The Ornament of the World (2002) By Maria Rosa Menocal

One of the jewels of Chicago is the Newberry Library on the near North Side.  It is a great archival library, housing many rare manucscipts.  It is considered one of the best genealogical resources in North America. Over the years I've taken several of the Newberry's continuing education seminars, including one this summer titled: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain.  The instructor was Sabahat Adil, a young woman from Morocco who is a Ph.D candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago.  With three primary text books, and excerpts from several doctoral papers, the class was the ultimate geek fest. This isn't a complaint, but, the course consumed virtually all of my limited readings hours this summer, and then some.

The class covered 750 AD through 1492 AD.  While this time period was known elsewhere in Europe as the Middle Ages, it was clearly a Golden Era for the Iberian peninsula, arguably far outshining what came after it. The book ends in 1492, generally portrayed by western scholars as the beginning of a new Spanish imperial era, marked by Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of what would come to be known as the Americas.  Only footnoted in most western histories however is that 1492 was also the date of the decree ordering the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, the kick-off of the post-conquest Inquisition.

The main text was The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal.  The Ornament is a readable history of how Iberia morphed during post-Roman history from the Visigoths to numerous city states, to Islamic dominance with the prize of Toledo, to Christian consolidation in the north (Castile, Catalonia, Aragon, Navaree and Leon), then conquest of the south (Andalusia and Granada).  While a superficial glance of this history would point to the importance of religious distinctions, that was not the case. But it wasn't a religious nirvana either, merely an era of pure "power politics," with mixed religious and ethnic demographics and frequently changing alliances.  The book's subtitle refers to this as a "culture of tolerance," and I guess that depends on how one defines "tolerance." The reality had little to do with benevolence, and a lot to do with religion just not being very important in the power scheme of things ... at least until Ferdinand and Isabella messed things up.

While The Ornament of the World details the political history of this time period, a second text, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, detailed the cross-cultural magnificence of the era, through poetry, music, science, medicine and libraries that rivaled the height of Alexandria.  The multi-cultural influence on art and architecture remains unrivaled to this day.  The text is heavy.  At first the professor thought I meant that it was heavy because it was difficult to understand (and it is), but what I meant was the book's weight.  It's printed on 400 pages of tightly bound glossed paper to highlight the hundreds of illustrations inside, to beautiful effect.

The final text was a picture-less book titled Medieval Iberia, edited by Olivia Remie Constable.  It's a compilation of period readings translated from their original Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin.

If you are into linguistics, the class covered in great and interesting detail the challenge of nation building on a peninsula with multiple dialects of multiple languages. As for what we now know as Spanish, one must look toward King Alfonso X, credited with making it the language of record. Though not part of the class, I've hunted down an out-of-print biography of Alfonso X called The Learned King, by Joseph O'Callaghan.

Let me emphasize, this was a course I took because the subject interests me -- particularly after trips to Malaga, Madrid, Toledo and Seville -- but it certainly doesn't make me an expert. Feel free to comment or recommend further readings.