Download PDF | (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East) Ann Rosemary Christys - Christians in Al-Andalus 711-1000-Routledge (2002).
246 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book is a version of my doctoral thesis, which set out to look at the christian response to the islamic conquest of Hispania. Although there is little that addressed this question directly, there is a small but important collection of texts written by or attributed to christians living in al-Andalus up to the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate. I used these as the basis for a series ofstudies of chronicles and calendars, hagiography and histories that cross the frontiers of Hispanic historiography between christians and muslims, north and south, Latin and Arabic. Few of these texts are well known, particularly by medievalists working on areas outside Spain and Portugal. They have not been considered as a body since Franciso Simonet wrote his Historia de los Morarabes in the 1870s. Recent developments in the reading of early medieval authors have opened up the writings of the christians of al-Andalus to a new interpretation which reveals the variety and complexity of the christian experience.
During the years when the thesis was 'nearly finished' I received support and helpful criticism from many people. I would like to thank the medievalists of the School of History of the University of Leeds, especially Wendy Childs, as well as Mayke de Jong, Rosamund McKitterick, Walter Pohl and their students in Cambridge, Leeds, Utrecht and Vienna, Jinty Nelson , Barbara Rosenwein and her colleague Zuhair Ghazzal, who rescued the last copy of the Arabic version of Orosius' Seven Books rifHistory Against the Pagans from the publisher's basement in Beirut and the Historians of Medieval Iberia, particularly Roger Wright.
I have been greatly assisted by the staff of the Brotherton library, especially the InterLibrary Loans office, the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid and the former Escuela Espanola de Arqueologia in Rome and its director Javier Arce. John Wreglesworth read the manuscript with exemplary care and raised enough questions for another thesis. Richard Hitchcock examined the thesis and suggested publishing it more or less in its original shape . Peter Brown nobly read the thesis before breakfast and advised me how to make it easier for a reader to negotiate.
I am very grateful to both for their encouragement. My debt to Ian Wood goes back to the first few weeks of my time as an undergraduate in the School of History, where I was a refugee from the unwarranted certainty of medicine. Ian's approach to the great unknown of the early Middle Ages, based on imaginative reading of the way early medieval authors had recorded their world rather than on explanation of what actually happened, was a revelation. I am grateful to Ian for humouring my obsession with the history of al-Andalus - almost the only corner of the early Middle Ages on which he is not himself an authority - and for giving me so many opportunities to develop as a historian. This book is dedicated to him .
Finally, although he should perhaps have come first, I should like to thank Roger Collins for writing EarlY Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity 400-1000, which I read after my first visit to Spain in 1983 and the rest, I hope, is history
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