Posts Tagged ‘Spain’

The End of Roman Spain

The End of Roman Spain

By Michael Kulikowski

PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1997

Abstract: ‘The End of Roman Spain’ narrates the history of the last years in which the Iberian peninsula formed part of the Roman empire and argues that the lapse of Roman control came around the year AD 460, much later than the traditional date of 409. The first chapter sets the scene and discusses Spain in the fourth-century. The second, ‘The Defence of Roman Spain’, presents an analysis of the confused sources for the late Roman army in Spain and is linked to an appendix on the ‘ Notitia Dignitatum’ which argues that that document was in origin a single base text, composed at the eastern court around 394.

The third chapter revises the traditional chronology of usurpation and barbarian invasion in Gaul between 405 and 413, in the course of which events Roman authority in Spain was first challenged by barbarian invaders. The fourth chapter traces the history of the peninsula between 425 and 455, examining the effects on Roman control of a barbarian presence in the Spanish provinces. Chapter five looks at the Goths, whose role in the end of Roman Spain is crucial, and argues that their initial settlement in Gaul in 418 was designed by the central imperial authorities to prevent their provincial Roman subjects from supporting further usurpations.

Chapter six, finally, examines the careers of the last two emperors to take an interest in Spain, showing how they maintained their authority in the peninsula by using the Goths as their instruments. It argues that after Majorian left the peninsula in 460, having failed to mount a campaign against the Vandals in Africa, Roman Spain ended, because the structure of imperial office-holding in Spain disappeared.

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1 Sep 2010
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The expansion of a European feudal monarchy during the 13th Century: the Catalan-Aragonese Crown and the consequences of the conquest of the kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia

The expansion of a European feudal monarchy during the 13th Century: the Catalan-Aragonese Crown and the consequences of the conquest of the kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia

By Enric Guinot

Catalan Historical Review, Vol.2:2 (2009)

Abstract: In the middle of the 13th century the Crown of Aragon conquered by military means the Muslim Mediterranean Coast of the Iberian Peninsula, incorporating it into the European feudal world; this resulted in the destruction of the Andalusí state and part of its society as well as in a redistribution of towns, villages, houses and lands among Christians. The historiography of some years ago emphasized the role of trade and urban burgesses in these new societies, but present opinion is more related to a long expansion of feudal society as well as the creation in Majorca and Valencia of a colonial society. Logically, the consequences of this process had also an effect in Catalonia and Aragon where the movement had its origins, and its effects can be verified on the re-settlers’ migrations, the changes in agrarian structures due to the redistribution, the expansion of commercial towns, and the political changes that resulted from the participation of the urban patrician class in the new power structures: townships and parliaments.

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30 Aug 2010
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Midwives and Medical Texts: Women’s Healing Practices in the Crown of Aragón, 1300-1600

Midwives and Medical Texts: Women’s Healing Practices in the Crown of Aragón, 1300-1600

By Alice Conner Harman

Bachelor of Arts Thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2009

Introduction: In the winter of 1374, Guillemona de Togores suffered from a recurring illness that sapped her strength and took away her appetite. A lady in waiting at the court of the Catalan-Aragonese queen in Barcelona when she became ill, Guillemona moved into the house of her friend Sereneta de Tous to recuperate. Although she wished to remain at court, her friends convinced her she should take up residence in a private home to recover properly. Although the Queen paid for multiple physicians to examine Gillemona, her friend Sereneta’s care and her ordinary household were judged to be better suited to her recovery. Sereneta was especially helpful in convincing Guillemona to eat pears, securing a favorite food of Guillemona’s when she was particularly afflicted with a loss of appetite. Food was one of the “non-naturals” that were regulated using humoral theory to control and heal the body.1 After her recovery, Guillemona sent a letter to Sereneta’s husband to assure him she was healthy and to thank him and his wife. “She [Sereneta] has done for me as much as if I had been her mother,” she wrote .

Guillemona’s story illustrates the difficulty of assessing women’s medical practice in the Crown of Aragón in the late medieval and early modern periods. Although physicians– official male healers– are called to treat her illness, she is also assisted by a friend who is never labeled a healer. When Guillemona wants to describe the care her friend has given her, she does not say that Sereneta was an excellent nurse but rather calls her a daughter. The healing that Sereneta offers Guillemona is not discussed in what we would consider healing terms today, nor is Sereneta ever explicitly called a healer. The relationship between Sereneta and Guillemona is described instead as being what a daughter would naturally do for her mother, even though the two are unrelated.

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25 Aug 2010
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Medieval Projects earn grants from NEH

Two medieval projects have been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). One project will develop an interactive jousting computer game for a museum, while the other will create a seminar for high school and college teachers about Islamic civilization in Iberia during the Middle Ages.

Over $31.5 million in grants for 201 humanities projects were announced by the NEH last week. This funding will support a wide variety of projects, including the production and development of radio and television programs, digital scholarly resources, professional development for teachers and college faculty, and the development and staging of museum and library exhibitions.

The Higgins Armory Museum in Massachusetts has received a $50 000 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for its project Virtual Joust: A Technological Interpretation of Medieval Jousting and Its Culture.  According to project director Jeffery Forgeng, the museum will be creating a virtual jousting game, which will make use of a Nintendo Wii remote embedded in the stub of a replica lance; this interacts with a Flash-based game projected on a screen. The game even allows players to create their own heraldic designs, which are incorporated into the gameplay visuals. Mr. Forgeng told Medievalists.net that a team of undergraduate students have been working on this game for about a year, trying to create “an immersive jousting experience.”

The Virtual Joust is set to become a permanent feature at the Higgins Armory Museum, which is the sole museum in the Western Hemisphere devoted to arms and armour. Mr. Forgeng added that the current generation of museum-goers want to experience some interactive elements during their visits. Using new technology will help people “envision themselves in a joust.”

E. Michael Gerli of the University of Virginia also received close to $120 000 for his project on Medieval and Early Modern Islamic Iberia. The project will take sixteen teachers from around the United States to Spain for a 4 week seminar in the summer of 2011.

In his proposal to the NEH, Professor Gerli said that, “Islamic Iberia generally fails to form part of western European cultural history in today’s school and college curriculum. To find courses on it, let alone minimal reliable information about it in history and civilization courses among the offerings of American high schools and universities is extremely rare. Yet, it is obvious that not just the cultural history of Iberia but of Europe remains incomplete without some deeper knowledge of this “lost” civilization. The proposed seminar is thus significant for several reasons: 1). Because it seeks to address this exclusion and examine Islamic Iberia’s place in western cultural history from the perspective of a complex borderland, a cultural bridge and porous interface that, if carefully considered, remains decisive for understanding the flow of customs, ideas, and institutions from the East to all of Europe during the Middle Ages; and 2), through the sixteen secondary school teachers who would participate, and the institutional effect they may subsequently have, it will seek to insert, even if minimally, an awareness of Islamic Iberia into the broader historical and cultural consciousness of contemporary American education.”

Teachers participating in the project will initially go to the University of Virginia’s Study Center in Valencia,  where they will attend lectures, visit museums, and take field trips to local sites. After two weeks, the seminar will begin to move around Spain, visiting cities which were the main centers of Iberian Islamic civilization, including Córdoba, Granada, Seville, and Toledo.

The NEH is funding a wide variety of projects related to American or World History. One project will provide digital textual analysis of 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other grants will support an interactive digital simulation of the experiences of Japanese Americans in wartime internment camps in the Arkansas Delta, and allow the Folger Library to mount a traveling exhibit on the history and influence of the King James Bible.

“The NEH grants announced today seek to discover, preserve, and share the stories that have shaped us,” said NEH Chairman Jim Leach. “Whether through continuing education opportunities for teachers, public debates on issues of civility and democracy, or the development of digital scholarly and educational tools, these projects underscore the power of the humanities to enrich our understanding of our history, our society, and ourselves.”

Click here to read a complete state-by-state listings of grants

Source: National Endowment for the Humanities

17 Aug 2010
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Tolerance’s End: Religious Minorities, Philosophers, Free-Thinkers and the Rise of Fundamentalism in 12th and 13th Century Islamic Spain

Tolerance’s End: Religious Minorities, Philosophers, Free-Thinkers and the Rise of Fundamentalism in 12th and 13th Century Islamic Spain

Lecture by Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Acting Director of Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the Catholic University of America

Given on April 23, 2009 at the Catholic University of America

Explorations (and celebrations) of the so-called convivencia between Muslims, Christians and Jews in 10th- and 11th-century Spain have been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarship in the last 60 years. Far less attention has been paid to the complex interplay between competing religio-political understandings of Islamic military and economic decline and how these conflicts affected religious minority populations and the philosophers, mystics and intellectuals who would become the most visible targets of “fundamentalist” fury.

Lourdes Maria Alvarez is acting director of Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the Catholic University of America and an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. A graduate of Yale University, she has published on Islamic mysticism, intellectual history and literature in medieval Spain. Her book, Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari: Songs of Love and Devotion published by Paulist Press.

This video was filmed by the Rumi Forum.

24 Jul 2010
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Traveling Around the Empire: Iberian Voyages, the Sphere, and the Atlantic Origins of the Scientific Revolution

Traveling Around the Empire: Iberian Voyages, the Sphere, and the Atlantic Origins of the Scientific Revolution

By Lino Camprubí

Eä – Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology, Vol.1:2 (2009)

Abstract: This paper aims at illuminating the links between spherical geography, Catholic empire and the Atlantic origins of the scientific revolution. Boldly put, the theory of the sphericity of the earth stood at the center of Iberian expansion and its imaginary; in turn, imperial patronage contributed to give a new status to that theory and to transform it into one of the sources for the early modern worldview.

Three main moments constitute the previous argument. First, voyages developed along with spherical geography, in which lumps of earth were located in terms of latitude and longitude. Second, Iberian voyages of discovery developed spherical geography by enlarging the Greek known world, or oikumene, and gave new ground to the theory of the sphericity of the earth in the midst of medieval competing models, specifically one that held that the sphere of the earth was suspended over a sphere of water too large to be navigated. Third, imperial voyages together with spherical geography, practice merged together with theory, rendered the entire world subject to human measure and exploration. For the first time, it also made clear that the natural knowledge developed from antiquity to the early modern period could and did produce practical power.

Thus, the simultaneous development and mutual nourishment of spherical geography and imperial voyages was a significant source for the scientific revolution.

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22 Jul 2010
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Medieval Spain

Medieval Spain – 54 minutes – documentary about the history of Spain in the Middle Ages. Directed by Jorge A. Borda, Filmed in 2001.

20 May 2010
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The Chronica Maiora of Isidore of Seville: An Introduction and Translation

The Chronica Maiora of Isidore of Seville: An Introduction and Translation

By Sam Koon and Jamie Wood

e-Spania: Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales, Vol.6 (2008)

Abstract: Isidore of Seville’s Chronica Maiora was written in two redactions in early seventh century and reveals a great deal about the political, religious and intellectual history of late antique and early medieval Spain. A comparative analysis of the different versions demonstrates the author in action, responding to a range of contemporary stimuli. On a series of levels, the changing form and contents of the chronicle can be mapped against a rapidly changing religious and political background to provide valuable historical data and insights into the working methods and intellectual world of the most important author of early medieval Spain. This article offers a brief introduction to the text and its context of production before presenting an English translation of the two redactions of the text.

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3 May 2010
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Seville : between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1248-1492 : pre-Columbus commercial routes from and to Seville

Seville : between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1248-1492 : pre-Columbus commercial routes from and to Seville

Serradilla Avery, Dan Manuel

University of St Andrews, 21-Jun-2007

Abstract

The city of Seville and its port have had a prominent place in the history of early modern Europe and America. This city was not only the Gate of the Indies, but also the Gate of Europe for all the exotic goods and people that arrived in Europe via Sevilleâs port. How this city achieved such a prominent place has traditionally been overshadowed by its post-1492 fame. This thesis demonstrates how, during the two hundred or so years before Columbus, different groups were able to shape this city into a commercial port that had made it the axis between the Mediterraneanâs commercial routes and those of the Atlantic Ocean. Beginning in 1248, with the Christian re-conquest, the monarchs set out to create an independent and powerful municipality, as well as a merchant class with distinctive city quarters and privileges.

In turn, this merchant class affected the policies of both monarchy and city-council. Eventually, the policies of both merchants and the city-council led to the creation of an important exchange port that lay nearly between the two bodies of water. The Castilian monarchs, aware of this, also began the construction of the first Royal Ware houses and Dockyards, as well as determining the location of the Castilian Armada. It was those years between 1248 and 1492 that witnessed the birth of one of the most important naval ports of European history.

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28 Apr 2010
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The myth of minority : cultural change in Valencia in the thirteenth century at the time of the conquests of James I of Aragon

The myth of minority : cultural change in Valencia in the thirteenth century at the time of the conquests of James I of Aragon

Eckersley, Ben

University of St Andrews, 2007

Abstract

The history of the Iberian Peninsula is intricate and complex. Like most regions of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, it suffered invasion, occupation, political change and an almost constant re–alignment of social alliances. Yet the thirteenth century saw one of the most massive shifts in the balance of power recorded in western history. In the space of fifty years, Islamic rule within the peninsula was ended for good, with the last vestiges of Muslim territory erased from the southern peninsula by the fifteenth century. Christian ascendancy heralded the arrival of a mixed policy of tolerance, as questions began to be asked about the nature of living together with other cultures and religions and whether this new rule – this new Christian rule – needed to tolerate the existence of others in its midst. The most dramatic shift in policy occurred in the middle of the thirteenth century, as the campaigns of the two great northern kingdoms of Leon–Castile and Aragon–Catalonia moved southwards. The most dramatic outcome – due to the size of the Muslim population – was the relatively swift conquest of, in the case of Ferdinand III, the main towns of Andalucia and, in the case of James I, king of Aragon, the region of Valencia by 1245. Yet it is important when examining the campaigns of these great warrior kings not to be overwhelmed by the idea of the religious ethos for the conquest. Some historians have chosen to interpret the thirteenth–century conquests as the Christian reaction for the centuries of subjugation under Muslim rule. The reasoning behind the conquests was far more complex than that of a mere idealistic crusade. In the case of thirteenth–century Christian expansion, desire for territory, sovereignty, inheritance, taxation and inter-territorial rivalry had just as much of a part to play as a desire to overcome the Muslim ‘infidel.’

It is the conquest of Valencia which will form the major focal point of this paper, examining the historical precedent for conquest, the nature of Muslim rule, the ulterior motives of the Christians, the position of Muslims and Jews in existing Christian society (as well as under the conquerors) and the role of James I in both consolidating and changing that culture. The programme of this thesis is divided into two main parts. In the first part, the paper will explore the impact of historical events up to the birth of James; how these events both shaped him as a king and as a warrior; and how domestic concerns may have provided a greater incentive than religious missionaries spreading Crusading fever amongst Western kingdoms. It will review the impact of those close to the king; on the nature of his conquest; on his ideology; and how his attitude towards his conquered subjects was shaped. External political and geographical pressures impacted both upon the king’s campaigning and, ultimately, how complete the conquest was. In the second part, the thesis will focus on the communities themselves and the changes that occurred as the conquests progressed further and further southwards. It will contrast the circumstances and fortunes of those conquered with the lives of minority cultures who were already subjects in the Christian realms. It will examine the idea of hierarchy within minority culture and the social mores that had an even more direct impact upon community life than the military campaigning. Most important of all, it will question the idea of convivencia and the concept of tolerance and ‘living together.’

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25 Apr 2010
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