing about Barcelona or its environs before coming here, I have made significant progress in improving my understanding of the place and its medieval contexts. I have managed to acquaint myself somewhat with the pertinent holdings of the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the University of Barcelona (which holds the earliest and most important of the extant manuscripts of Raymund’s Summa – the one used as the base text for the modern edition), and I am curious as to whether the Archives of the Crown of Aragon contain any records of Jaume I’s interactions with Raymund, who served as his counselor and confessor.

The following are avenues of inquiry or new issues to explore (some more basic than others) that represent my conceptual progress with respect to understanding the historical context of Raymund’s text, and that will help guide my future research:

Should I really be referring to him as Raymund of Peñaforte (or Raymundo de Peñaforte)? Or should I refer to him by his Catalan name, Ramon de Penyafort?

To what extent do his preaching activities in the Dominican Order affect his composition of the Summa de poenitentia? -- Especially with respect to Jaume I’s collaboration with the Dominican Order’s efforts to convert the Jewish population, leading to the debates with Moshe ben Nahman, over which Raymund (Ramon) presided? Although these debates happened long after the publication of the Summa, can we see any foreshadowing or anticipatory rhetoric in the Summa?

The 4th Lateran Council of 1215 established yearly auricular penitence as a sacrament in order to control heresy as well as for pastoral purposes; it also established marriage as a sacrament. How closely do these impulses correlate with its mandate for the separation of Jewish and Muslim communities, with the imposition of badges worn for identification? All three seem concerned with problems of constructing and construing the self and the other within the secular community as well as with respect to the community of faith. Nirenberg’s readings, lecture and seminar were most enlightening on this topic.

As Jaume I’s counselor and confessor, how politically engaged in the affairs of the Crown of Aragon was Raymund (Ramon)? How influential was he in Jaume I’s program to establish and elevate Catalan identity?

Barcelona was a multicultural, polyglot society; how much of a polyglot was Raymund (or Raymundo or Ramon)? Can we assume that his primary language for daily affairs was Catalan? Did he preach in Catalan or in Latin? And how does the close daily contact with other religious and ethnic groups affect his writings on legal and theological matters?

In the University of Barcelona Library, I have come across the Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis Cataloniae, which focuses on the Latin of Catalonia between 800 and 1100. Although Raymund (Ramon?) wrote his important works between 1200 and 1275, were any of these forms still in use? Will I need to consult this glossary for my translation (and is it available anywhere in North America)? However, I don’t think they’ve gotten past fasciculum 9: dotalis-dux.

Pedagogical Outlook: I hadn’t come here especially concerned about how new thinking about the Mediterranean would influence my pedagogy, but the last several weeks have definitely inclined me to present my new insights in class – especially in a course I teach every other year, called “Mapping the Heavens,” which leads students through readings via medieval cosmology. In the past I focused exclusively on Catholic cosmology, but now I will have new material to add with respect to Judaism and Islam, especially with respect to the transmission of astronomy and astrology, but also with respect to more general patterns of distribution and transmission of goods and ideas around the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe.

Publication Prospects: My library research here has revealed that even in Spanish (Castillano) and Catalan language publications, most of the recent books and essays are historical and biographical rather than critical or analytical, showing a clear space for the literary approach that I am taking in my work. Furthermore, there are very few non-Spanish or Catalan treatments of Raymund (Ramon) available. My general experiences here have given me many more and more precise avenues for future research, and have suggested a way to introduce the translation for an English language readership that contextualizes the work in literary as well as historical and theological ways, with respect to the special position of Barcelona in the Mediterranean world as a crossroads of the three religions, technology and commerce. My new appreciation for the history of the region also makes me think that a particularly literary biography of Raymund (Ramon) might be an especially exciting project, since most of his biographies tend to focus on his theology, rather than examining the literary and rhetorical themes and gestures that appear throughout this writing in response to the particularities of his social, cultural and political environment.

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Valerie Michelle Wilhite
Visiting Assistant Professor
Middle Tennessee State University
Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Box 79
Murfreesboro, TN
37132
vwilhite@hotmail.com

Project:
The time I have been afforded by the NEH Summer Institute on the Mediterranean held in Barcelona during the summer of 2008 has affected me as an academic scholar in three ways:

1. Discussions with art historians, literary scholars of various traditions, and economic and social historians allowed me to aggressively re-examine the methodologies with which I’d grown comfortable. Many of the talks by our speakers demonstrated the great variety of ways original sources or material evidence can be used to stimulate thinking about issues we’d thought already neatly packed away as understood, as unproblematic.

2. The consistent reflection on the idea of The Mediterranean in the presentation by the invited speakers, the discussions in seminars, and the discussion in small groups with people of very different disciplines and backgrounds, as well as discussions with participants over dinner or coffee in groups small and large only added to the questions we came to Barcelona to explore. It is obvious that, as Peregrine Horden instinctively knew, we each had our own concept of Mediterranean we were expecting to have fleshed out over our four-week institute. Instead our givens were challenged and our content or history-based questions gave way to methodological and philosophical ones. Despite the move from the concrete or historical to the abstract the significance of our discussions to current issues were always present. Materialism, racism, transportation, commodification, intercultural exchange, and so many of the issues discussed by scholars and non-academics alike consistently appeared. All of these issues will be included in the Instructor’s version of the syllabus I will be creating for the three courses on medieval Iberia (one literary two cultural) I will be teaching in the fall. I look forward to recreating the dynamism of the summer’s discussions with my students in the fall.

3. The time spent with a variety of scholars from all over the U.S. in the city of Barcelona has been invaluable for my own research on the literary tradition of troubadour lyric, a tradition which had its roots in Al-Andalus before gaining its full strength along the Mediterranean coast of what is now France, and then breathes its last sighs in the territories of Aragon-Catalunya and Sicily and Italy.
It is in Catalunya and Italy that the songs of one of the greatest literary traditions of the west were recorded. The Biblioteca de Catalunya still holds manuscripts or songbooks of troubadours who we would now claim to be Catalans, Provencals, Toulousains, Aragonese, or Italian. What my research has been discovering is that in fact these regional affiliations are not a part of the construction of identity of our troubadours of the earliest known songs through the golden age of troubadour production in the 11th and 12th centuries but instead would rather seem to stem from the irruption of crusade geography or geography as the mentality of the crusades implied it. It is the call to travel across the Mediterranean and most interestingly the “Albigensian” Crusade which pitted sectors of what to the troubadours had been a unified land against each other even as they could have united against the French and the Papacy. Not only does identity change to fit within a mentality of geographical others but music itself changes as the plays of power shift values in these territories. In particular I was able to examine the songs of late troubadours held in manuscripts in Barcelona. One song in particular provides a theory of love completely opposed to that proposed by the troubadours despite its claim to be a song in the troubadour tradition of the “gay saber.” The copious marginalia surrounding the text likewise stress the rhetorical construction of the text rather than the emotional impetus as would have done earlier troubadour songs. The language of the marginal comments suggest that the significant position of love lyric, the discourse of courtliness, has been usurped by legalese—a fact that, as one might expect, will kill the Occitan lyrical tradition.

The healthy reading list I take away from the institute ensures that I will be reading about the issues surrounding Mediterranean studies for quite some time. The relationships formed during this month of collective interrogation and study will ensure that I continue to be pushed in my thinking and questioning. The benefits of the NEH Summer Institute will not be limited to the work or teaching of the upcoming year but for many years to come.

Projects:

A study of Early Modern Orientalism

I feel certain that our work this month is going to be included in my courses in the future. It will be especially true when I will be teaching again world history or world literature classes. The lectures and discussions in this institute were focused on social, economic, cultural, and art history, as well as history of technology and science. For me as a literary scholar, the wealth of information and suggestions (of bibliographic resources, paths in research, etc) will be very precious to create new syllabi and revise old ones. It has given me the necessary tools to find and organize material in order to provide and enrich the historical background, indispensable for the study of literary texts from the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, whether my classes focus on French literature of that time or expand to world literature. I am also thinking of developing thanks to this summer institute an undergraduate class that is for now tentatively called Literatures of the Mediterranean, that would focus on texts and motifs that have widely circulated for centuries and even millennia across the region (such as fables following the aesopic model, epic motifs, etc.) – a class that could focus on one language or open up to different languages, depending on the necessities of the curriculum.

As far as research is concerned, the usefulness of the institute is evident, although it will obviously be less direct. Rather than simply providing material that could be almost immediately incorporated in my work as is the case for teaching, the institute has suggested different paths for reading documents and considering history. This was made possible thanks to the diverse groups of scholars selected for the lectures and the seminars. It was also due to the discussions with other participants, whether in our working groups, the seminars, or private conversations. Plainly this is one of the most obvious benefits of the institute, allowing us to discover the work of so many scholars in the field of medieval studies.

During this month I have used some of the numerous resources provided by Barcelona, and that the institute conveners have done a really good job in helping us discover. In particular, I have read early books printed in Spain and difficult, sometimes impossible to find in United States libraries. This research should be included in my on-going work on the history of early modern Orientalism. Not only did the institute offer me the opportunity to access those texts (most of which are owned by the library of the University of Barcelona), it also helped give me the background to better understand them. One of them was written by a Morisco in the region of Saragossa in the early 16th c. It later attained a measure of fame during the following two centuries, especially among European scholars interested in collecting information about Islam. It was cited and quoted to enrich texts on the subject during that time. This is obviously this aspect that is the most interesting for my research on the field of Oriental studies in the Renaissance. However, evidently the circumstances of its production are important too, and the lectures and discussions about the history of Catalunya and Spain at that time and during earlier periods were very useful. Beyond that particular case, I have had a number of conversations about my work with other participants in the institute that I know will help me frame my future research, up to the point when it will hopefully result in a book or articles.