Download PDF | María Marcos Cobaleda - Artistic and Cultural Dialogues in the Late Medieval Mediterranean-Springer International Publishing_Palgrave Macmillan (2021).
304 Pages
As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at least two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years become the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines. In shifting focus away from histories of the origins and developments of phenomena predefined by national or religious borders, Mediterranean Studies opens vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in all their complexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter- and intradisciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and dynamic fields in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets the Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it, as well as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by networks of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes monographs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the span of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary.
FOREWORD
Thankfully, the time is all but past when scholarly consensus regarded Islamic history and culture as Orientalized exotica—and, by extension, when al-Andalus was seen as a mere footnote or foil to the history of Europe, credited, at best, with the “transmission” of Classical knowledge to the Renaissance “West.” This outdated, teleological vision of the Middle Ages—characterized by an intuitive and uncritical Eurocentrism, self-confident Christian chauvinism, and an anachronistic embrace of racialized nationalist paradigms—is now broadly recognized as an outmoded relic and persists largely as the nostalgic refuge of reactionary xenophobic populism and those few scholars who serve as its megaphones.
We now recognize the Islamicate world as a subject of study in its own right, not as an appendage to the West, but as a constituent element. Moreover, we no longer imagine Christendom and Islam as coherent, homogenous, and well-bounded civilizational entities. The Platonized, essentializing perspective of the historical canon has given way to one which recognizes the variety, permeability and ambiguities that each of these socio-cultural categories embodied. Whereas before we saw only opposition between Islam and Christendom, we now see engagement. This engagement—manifested in both conflict and collaboration, in opposition and appropriation—was a driving force in the development of culture and institutions in both of these worlds. Consequently, we now see the Mediterranean—the region where Islam and Christendom not only met but merged—not as a zone of division, but as the epicenter of transformational historical processes that involved European, African and Near Eastern peoples, including Christians, Muslims and Jews, who together constitute the West.
How did this change come about? However much many of us have long found the ethnocentric perspective to be unscientific and unethical, and as much as the outliers on the reactionary right might suggest otherwise, this revolution in perspective did not come about as some deliberate ideological program imposed by politically correct academicians. It developed organically as a consequence of shifts within the academy and society as a whole. No longer is the academy the preserve of a narrow class of privileged, white middle-class Christian men, or of scholars who imagine it as a self-evident truth that the nation—a supposedly coherent convergence of language, culture, religion and race—is the basic unit of human history. The diversification of the academy, and the Humanities in particular, in terms of gender, social class and ethnic identity from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, and the incorporation of scholars of different backgrounds and perspectives has undermined many of the assumptions that the study of history and culture were based on. No less important has been the diversification of our student bodies and of the educated reading public, who are less and less interested in historical metanarratives that marginalize or ignore the communities they identify with. The movement towards critical theory and cultural studies from the 1970s forward provided an intellectual articulation of these dissatisfactions and provide scholars with a vocabulary and methodologies to push back against what up to then were considered a priori truths regarding our disciplines.
Within the academy, the Occidentalized curio-cabinet approach to the Humanities that coalesced in the nineteenth century has declined. Whereas previously, historians, art historians and scholars of literature and culture worked in often willing and deliberate disciplinary isolation, interdisciplinarity has been for some time now regarded as an ideal. Again, this is no mere intellectual affectation or scholarly fashion, but a consequence of scholars coming to recognize the insights working across disciplines can bring to their own work. Part of this shift is due to changes in the way that scholars are trained and prepare for the job market. Doctoral students now frequently train in more than one linguistic, cultural or religious tradition, or geographic region or period. This has been driven in part by the increasing sophistication of newer generations of scholars, and in part by the pressure of competing in an ever more demanding job market, and in part by the temptation of university administrators to economize by looking for single scholars who can cover two areas and, therefore, take the place of two faculty members.
The net result of all of this is that scholars today are less likely to see an academy defined by disciplines or a medieval world divided conceptually between supposedly ontologically superior Christian European civilizations and a marginal and inferior everything else, and are coming to recognize the value of the Mediterranean as a heuristic framework for investigating the history of the larger West, including Europe, North Africa and Western Asia in the Middle Ages.
Thus, in recent years, journals, projects and fora focusing oriented towards or identifying with Mediterranean Studies have proliferated not only in North America and Europe, but also in Asia. The Mediterranean Seminar, for example: a forum for promoting collaborative and interdisciplinary research and pedagogy has in 12 years grown to include over 1500 scholarly associates in over 40 countries. The Spain North Africa Project (SNAP), which grew out of a summer institute organized by The Mediterranean Seminar has itself now become a world-wide community of scholars, and the European Research Council has sponsored a rich portfolio of Mediterranean-oriented research projects, while smaller-scale projects, such as AvtMedGIS, are breaking new ground through the use of innovative technological and methodological approaches.
In other words, this is a very exciting moment to be a scholar of the pre-Modern West—a time when new perspectives and methodologies are leading us to reconsider both the history of the Islamic world and Christendom in the Middle Ages and to reappraise our very disciplines and practices.
This volume epitomizes all of these trends in the new Mediterraneancentered Medieval Studies, bringing together in English contributions from both long-established and leading specialists and recently trained and promising new scholars from Spain, the rest of Europe, and beyond. Each of the contributions in its own way bridges the divisions that used to define scholarship—whether by region, period, cultural or religious tradition, or discipline—and by publishing these studies in English, now the academic lingua franca, makes them accessible to scholars everywhere. As such it marks the culmination of trends that have been reshaping academia in the last decades, and provides a model for such endeavors in the future.
Boulder, CO, USA Brian A. Catlos
PREFACE
Studies on Islamic religion, society, culture and the arts have been always of considerable interest to scholars in many different fields. The political and economic dependencies and turmoil of the past two decades, however, has led to an increased need for understanding. Throughout the Middle Ages and continuing to today, the Mediterranean Sea has been a complex scenario of relations among different societies. Although most of the times it has been considered a connecting element (above all in the trade context, where most of the coastal capitals were linked by their important ports), other times it has been a significant border area, where an imaginary line (or multiple ones) separates Christian and Islamic societies (let us think, for instance, of the Crusades), or, in more recent times, European and non-European ones (as an example, the flows of migrants from the East and South of the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe). In this way, the Mediterranean becomes a dual element, in which the concepts of union and separation—both physical and ideological—coexist, with the consequent implications in the construction of the identity of the Mediterranean societies. Nevertheless, despite the existing differences, the Mediterranean has been an important means of exchange between Islamic and non-Islamic countries. Numerous research groups focusing on this topic have appeared in the last decade, such as the Spain-North Africa Project (SNAP) and The Mediterranean Seminar. Furthermore, an increased number of projects focusing on the relations between the East and West, Christendom and Islam or North Africa and al-Andalus, such as the Qantara Project (Institut du Monde Arab—El Legado Andalusi Foundation), the Ewropeana Project or the ArtMedGIS Project (all funded by the European Commission throughout its different Framework Programmes), have emerged on the international scene.
The present publication is included within the frame of this latest European Project, with the full title, Analysis of the Artistic Exchanges in the Medieval Mediterranean between Twelfth and Fifteenth Centuries through the Geographical Information Systems (GIS): A Critical Review of “Centre” and “Peripheries” (ArtMedGIS Project, MSCA—H2020, Grant Agreement no. 699818). It focuses on the period between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, a time characterised by very turbulent and complex relations between the Islamic and Christian worlds that, in fact, shares strong parallelisms with the current political situation, making of it a relevant period-of-interest. Within the framework of the ArtMedGIS Project, two International Workshops on this topic, both entitled Dialogues in Late Medieval Mediterranean, were held in 2017. The first one, at the Universidade Nova of Lisbon (Portugal), focused on the legacy of Western Islamic societies; the second one, held at the Alhambra of Granada (Spain), focused on the exchanges between East and West. In both Workshops, a space for dialogue was created in order to share current research results. New collaborative networks were also established by experienced and young researchers alike, thus enabling the development of interdisciplinary research lines across various disciplines, all focused on the late Middle Ages. This framework has made this publication possible.
Set in this context, the aim of this book is to analyse the artistic and cultural legacy of Western Islamic societies and their interactions with the Oriental, Christian and Jewish worlds from various complementary perspectives. For this purpose, contributions from the fields of Art History, Architecture, History, Literature, Archaeology, History of Science, Philosophy and History of Religions have been included in this volume. Although the emphasis is primarily on Art History studies, these multidisciplinary approaches have contributed to draw the broader cultural panorama in which the artistic manifestations addressed herein were developed. Moreover, these non-art history studies have highlighted some fundamental aspects of the culture in question, as relate to religion, propaganda and social matters and which, so considered, allow a more comprehensive understanding of, and approach to, the complex interactions within the Mediterranean basin as unfolded in the late Middle Ages and has helped give rise to those artistic creations, beyond the ideas of hybridity.
According to the territorial and chronological restrictions of the Mediterranean between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the main fields of study contained in the publication are those referring to the most outstanding Western Islamic societies and, as well, the Eastern ones, which they had some kind of relation with during the late Middle Ages: the Fatimids in Egypt; the Almoravids and Almohads in North Africa and alAndalus; the Bani Ganiyya in the Balearic Islands; the Zenghids, Ayyubids and Mamluks in Eastern Mediterranean; the Nasrids in Granada and the Christian Kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula. Works on Mudéjar manifestations and Norman Sicily have been also included, due to their own unique qualities.
The present study of these societies has been approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and organised into four main sections. In the first section, under the title Al-Andalus beyond al-Andalus: the Maghreb and the Mashrig, the Andalusi legacy is addressed from its presence in the East and the West. In this section, Javier Albarran shows, through al-Qadi ‘Tyad’s death, how this personality became a symbol related to al-Ghazali in the East and Ibn Tumart in the West, and how his Kitab al-Shifa’ became a “bestseller” of the Islamic world. In this way, this chapter is closely related to Maribel Fierro’s text, which explores the popularity of works written by the Andalusi scholars, especially those that managed to enjoy success across the Islamic world as a whole (and not only in the territories of al-Andalus and the Maghreb). Both chapters accomplish their ends: to delineate the Mediterranean cultural scenario out of which the artistic productions mentioned in this book developed. At the end of this section, Susana Calvo Capilla travels from Umayyad Cordoba to Mamluk Cairo to show how certain practices in architecture, especially the use of spolia and classical materials, are shared by both societies as strategies of legitimacy and self-affirmation.
Concerning the second part of the book, Andalusi Legacy in Medieval Christian Art, the relations and transfers between al-Andalus and the artistic productions of the Christian Kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula are analysed. In this way, Inés Monteira shows how the Muslims are depicted in Mediterranean Romanesque sculpture, with initial visual traits that define the religious otherness in the twelfth century. In the case of the Gothic world, Doron Bauer presents the particular case of the survival of the Islamic past in Palma de Mallorca after 1229, despite the intention of the Christian conquerors to create a new identity reflected in the Gothic style (through portable Islamicate objects that circulated within these monumental Gothic halls). At the end of this section, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza analyses the political and religious messages that Castile and Granada shared in the field of the arts and architecture at the end of the Middle Ages and as were embedded in the context of the Mediterranean Islamic art.
The third section of the book, under the title Andalusi Cultural Legacy in the Iberian Societies, explores other manifestations of the Andalusi legacy in the fields of knowledge, construction, identity and religious studies. In this way, this section both delimits and enriches the cultural context that surrounded the artistic manifestations in the Western Mediterranean. In this framework, Michael A. Conrad reconstructs the social networks of scholars and patrons between the end of the twelfth century and the end of the thirteenth century to vindicate the importance of Murcia as a centre of Islamic erudition and, as well, transfer of knowledge to the Christian scholars. On the other hand, the movement of culture between Islamic and Christian societies on the Iberian Peninsula, as elaborated in the field of building regulations, is shown by Sandra M. G. Pinto in the second chapter of this section. In this work, Pinto demonstrates the strong influences of the Islamic regulations in the Christian ones, as well as the case of the official responsible for applying these rules. This continuity is also present in the case of the pious endowments, as Ana Maria Carballeira Debasa explores, in context of the holding of these assets in the Christian administration after the conquest of the Nasrid Granada. In her work, she explains how these pious endowments were assimilated into the new society and the transformations experienced when they were transferred to the Castilian institutions.
Regarding the fourth and last section of this book, Circulation of Cultural Goods in the Medieval Mediterranean, here one finds the study of the ornamental transfers and exchanges in the artistic manifestations between East and West, in the specific case of cultural goods, themselves bearers of political and religious ideas as were shared on both sides of the Mediterranean basin. On this topic, Noelia Silva Santa-Cruz studies the iconographic transmissions in the particular case of the painted ivory works of the Norman monarchy in Sicily, which assimilated the propagandistic visual lexicon of the sumptuary productions of al-Andalus and the Fatimid Caliphate. In the case of textile production, Laura Rodriguez Peinado proposes a change in the paradigm in studies about the ornamental repertoire of the Almohad and Nasrid textiles, with an analysis of transfers between these cases and the fabrics produced in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean. At the end of this section, Azucena Hernandez Pérez, from the double perspective of art and science, explores cross-references in the Islamic Mediterranean in the production of astrolabes during the Almohad and Nasrid periods in al-Andalus and under the Ayyubid rule in Syria and Egypt, focusing on the creation of the Universal Astrolabe.
As final remarks and as the framework of this publication, a summary of the ArtMedGIS Project is included. This chapter presents its main results (an assessment of the artistic exchanges within the Mediterranean framework between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, as analysed through application of the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to the study of Art History. The analysis provided by the GIS has enabled the measurement—in a numerical way and from specific cases of study—complex political, religious and cultural phenomena that are analysed throughout this publication by the various authors.
At the end of this book, an index is included to facilitate the consultation through the material.
In another vein, this publication is the result of the effort of a great number of authors from a range of disciplines, countries and Institutions. We would like express our deepest thanks for their enthusiasm, patience and precious contributions. They all have made this book possible.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Javier Albarran is a postdoctoral fellow at the DFG Center for Advanced Study “RomanIslam”, Universitit Hamburg. His PhD dissertation (Medieval History, Universidad Auténoma de Madrid, 2020) was entitled “The Discourses of Holy War and the Memory of the First Battles of Islam. Al-Andalus, 10th-13th Centuries” and aimed to study the articulation of the discourse of holy war and its relation to the remembrance of the maghaz and the fwzih in al-Andalus. Several of his monographs and book chapters have been published, and scientific articles have appeared in journals such as Al-Masagq, Al-Qantara and the Journal of Medieval Worlds. His forthcoming book, entitled Eyércitos Benditos. Yihad y Memoria en al-Andalus (ss. X—XIII), will be published by the Editorial Universidad de Granada.
Doron Bauer is Assistant Professor of medieval and Islamic art history at Florida State University. He holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Two of his books will be published in the upcoming year: Romanesque Sculpture: Towards an Anti-Iconography and Art in the Kingdom of Majorca: An Anthology of Sources. He is currently working on Cities Upon Cities: The Aesthetic Colonization of Conquered Islamic Urban Centers on the Other Coast of the Mediterranean, from Ceuta to Tel Aviv—a book project that examines the Occidentalization—Christianization of Islamic cities in Iberia and Africa.
Susana Calvo Capilla is Professor at the Department of History of Art, Complutense University of Madrid. She is Principal Investigator in the R&D Project entitled “Al-Andalus, art, science and contexts in an open Mediterranean. From the West to Egypt and _ Syria” (RTI2018-093880-B-100). Her publications are focused on the visual culture of al-Andalus and Islamic religious architecture. She is author of Mezquitas de al-Andalus (2015), “Reuse of Classical Antiquity in the Palace of Madinat al-Zahra’ and Its Role in the Construction of Caliphal Legitimacy” (Mugqarnas, 2014) and editor of Las artes en Al-Andalus y Egipto. Contextos e intercambios (2017).
Ana Maria Carballeira Debasa is a Tenured Researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Spain). She has doctorate in Semitic Philology (Universidad Aut6noma de Madrid). One of her principal lines of investigation is the study of the social history of al-Andalus. Some of her major publications are the books entitled Legados pios y fundaciones familiares en al-Andalus (Madrid, 2002); Caridad y compasion en biografias islamicas (Madrid, 2011); and Libro de los habices de la Alpujarra de 1530. Edicion, estudio e indices de un manuscrito del Archivo Historico Diocesano de Granada (Helsinki, 2018).
Brian A. Catlos (Medieval Studies: Toronto, 2000) works on MuslimChristian-Jewish relations and ethno-religious identity in medieval Europe and the Islamic World, and the history of the pre-Modern Mediterranean. He co-directs The Mediterranean Seminar, a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration with over 1500 affiliates worldwide. His monographs include, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300 (2004); Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614 (2014); Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (2014) and Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (2018).
Michael A. Conrad is a PhD candidate and researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). He was research assistant for the project “Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe”, and worked for the Collaborative Research Centre 980 “Episteme in Motion. Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period” at Freie Universitaet Berlin, and at the Centre for Media and_ Interactivity (ZMI) at Julius Liebig University Giessen. His research interests are the history and theory of games and play and the history of medieval Iberia, with a special focus on issues of religious and cultural coexistence.
Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean (CSIC-Spain). Her research focuses on the political, religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Maghreb, Islamic law (especially Malikism), orthodoxy and persecution of heresies, and violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources. She directs with Mayte Penelas the project Local contexts and global dynamics: Al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the Islamic East (Spanish Ministry of Education). Among her publications: The Almohad revolution. Politics and religion in the Islamic West during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (2012), and Abd al-Rahman IL: The first Cordoban caliph (2005).
Azucena Hernandez Pérez holds a PhD in Art History, a master’s degree in Spanish Art and two degrees in Physics and Art History. She is the author of Astrolabios en al-Andalus y los reinos medievales hispanos and Catalogo razonado de los astrolabios de la Espana medieval and a good number of articles. Her current research focuses on the double artistic—scientific features of medieval astrolabes (in al-Andalus, the Hispanic Kingdoms, the Mediterranean Islam and Europe) and their representation in painting, sculpture, tapestry and book miniatures. She is also a member of R&D Project “Al-Andalus, arte, ciencia y contextos en un Mediterraneo abierto. De Occidente a Egipto y Siria” (RTI2018-093880-B-100).
Maria Marcos Cobaleda is Lecturer at the University of Malaga (Spain). She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Granada (Spain, 2010, Extraordinary Doctorate Award). In 2016, she was granted the prestigious Marie Sktodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Medieval Studies Institute, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal). Her research is focused on medieval Islamic art and architecture and the application of the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to research in Art History. She is author of the books Los almoravides: argquitectura de un Imperio (Granada, 2015) and al-Murabitin (los almoravides): un Imperio islamico occidental (ed., Granada, 2018).
Inés Monteira is Associate Professor in UNED (Madrid). Her doctoral thesis was undertaken under two Research Grants from the CSIC (2004-2009) and presented in the Carlos III University. This research was published under the title El enemigo imaginado. La escultura romanica hispana y la lucha contra el Islam (CNRS, Toulouse, 2012). She has completed different research stages at the CNRS in Toulouse, the EEHAR in Rome and the KHI in Florence (Postdoctoral Fellow from the Max-Planck Institut 2010-2011). From 2011, she has taught medieval art at UNED where she was editor of the journal ETF VI until 2016.
Sandra M. G. Pinto (ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7367-3148) is a contracted researcher at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal), doing her research at the CHAM— Centre for the Humanities. She is an architect by training and holds an MSc and PhD in Architecture from the University of Coimbra. Her main research interests include the history of architecture and urbanism, history of building regulation, construction history, history of urban cartography and urban heritage. She recently co-edited, with Terry R. Slater, Building Regulations and Urban Form, 1200-1900 (Routledge, 2018), and has several articles and book chapters published.
Laura Rodriguez Peinado is Professor at the Department of History of Art in the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Complutense University with a thesis entitled Coptic textiles in Spanish collections. She is Principal Scientific Researcher and coordinator in four Research Projects funded by the government of Spain focused on textiles productions of Late Antiquity and Middle Ages in the Mediterranean with an interdisciplinary character. Her research is focused on the study of textile iconography and textile production, sumptuary arts and medieval iconography.
Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza is Professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research has focused particularly on the mutual artistic influences between al-Andalus and the Crown of Castile in the later Middle Ages, on Islamic Art, on the relationship between messages and their artistic forms, etc. He is currently working on late-medieval palace architecture, and especially on The Alhambra of Granada and on the Alcazar of Seville.
Noelia Silva Santa-Cruz is Lecturer in Medieval Art History in the Department of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. She obtained a PhD from Complutense University of Madrid in 2011. Specialist on medieval Islamic ivories, she is author of La eboraria andalust: Del Califato omeya a la Granada nazari (Oxford, 2013). She has published several journal articles and book chapters, especially on caliphal, Ta@ifa, and Nasrid ivory productions in al-Andalus and ivories from Norman Sicily. Her current research focuses on the interesting transfers of luxury objects and visual lexicon between al-Andalus, Fatimid Caliphate and the medieval Christian kingdoms in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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