Browsing by Subject "Iberia"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Bridging the Strait: The Shared History of Iberia and North Africa in Medieval Muslim and Christian Chronicles
    (2021-06) Snowden, Emma
    This dissertation examines Arabic, Latin, and Ibero-Romance historical chronicles written by Muslims and Christians from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries to investigate connections between Iberia and North Africa on two levels. The first is the historical, considering the extent to which Muslim and Christian chroniclers across the Strait depicted their histories as related, writing about the same people and events. The second is the historiographical, exploring the extent to which chroniclers borrowed from one another directly, and wrote within a common cultural and intellectual framework. I argue that chroniclers on opposite shores of the Strait saw their histories as intrinsically connected, but did not always view all the individuals and populations in the region as participants in a larger community. Perceived differences were frequently rooted in religious identities, but also in ethnic and geopolitical ones. Despite these differences, I present evidence that chroniclers drew upon and elaborated a co-produced and mutually colonizing historical framework, employing similar narrative strategies and invoking a common past in an effort to resolve the ideological problem of competing North African and Iberian claims to power over the same territory. Individual chapters detail how historians across the Strait employed ethnonyms for one another that undermined claims to regional belonging, constructed a shared cultural archive of legendary, apocalyptic, and gendered elements to stake territorial claims, and invoked a rhetoric of emptying and elimination that I read through a settler colonial lens.
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    Imagining the Mediterranean: Disruption and Connectivity in Medieval Iberian Tales of the Sea
    (2013-06) Parmley, Nicholas
    Despite the importance of the Mediterranean Sea, much literary scholarship of the twentieth century has fixed its gaze on the ports and hinterlands that mark only the beginning and end of maritime travel. My research responds to this lacuna by investigating medieval tales of the sea and seafaring produced by authors of the diverse linguistic and confessional communities that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. These historical groups not only thrived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but many of them braved its depths, in turn creating complex networks of cultural exchange. And as the authors and subjects of these texts adhered to different faiths and wrote in several languages, the tales they tell reveal not only the rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean, but a complex space of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Real or imagined, the tales these authors tell are of importance to our understanding of a diverse people and a rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance, by and for kings, clerics and exiles, the authors whose work I explore reveal a space of constantly shifting geographical boundaries, political frontiers, and religious identities. But before the protagonists of their tales arrive at port, wreck into land, or are swallowed by the sea, each entices us to consider their point of view, a perspective from amidst the tumultuous waves. I hope to demonstrate through a reading and examination of these texts, both individually and together, how the Mediterranean offers us a reorientation of critical perspective which expands the traditional national literature approach of Spanish Studies to include aspects of Jewish and Arabic history and literature, as well as the contingency of discrete cultural production that cannot be erased by an overgeneralized category of "the Mediterranean." A such, I hope to show how Iberia, as a space of multiplicity, may be viewed as emblematic of Mediterranean Studies as currently articulated. Thus we may explore how Iberian cultural production participates in--and is a product of--a more broadly conceived and shared Mediterranean space of cross-cultural contact and intellectual exchange.
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    Out of Love: Magic and Control of (an)Other in Premodern Iberia
    (2018-05) Menaldi, Veronica
    What do deviant clerics, meddling old ladies, queens, and Moorish necromancers have in common? These unlikely companions share the magical ability to bend people and spaces to their will resulting in amorous entanglements for themselves or their clients. These characters appear in some of Iberia’s most studied texts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries—Cantigas de Santa Maria commissioned by Castilian King Alfonso X; Libro del caballero Zifar written by Toledean cleric Fernand Martinez; Libro de buen amor written by archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz; Celestina by presumed Converso, Fernando de Rojas; and Inocencia castigada written by Maria de Zayas. While the literary characters (and their historical counterparts) in these texts hail from various social spheres and were reproduced by equally varied authors in a span of four centuries, a common thread linking them all is their use of love magic. These various amorous manipulations—regarding both the characters and the authors who created them—expose the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions. I view love magic as a dualistic cultural phenomenon; one that simultaneously claims power but also resists and subverts it. In premodern (Christian) Iberia, magic allows for the entrance of unorthodoxy and Islamicate knowledge while at the same time representing domination of another’s will, sexuality, and mental state. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian: a mixture of imitation and control with a pinch of destruction and acceptance.
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    Women, Slavery, and Community on the Island of Mallorca, 1360-1390
    (2013-12) Mummey, Kevin
    In Women, Slavery, and Community on the Island of Mallorca, ca. 1360-1390, I contend that Mallorcan women, through their participation in the slavery business, extended their reach beyond that of the traditional women's sphere and contributed to the social and commercial structure of the medieval City. Using notarial protocols in the Mallorcan state and capitular archives, I trace how women and slaves affected the nature of literal spaces like public ovens, city streets, and domestic quarters, and impacted the worlds of finance, commercial transactions, and personal interactions. I argue that the social and economic facility of Mallorcan women, while possibly heightened by the epidemiological and anthropomorphic crises of the late fourteenth century, was not an anomaly, but represented a practical way of assessing and living with the possible. My research contributes to three distinct, but interrelated fields of inquiry. First, it contributes to the historiography of medieval slavery by moving beyond the commonly studied enslaved women to study women slaveholders. Secondly, by focusing on an understudied segment of social relation it contributes to a more nuanced portrait of a medieval urban environment. Lastly, my research fills a void in scholarship concerning medieval Mallorcan women, about who almost nothing has been written.