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Iberia and the Mediterranean: An Introduction
Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Ferndndez
In the last decade or so Mediterranean studies has gone from constituting a rather vague approach to a region imagined in geographical terms, to coalescing as a recognized field of research and teaching—a process driven in part by its inherent imperative to interrogate established categories of cultural and historical analysis. In our era of globalization, transnationalism, and oceanic and diasporic studies, the Mediterranean has come to captivate the imagination of scholars who see in it an alternative to the paradigms that have dominated scholarly discourse since the inception of the modern academy.
It has provoked a reconsideration of the nation-state model and of continental and civilizational paradigms that up to now have been accepted a priori as the fundamental building blocks of history and culture. Even though the nation-state remains the dominant form of cultural identity and political organization, and in large part the rationale for the current organization of the nationally oriented language departments in which many of us find ourselves, a more globalizing and comparative construct, such as the Mediterranean, offers to help us understand difficult and contentious issues that sit at the foundation of our assumptions, not the least of which is the relationship between political organization and cultural and national identities.
For all the lip service paid to comparative approaches and interdisciplinarity in the academy in the past few decades, na-tional models still tend to dominate humanities disciplines—and civilizational divisions, such as “Western, “Islamic,” or “African” are often taken for granted, but seldom clearly defined, let alone put to the test.
This has certainly been the case with regard to Iberian studies in the American academy. History departments inevitably place the study of the peninsula within the European concentration of the curriculum, whether the course in question is on Castile, al-Andalus, or the Almohads. This may be less true of those contemporary departments of Spanish and Portuguese that in the last decade have started to explicitly broaden the traditional category of “Spanish and Portuguese”—often imposed on them by others, but sometimes generated internally and then internalized—by reconfiguring themselves as departments or centers for Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Resina; Menocal, “Why Iberia?” 7).
Certainly this change has helped to foster an awareness of the complex nature of Iberian culture—a characteristic it shares with the Mediterranean approach. Both endeavor to loosen nationally defined fields from the geographic borders and the national shadow of hegemonic linguistic agendas and to consider them on broader, cultural terms. Such a revision is particularly apropos when one focuses on the medieval and early modern periods, when the notion of the nation-state, discretely bounded geographically, linguistically, and culturally, is clearly anachronistic.
Even for a scholar such as José Antonio Maravall, who carried out a thorough study of “The Concept of Spain in the Middle Ages,’ Spain is primarily a geographical concept—the scene where a human group shares history, and even more importantly, historiography (17-32). But these are “imagined communities” (Anderson); for, as Patrick Geary puts it, “The real history of the nations that populated Europe in the early Middle Ages begins not in the sixth century but in the eighteenth” (15). This moving away from modern nation-state models has also given a new and deserved protagonism to languages and cultures that fell between the cracks of the national models.
In the case of Iberian Studies, this broader perspective invites the inclusion of other peninsular languages and literatures, such as Catalan, Euskera, Aragonese, Galician, Portuguese, Occitan, and Latin, as well as Arabic and Hebrew, and texts and traditions, such as Aljamiado, that do not clearly fall into a single linguistic-cultural category (Dagenais 42).
As the studies in the current volume reflect, the Iberian Peninsula constituted a truly polyglossic space, in which many authors composed their works in more than one language and worked in and were influenced by several literary traditions or had the potential of doing so. In this sense, as David Wacks’s points out, Iberian literatures were part of a polysystem (13).
Of course, this fact is not new to scholars of Iberian history and culture, and in the studies included in In and of the Mediterranean the reader will find many of the primary texts in which such polyglossy can be found, including those produced at the court of Alfonso X the Learned (b. 1221, r. 1252-1284), King of Castile, Len, and Galicia. The latter’s cultural agenda is characterized by a preference for both Galician/Portuguese, used in the composition of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, as well as for the Castilian vernacular used in the composition of histories such as the Primera Cronica General and in the prose translations such as Calila e Dimna (1251), and is emblematic of this multilingual dynamic.
The latter work, Calila wa Dimna, is a vernacular translation of a work with its origins in the Indic Panchatantra, and is but one of many translations Alfonso oversaw in his role of patron of the so-called Toledo “school of translation.” Previous Iberian luminaries such as the Archbishops Raimundo of Toledo and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, had held similar roles as creators and patrons of the translation of literary and scientific texts translated from Arabic and Hebrew. The translations produced in Toledo and as part of the Alfonsine cultural project became foundational in the Castilian literary canon both in terms of substance and form. For example, the narrative device of the frame-tale, ubiquitous among the Hebrew and Arabic works translated into the vernacular, is adopted by subsequent medieval Castilian authors such as Don Juan Manuel in El conde Lucanor and Juan Ruiz in Libro de buen amor.
The latter also reflects both formal aspects of the Arabic maqamat (Monroe 30-31, 331-32), as well as having echoes in other European literary tradition—from the Italian of Boccaccio to the English of Chaucer (Hamilton 13). The role of translation and polyglossy as part and parcel of an Iberian cultural agenda, however, extends far beyond the familiar Toledan and Alfonsine projects or the texts of the traditional Spanish canon, and are evident in the cultural realities examined in several of the essays included in the current volume, such as those of Vicente Lledé-Guillem, Gerard Weigers, Eleazar Gutwirth, and David Wacks.
Thus, the movement to broaden Iberian studies and the emergence of Mediterranean studies, although they may have developed as distinct phenomena, are obviously complementary. The aim of this volume is not to replace the notion of Iberia in Iberian Studies, but to propose an alternative and broader conceptual and comparative framework: that of the Mediterranean. The Iberian Peninsula has always been an integral part of the Mediterranean world, from the age of the Tartessos and the Phoenicians to our own era of pateras and the “Union for the Mediterranean,” the latest iteration of the multinational political partnership created in the 1990s by the Barcelona Process.!
Obviously, all Iberian cultural production and history can be situated by definition, “in the Mediterranean”—i.e., originating within the geographical region located around the Mediterranean Sea—but it is our intention in this volume of Hispanic Issues to consider Iberian culture “of the Mediterranean.” In other words, to draw on the fundamental distinction articulated by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, the purpose of the present volume is to examine what it means for medieval and early modern Iberia and its people to be considered as part of the Mediterranean (“of” rather than “in”).
Each of the contributors has addressed this need and each offers a distinct perspective: to consider these cultures not as merely peninsular, but rather as corresponding to, or forming part of, cultural entities that were manifest on a regional scale, and that transcend the geographic and national boundaries normally thought to contain them. This is, of course, as true of the European context as the Mediterranean one; many Hispanists have called attention to Spain’s marginalization or exclusion from the traditional master narratives of European history elaborated by northern European scholars who, consciously or not, presumed, as in the famous quip attributed to Dumas, that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.”
Spain is indeed part of Europe, but it is also part of the Mediterranean, and seeing it as such provides us with the opportunity to appreciate the peninsula's connections, not only with Africa, but also with the Middle East, as several of the articles included in this volume underscore (those of Brian Catlos, Gerard Weigers, Manuela Marin, Nico Parmley, Andrew Devereux, Luis Avilés, and Barbara Fuchs). The collection does not presume to exclude Europe and its influence from Iberian history, but it does have the effect of “provincializing” it (Chakrabarty), and, thus, constitutes in part a response to Eurocentrism (see, for example, the interventions of Catlos, Marin, Parmley, Lledé-Guillén, and Wacks).! As Sharon Kinoshita puts it, adopting a fresh comparative frame— “Mediterraneanizing” the object of our study—encourages us to take into account concepts such as mobility, portability of cultural artifacts, connectivity of lands and people, as well as segmentation (602).
These issues are addressed in the majority of articles comprising the present volume, including those that interrogate the various forms of Iberian Imperial Mediterranean legitimacy (see Lled6-Guillem, Simone Pinet, Devereux, Ryan Giles, Avilés, Fuchs) and the mobility of people and customs (Marin, Weigers, Giles, Avilés, and Fuchs), as well as how the production and movement of cultural artifacts (manuscripts in the articles of Weigers and Parmley; printed books in that of Wacks, and both in that of Gutwirth) reveal networks of Mediterranean exchange along which Iberian thought traveled. Merely by shifting our frame of reference and deploying alternative categories of analysis, we can gain fresh insights regarding the exchange of people, texts, and other cultural artifacts.
Trade and exchange has, in fact, long constituted the subject of studies of the Mediterranean, including Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranee et le monde Méditerranée and S.D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society. The latter, although groundbreaking, are nevertheless temporally specific studies of the Mediterranean, and scholarship has moved on to the environmentally-framed, historically-transcendent approach of Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea. This shift, together with the tendency to move Judaic and Arabo-Islamic Studies toward the scholarly and pedagogical mainstream, has helped to provoke an interest on the part of scholars, students, and administrators in the Mediterranean as a field of inquiry and frame of comparison.
Positions in history and in language and literature departments are now advertised as “Mediterranean,” and a series of journals, monograph series, research institutes, and projects organized around this new field have been launched in Europe, across North America, and even in Asia.” At the same time, the field is still far from established or fully articulated, even by those who work in it. The daunting prospect of defying established teleologies, of mastering many languages, and of working outside of one’s intellectual and disciplinary comfort zones, all present obstacles to scholars trained in nationally-oriented traditions and inculcated with disciplinary caution.
The rising popularity of Mediterranean studies in the Anglo-American and European Academy, even if it may cause some initial discomfort, is a unique opportunity for our field, which has long been pushed to the side or marginalized by the Anglophone and continental world of “theory.” Mediterranean studies as conceived of by Kinoshita, Iain Chambers (who proposes the mutable Mediterranean as a space for exploring “complex, open-ended narratives”), and others recognizes the value of exchange and alternative models, including or especially those in languages other than English, and critics such as Suzanne Akbari and Karla Mallette especially underscore the encounters of Muslims and Christians as definitive of Mediterranean studies (Akbari 131). For many of us working in Spanish studies, the shift to open-ended narratives and complexity is a natural and integral aspect of not only our work, but of our field.
The widening of our theoretical frame to consider Iberia as part of the shared space of the Mediterranean offers a method to examine the ways in which those living in and moving through the Iberian Peninsula—past and present—produced and responded to the richness of linguistic, cultural, and historical threads that extend far beyond the peninsulas geographical borders. In the context of the development and current state of Iberian studies, Mediterranean studies is not an unfamiliar or foreign landscape, but rather offers a new, wider forum that for many of us (including several of the contributors to this volume) will already be a familiar way of conceiving of our field and our research.
The great advantage for those of us working in Iberian/Spanish studies is the dialogue that Mediterranean studies offers with our colleagues in what have been more insulated and nationally defined fields that have proven much more impervious to the currents, flows and exchange of ideas that have characterized work being done by Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Latin American, and American scholars (among others) who chose or choose to publish for a Spanish-speaking public.
In this sense, the work of Maria Rosa Menocal has been important to Iberian studies for both popularizing the history and culture of medieval Iberia and for drawing the attention of colleagues working in fields outside Iberian and even Romance studies. And while Menocal may have brought the complicated diversity and multiplicity of Iberia to the attention of a broad Englishspeaking public, many of us working in the field, including many of the contributors to this volume, have long appreciated the richness of Iberian medieval cultural production and modern Iberian scholarship, that since the nineteenthcentury has been wrangling with these issues of multiplicity, conflict, and exchange. While an exhaustive review of such scholarship is beyond the scope of this introduction, some representative examples will help to dispel the growing myth that Spanish studies has conformed to the same insular and monolingual perspectives that have defined other European national traditions.
The early twentieth century witnessed an impressive flowering of scholarship on the Arabic and Hebrew cultural production of al-Andalus. Much of it can be found in monographs and volumes of the journal Al Andalus, published by the Escuela de Estudios Arabes de Madrid, which was founded in 1932 by the Spanish Arabist Emilio Garcia Gomez (who before that held a similar post in the Centro de Estudios Histéricos de Granada established in 1910) (Alvarez de Morales).
Al-Andalus was dedicated to Andalusi Arabic (and in its first years Hebrew) literature and culture and provided a forum in which a series of Spanish (and other) Arabists—among them Angel Gonzalez Palencia, Miguel Asin Palacios, Emilio Garcia Gémez, A. R. Nykl, E. Lévi-Provencal, Fernando de la Granja, Federico Corriente, and L. P. Harvey—and Hebraists such as José Maria Millas Vallicrosa and Samuel Stern published original studies, as well as editions and translations of original Andalusi texts that are to this day invaluable sources for studying the history and culture of medieval Islamic Iberia.’
In addition, these and other scholars published important editions and studies on Andalusi works (such as Garcia Gémez’s edition and translation of Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al-Hamam), and monographs teasing out the threads of intellectual exchange between the Andalusi world and Western Europe (such as Asin Palacios’s La Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia). Sefarad, a journal dedicated to the history and culture of Sephardic Jews, is yet another product of a state-sponsored institution, the Escuela de Estudios Hebraicos, which was founded by Millas Vallicrosa and the Spanish Hebraist Francisco Cantera Burgos in 1941. Like Al-Andalus, Sefarad, in addition, of course, to reflecting the political and colonial desires of the Spanish state, also, nevertheless is a testament to the Spanish academy’s recognition of the diversity defining Spain’s past.*
In Sefarad, scholarship tracing the movement of ideas and people across the Mediterranean has been published in multiple languages for some seventytwo years, including the pioneering work of Millas Vallicrosa and Cantera Burgos. While Sefarad continues to be published today, Al-Andalus ceased to exist in 1978—to be revived two years later as Al-Qantara. Al-Andalus was created under the auspices of the Escuela de Estudios Arabes, but continued publication when the latter was subsumed into the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in 1939 after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War.
The CISC still functions as a research institute that houses and trains leading Spanish Arabists (such as Manuela Marin, a contributor to the current volume). Nor should the work of those scholars who investigated the rich cultural heritage of the Crown of Aragon, the Kingdom of Portugal, and the other regions and cultures of the Peninsula (such as, among others, Martin de Riquer, Lola Badia, Roque Chabas y Llorens, Carolina Michaélis de Vasconcelos, and José Leite de Vasconcelos) be written out of any history of Iberian scholarship.
The latter scholarship, in addition to Sefarad, Al-Andalus, and the CSIC offer examples of the complicated nature and history of the study and recognition of Iberia’s multi-confessional, polyglossic, and diverse pasts and serve as a reminder that the history of the Spanish and Portuguese academies is not as black and white as it may seem from the outside.
The pioneering work of Américo Castro and his concept of convivencia— more recently rearticulated as the more nuanced concept of coexistence, or even better, Catlos’s conveniencia, “the convenience principle” (Catlos, “Contexto social” and The Victors 404-8; Szpiech; Ray)—which has become so prominent in recent scholarship in English, cannot be understood nor explained without an awareness of this intellectual milieu.
The latter was a thriving academic culture of scholars trained in and investigating the Arabic and Hebrew literatures and histories of Iberia, from which Castro, and his sparring partner (as discussed by Catlos in this volume) Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, developed theories about and debated the nature of modern Spanish identity and its cultural debt to the Iberian past.
Nor can the work of Menocal, to which we owe so much for her popularization and ability to finally attract the attention of an English-speaking public to what had been considered for so long, as Barbara Fuchs has shown, a place of suspiciously un-European peoples and places that were uncomfortably like the Muslim Other of the early modern and Imperial age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries studied by Edward Said, stand as the only voice of Iberia in the Mediterranean. In the pioneering work of other scholars working in the United States, such as James T. Monroe, Samuel G. Armistead, Francisco Marquez Villanueva, and Angel Saenz Badillos, we find defining voices in the twentieth-century debates concerning the role of Jews, Muslims, and Christians and their use of language, culture, and religion to articulate their identities not just as Iberians, but as members of any number of groups that transcended national or local definition, and in so doing, to truly reflect a Mediterranean sense of the world and self. While scholars in Spanish studies have long studied the literary works, the cultural debates, and the social and theoretical problems surrounding the realities and constructions of multi-faith, -linguistic and -cultural coexistence and conflict that have come to define Mediterranean studies in its current iteration, it behooves those of us currently working in Iberian studies to respond to this new interest on the part of scholars working in other fields and until recently unaware of the complexity of medieval Iberia and its role both in and of the Mediterranean and the not insignificant corpus of scholarship already generated. The studies in this volume point to this world of scholarship on the languages and cultures of Iberia (Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Arabic, Jewish/Hebrew) that, while perhaps not as familiar to scholars of more “European” traditions, has nevertheless formed the intellectual basis and rationale for the work of many of us currently working in medieval and, to an increasing extent, early modern Iberian literature and culture.
Needless to say, the Mediterranean is not a panacea for Eurocentrism and national and disciplinary parochialism, and it also has its critics. After all, the Mediterranean is a modern cultural construct that has to be managed with care, lest it unintentionally be reduced to a new manifestation of Orientialism—a danger that Pinet points to in her contribution to this volume (Wigen 719-720; Goddard, Llobera, and Shore; Herzfeld 45-46, 48).
That said, it is no more dangerous or dubious than the other categories that we are accustomed to deploying in our scholarship, or for that matter the rarely-questioned periodization on which so much of our scholarship turns. There can be no intellectual activity, no scholarly analysis that eschews the use of categories; the imperative is to use them critically, and with a sense of self-awareness, not to reify them, and to appreciate that many different categories and perspectives may be valid and useful for examining the same phenomena. Therefore the Mediterranean should be used as a heuristic category and as an analytical tool, rather than as a taxonomical construct that aims merely to describe, classify, and systematize.
In this light, we are confident that putting Iberian studies under the lamp (or the sun) of the Mediterranean will serve to further illuminate the intellectual landscape of our discipline. What Mediterranean studies offers to Iberian/Spanish studies is a theoretical space in which scholars for whom the work being done in Iberian and Spanish studies has been invisible can come to intellectually engage and exchange ideas with those of us who have been wrangling with some of the theoretical issues at the heart of Mediterranean studies for some time.
Mediterranean studies offers a critical space where geneaologies and teleologies that privilege (however unconsciously) certain languages and traditions over others can meet—where past work in Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese, Andalusi Arabic, and Hebrew (among others) can come into dialogue with the scholarship and cultural production that have long dominated not only the narratives of Europe and its past, but also those recent critical studies of them. In this sense Iberian studies, like the Iberian Peninsula, is not simply prescribed and defined by the Mediterranean, but also in turn helps to anchor and define it and its critical discourses.
This Volume and Its Essays
The present volume brings together a cluster of studies that consider medieval and early modern Iberian history and cultural production from the perspective of the Mediterranean. Both the breadth of the contributions and the crosscutting approach that characterizes them reflect the natural tendency of Mediterranean studies to encourage interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration among scholars working in a range of fields.
Specifically, this volume brings together a series of studies that illustrate how the various linguistic, confessional, and ethnic groups of medieval Iberia interacted with each other and conceived of themselves as belonging to communities that stretched beyond the geographical, political, and linguistic boundaries of the Peninsula itself. A collection of this sort should help us deepen our awareness of how the trade and education centers and networks, pilgrimage routes, courts, flows of ideas, and cultural mores worked to allow Iberians to consider themselves as part of larger trans-national communities and move beyond models of exceptionalism. Seen in this light, the Mediterranean becomes a Hispanic issue, and Iberia a Mediterranean one.
Thus, we construe “Iberian studies” to include not only Castilian history and cultural production, but also the history and cultural production of the other regional, linguistic, and ethno-religious groups who inhabited the peninsula: Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and speakers and writers of Arabic, Hebrew, Catalan, Portuguese, Latin, and the other languages of the peoples who lived their lives in Iberian kingdoms, as well as their legacy beyond its geographical, and often even cultural borders.
This volume is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of the potential that the Mediterranean holds for Iberian studies, but rather, as mentioned, to demonstrate through the studies featured here how Iberia is at once in and of the Mediterranean. The thirteen contributing scholars represent a range of fields, methodologies, and perspectives, reflecting the natural interdisciplinarity of Mediterranean Studies. Thus, the volume features scholars who specialize in the different Iberian literatures, historians, and scholars of religion and culture working in American, European, and Mediterranean institutions.
The first four essays address Iberia as part of the Muslim Mediterranean. Brian Catlos reminds us what is at stake in the way we frame medieval Iberian Muslim, Christian, and Jewish interactions, and points out that from a Mediterranean perspective such interactions are in fact the norm in the medieval period, contrary to the hardline positions of earlier critics, such as Castro and Sanchez-Albornoz, who debated everything but the idea that such interactions made Iberia unique. Catlos’s essay is strategically placed, because in it he broaches the still fundamental question about the relevancy of the medieval past to present-day conceptions of nationhood that continue to shape our epistemological categories, including, for many of us, the institutional frameworks within which we find ourselves, as well as the type/s of knowledge we produce as a result.
His dismissal of the idea of a medieval “Spain” also lays the foundation for the subsequent articles in the volume that explore various aspects of the medieval kingdoms and that for Catlos form part of a larger Mediterranean cultural ambit (and not merely provincial “Spaniards”).
Gerard Wiegers looks explicitly at the mechanics of cultural transmission, focusing on how knowledge concerning the religion of Islam was translated, commented upon, and interpreted for a Christian audience by Jewish and Muslim intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, Muslim slaves and converts. Wiegers shows how the Muslim scholars of Iberia shared cultural and political beliefs with Muslims across the Mediterranean, and according to which neither translation nor transmission were neutral acts of sharing, but rather charged political acts that could be used by their political and military rivals, the Christians.
While scholars such as Charles Burnett and Thomas Burman have examined the role of Jews and noticeable lack of Muslims in what scholars of Spanish Studies often teach as the great translation projects of Toledo, Weigers’s study brings to the fore the important role that the medieval Mediterranean institution of slavery (an issue addressed in subsequent essays, such as those of Luis Avilés and Barbara Fuchs) played in this important stage of Iberian cultural development.
Manuela Marin’s essay brings to our attention the not insignificant political power wielded, first in Iberia, then in Morocco, by the Almoravid princess Hawwa bint Tashufin, as well as the legacy of warrior women among Saharan Berbers and their Almohad detractors, who used their agency as a way of depicting Almoravids as culturally deficient Muslims. Few studies address the gender roles of the ruling Almoravid elite of twelfth-century Iberia, and Marin points to the inherent tension between the Arabized mores of Andalusi society and the customs of Saharan Berber women. Marin’s article further underscores the cultural ties binding Andalusi and North African peoples across the Mediterranean.
Nicholas Parmley reads the canonical Libro de Apolonio as a counter-Crusading narrative that not only offers a model of Mediterranean sea-crossing adapted from the Arab philosophical and literary traditions of Iberia and the wider Muslim world, but that also forces its vernacular reader/s to question the larger agenda of Western Christendom vis-a-vis the Mediterranean. According to Parmley, the Libro de Apolonio is an example of thirteenth-century Iberian cultural production that both reflects upon the status of Mediterranean crossings for an Iberian audience and distances it from French and German narratives of the latter.
Simone Pinet’s contribution similarly addresses the Libro de Apolonio as but one of a pair of works—its imperial twin in constructing a narrative space of kingly conquest and trade being, in Pinet’s opinion, the Libro de Alexandre. The latter begins the process of transformation by which the classical Mediterranean of Homer will be shaped in the Iberian imagination into the domesticated/colonized sea ready for the imperial desires of the Early Modern era. While for Parmley the Mediterranean as represented in the Libro de Apolonio offers not only the threat of misguided conquest as well as the promise of personal enlightenment, for Pinet it is a geography upon which Spanish imperial desires can be realized.
The next two essays explore specific examples of the ways in which the eastward glance of desire that both Pinet and Parmley find in the thirteenthcentury narratives of the Castilian mester de clerecia were constructed by later Iberians in radically different literary and historical sources. Vicente Lled6-Guillem’s article shows how the Aragonese nobleman and soldier Ramon Muntaner, by questioning the notion of Greek as a Mediterranean lingua franca, offers instead Catalan as the fourteenth-century alternative for a panMediterranean standard language.
Muntaner’s linguistic position is related, as Lled6-Guillem points out, to the Catalan presence in both Greek and Byzantine territories during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and offers a later iteration of the imperial impulses that Pinet explores in the thirteenth-century novels of Apolonio and Alexander. However, while in Muntaner’s Chronicle the desire for Empire may also be in part a reaction to French narratives of conquest (as both Pinet and Parmley argue was also the case for the Libro de Apolonio and Alexandre), the vernacular that Muntaner favors is that of a specific Iberian confederation, the Crown of Aragon.
According to Lledd-Guillem, Muntaner’s text is not only reflective of the royal position of Jaume the Conqueror, his son Jaume II, and grandson Alfons, but also reflects a nationalist ideology present in other contemporary Aragonese authors. Both Aragonese and Castilian imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean are also the focus of Andrew Devereux’s study of the Catholic Monarchs’ Mediterranean policy as articulated in the work of several contemporary fifteenth-century Iberian authors and statesmen, including Christopher Columbus, Pedro Navarro, and Cristobal de Santesteban.
While today we are most familiar with the legacy of Spanish imperial expansion to the Americas, Devereux’s study brings to light Columbus’s crusading agenda to retake the Holy Land as part of a larger political theology espoused by several voices in the royal courts of the Catholic Monarchs, who looked East and South across the Mediterranean to the spaces of former Aragonese rule (and beyond) as the theater for Spanish imperial expansion and the site of a universal Christian empire, according to which both Ottomans and North African Hafsid and Fatimid subjects would be “restored” to Christianity under the Spanish monarchs.
As do both Lleddé-Guillem and Devereux, Josiah Blackmore examines the ideological import of the fifteenth-century historical chronicle, but from the Portuguese perspective, focusing on how the chronicler Fernao Lopes chooses to depict Castilian sympathizers in his Cronica de D. Jodo I, a work designed to legitimate the dynastic claims of the Master of Avis over those of the Castilian monarchy. Lopes’ unique historiographic narrative shuns the traditional authority of the chronicle for a style that offers a comparative perspective based on the use of several sources including, in addition to traditional autoritates, more popular vernacular texts such as letters, sermons and even gossip.
Blackmore focuses particularly on Lopes’ choice to cite the lyric cantiga de escarnho purportedly sung by the Castilian sympathizer Fernao Goncalves de Sousa upon surrendering the castle of Portel. Blackmore's essay reminds us, in its study of this previously unexplored lyric insertion in Lopes’ chronicle, of other Iberian texts such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria or the Alfonsine chronicles that also reflect the polyphonic culture of discourse used in narrating the Iberian past and of the polyglossy of Mediterranean Iberia.
The subsequent essays turn our attention from the legitimation of Iberian Empire and imperial culture expressed in official chronicles and court documents as addressed in the essays by Lledé-Guillem, Devereux, and Blackmore, and looks instead to how the tensions and problems of imperial Mediterranean desires (and realities) manifest in several works of Iberian imaginary fiction. The monsters and marvels that Eleazar Gutwirth has found in the Hebrew manuscripts of the Sephardim and their diaspora, particularly that of Shlomo ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehuda and Usque's Consolation for the Tribulation of Israel, as well as in the margins of earlier peninsular Bibles, and that include the leviathan, behemoth, centaur, and even the Inquisition transmorphed into a monstrous beast, are prefigurations of the marvels and monsters in subsequent and better known “European” works.
Gutwirth draws a line connecting Ottoman and Italian copies of these Sephardic accounts of the Expulsion to the gardens of marvels and monsters in Italian works such as Orlando Furioso and Bomarzo and from the latter to the early English print book, Peter Morwyn’s Compendious and most maruelous history of the latter times of the Iewes. Importantly, Gutwirth relates Ibn Verga’s use of the monstrous and marvelous, marked in the text in several cases by the use of the Romance instead of Hebrew, to the post1400 Iberian interest in the monsters and the inexplicable, and as part of a rhetorical strategy designed to alert the reader that the passage or concept being discussed concerns religious polemic—whether the role of reason in questions of faith or of the Inquisition in Sephardi history. Gutwirth’s essay illustrates how the Iberian conception of the marvelous and the monstrous crisscrossed the Mediterranean, and how the expulsed Iberian Jews served as cultural transmitters between Iberian, Ottoman, Italian, and English literature and popular imagination.
Wacks also explores Sephardic culture in Diaspora—including both the Sephardi manuscript and early print cultures of Italy and the Ottoman world discussed by Gutwirth—arguing that this Jewish Diasporic culture is the product of Imperial Spain and a type of “parallel shadow imperialism” that reveals how Sephardic Jews performed their Spanishness in their new diasporic homes. Wacks examines how such an interpretation explains why the Sephardi Jew Jacob Algaba chose to translate into Hebrew the Spanish book of chivalry par excellence, Montalvo’s Amadis de Gaula, in Constantinople—the very imperial city the fictional hero conquers and incorporates into the imagined Christian Spanish empire of the text.
Wacks shows how Algaba’s translation de-Christianizes the text in order to make it accessible for the large reading audience it would have among Ottoman and Mizrahi Jews who constituted the public for and consumers of the sixteenth-century early print books produced in the centers of Sephardi printing such as Constantinople, Salonika and Adrianopolis. Giles, on the other hand, follows the Mediterranean crossings of the markedly unheroic Jewish conversa protagonist of Francisco Delicadoss early sixteenth-century La Lozana andaluza.
The eponymous protagonist goes about her business as whore and pimp while traversing the streets of Rome bearing the physical mark of a star on her forehead, variously interpreted as a syphilitic scar or as a mark of her Jewish identity. Giles offers a novel reading of Lozana’s mark based on the wide but understudied Mediterranean tradition of popular magical spells and amulets, as well as Delicado’s own treatise on plague and syphilis that reveals his eschatological interpretation of the disease and its relation to the fate of Rome at the hands of the invading Spanish troops of Charles V in 1527.
While Lledé-Guillem points out that in the thirteenth-century Ramon Muntaner had advocated for Catalan as the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, Gutwirth, Giles and Wacks show in their contributions to this volume that by the sixteenth century both Castilian and, in the case of the Jews, Hebrew, came to be de facto Mediterranean linguas francas and by-products of two very different forms of cultural imperialism.
The final two essays, Luis Avilés’s “Expanding the Self” and Barbara Fuchs’s “Intimate Strangers,’ offer detailed explorations of the ways in which the Mediterranean functions in the work of Cervantes as a space for the working out of Iberian identity. In his study of the Amante liberal Avilés investigates the ways in which Spain’s most iconic author explores the realities of Mediterranean captivity and human slavery as by-products of Iberian and Ottoman imperialism.
The work’s hero, Ricardo, also because of his Mediterranean experience, which entails a recognition of counter-narratives of empire and cultural exchange on the part of North African Muslims, Jewish merchants, and Turkish sailors, undergoes a personal transformation that, in Avilés’s opinion, allows him to overcome his limited, parochial “Spanish” perspective and to become truly liberal, that is, capable of valuing others’ opinions, particularly that of his love interest Leonisa. Fuchs explores not the hero of Cervantine drama, but the comic sideman, the gracioso, as the vehicle chosen by the author to explore the Mediterranean as a space of cultural engagement and hybrid cultural forms.
The graciosos of the Barios de Argel and the Gran Sultana on the one hand give voice to antiSemitic and anti-Muslim sentiment and, on the other, show an awareness of Jewish and Muslim cultural mores that reveal the suppressed cultural hybridity at the heart of Spanish culture itself (as explored in Fuchs’s earlier studies on Maurophilia such as Exotic Nation). The gracioso of the Sultana, Madrigal, performs Spanishness by playing the conqueror across the Mediterranean, while Tristan of the Los banos is a cynical, irreverent sacristan with apostate tenden-cies. According to Fuchs, both texts invite the reader to reflect upon class and race and the contingencies and uncertainties of both.
The seventeenth-century Mediterranean of Cervantes explored by both Fuchs and Avilés and defined by shifting allegiances and meaning not only marks the temporal end point of our volume, but also, nevertheless, brings us back to the beginning—recalling the constant movement of Iberian women and men across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Iberia, as well as the early imperial desires of Iberian authors and monarchs outlined in the preceding studies, and even the constant mutability that Pinet established as the defining feature of the thirteenth-century Mediterranean narratives of Apolonio and Alexander. This is in fact, as this volume shows, a hallmark of Iberia as being of the Mediterranean.
The essays collected in this volume thus offer an extended inquiry into the complexity of Iberia as a Mediterranean site of cultural complexity, conflict, and exchange in the Middle Ages and early modern period. The studies offered here explore the nuances and specifics of linguistic, religious, and national identities negotiated through and in the desire and realities of both diaspora and imperial expansion. It is our hope that the reader will take away from it an appreciation of the type of new scholarship the change in perspective allowed by Mediterranean Studies can have for those of us working in the history and cultural production of Iberian (and Spanish) studies.
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