(In participation order)

Abdellah Hammoudi (Princeton University)
Giving and receiving yeast: how to keep differing identities together

We live in a world  in which we can not avoid "being in the way of eah other". A situation caracterised by extreme proximity and familirity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by an exacerbation of  difference and heigtened demand for recognition. This tension seem to inform many conflits, and indeed we live in a state of permanent, if mostly low  intensity,  cultural  confrontation. I want to start from a ritual of exchange of yeast between Muslims and Jews in Morocco [ 1950] in order to explore what kept those identities together, even under conditions of radical change. Historians will explore Convivencia in earlier times. My contribution will be to try and spell out a priciple of and for convivencia.


Angelika Neuwirth
The Qur’an – a Text of Late Antiquity

The Qur’an in contemporary scholarship is viewed as a re-reading of the Bible, a view that is based on observations put forward already in 19th century scholarship. Though there is much truth to this judgment, the question of the particular mode of re-production arises. It can hardly be overlooked that the Qur’an reflects a mass of exegetical traditions that contributed to reshape and sometimes ideologically manipulate the Biblical reference text. Traces of qur’anic re-workings of the Biblical text carried out on the basis of midrashic and ecclesiastical traditions are evident – many have been documented already by the pioneers of qur’anic studies, the ‘historistic scholars’ of the 19th century. But in spite of the gigantic work carried out by scholars from Abraham Geiger to Heinrich Speyer, these finding are only the peak of an iceberg: only a small part of the exegetical intertexts of the Qur’an have been identified until now. And – more lamentable - the particular way of integration of these intertexts, their new, theologically modified function in the Qur’an has not been discussed yet.

A number of questions, then, are still unanswered: What theological principles have been guiding the re-shaping of the Biblical texts? What was the impact of the exegetical traditions in constituting these guiding principles? Does the Qur’an reflect different approaches to theological issues of the Bible due to changes in outlook that occurred in the course of the development of the text?

If the semantic dimension of the Qur’an is still under-studied, this applies even more to the hermeneutics of the qur’anic appropriation of earlier traditions. What are the rhetorical means applied in the qur’anic process of assimilating the earlier traditions? Are these strategies again part of the Hellenistic heritage of the Late Antique Near East? Recent scholarship has presented a number of rhetorical stratagems familiar from Hellenistic arguing, that re-appear in the Qur’an.

The paper will present the qur’anic text not as is usually the case: as an Islamic text, but as a pre-Islamic text, as a document of Late Antiquity. The Qur’an emerged in an epoch that was particularly significant for the three monotheistic religious traditions alike: the epoch from which both the Talmud and fundamental ecclesiastical works originated. The Qur’an will be made audible as another voice in this pluricultural ensemble.


Andreina Contessa
The Visualization of the Heavens in Medieval manuscripts: From Ancient Astronomical Imagery to Christian Scientific Illustration

This paper concerns scientific illustrations in the Middle Ages and the use of visual aids to transmit knowledge in medieval codices. The focus is the visualization of the heavens, in the context of astronomical-astrological studies in Europe during the tenth and twelfth centuries.
This paper in centred on the study of medieval scientific codices in the Catalan area (Ripoll Monastery). The choice of Catalonia depends on its location between Muslim Spain and Christian Europe, at a strategic point for the transmission of culture in the Mediterranean area. The monastery of Ripoll, less known and studied than others in Europe, had strong connections with France and Italy, cultural relations with the Islamic world and the local Jewish community, and a renowned tradition in teaching trivium and quadrivium since the time of Abbot Arnulphus and Oliba (10th and 11th centuries).

Scientific illustrations in the medieval period are mostly contained in computistic miscellanies and manuals for the teaching of the liberal arts in the monastic milieu. These anthological collections, centred on a nucleus of texts that deal with the computus (computation) of Easter, frequently incorporate extracts from astronomical and geographical treatises. Many of these manuscripts were poor scholar-books, accompanied by simple coloured-ink drawings; a few of them were luxury codices lavishly illustrated. In both cases, images, schemes, and diagrams were integral parts of the treated subject and the pivot in the transmission of learning.

Medieval scientific texts also included non-scientific materials: since the Carolingian epoch, computistic collections included cosmological excerpta from Pliny and various stellar catalogues, whose illustrations had a decorative as well as a functional role.  Stellar catalogues, such as those linked to the Aratea (from Aratos’ Phenomena, 310–245 BC), represented the planets according to their attributes in ancient mythology, and included personifications of the Sun and Moon. The Aratea  illustrations were included in medieval  monastic computus books and encyclopediae and might accompany different texts.
Study of the transmission of astronomic illustration will enable a wider knowledge of the cultural relations and book exchanges between some important schools of the time.


Regula Forster
Transmission of Knowledge through Literature: The Literary Frames of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Sirr al-Asrar and Kitab al-Tuffaha

The pseudo-Aristotelian Sirr al-asrār, known in the West as Secretum Secretorum, is a text with an amazing career. This mirror for princes, containing chapters on behaviour, warfare, medicine, alchemy, astrology etc., was composed in Arabic in the 10th century AD. It was later translated not only into Persian and Turkish, but also twice into Latin (once by John of Sevilla and Limia), and into Hebrew and Castilian. From Latin, the text was translated into most European vernaculars (including Aragonese, Catalan, and Portuguese).

Compared to the Sirr al-asrār, the Kitāb at-tuffāḥā (Liber de pomo), in which a dying Aristotle instructs his students not to be afraid of death, knew a far less impressive success, though it was still a medieval bestseller: Composed in Arabic, at the latest in the first half of the 10th century AD, it was translated into Hebrew by Abraham ibn Hasday and thence into Latin at the court of Manfred of Sicily, son of Frederick II. In the 15th century, this Latin text was translated into Catalan, remaining the only medieval vernacular version of the text.

Though these texts were originally composed in the Arabic East, they both seem to have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula relatively early and were translated here. As both texts offer a pretty basic knowledge, that can in no way be called original, I will argue that the success of these texts was due to two factors: to the connection with the name of the “first teacher”, Aristotle, and to their literary “mise en scène”: While the Sirr al-asrār uses the form of an epistle, the Kitāb at-tuffāḥa is a dialogue between Aristotle and his pupils. My analysis shall focus on the literary frames of the two texts: In what circumstances are they said to have been written? What is the relationship between the supposed author and the addressee(s) of the texts? How does their relationship affect the content of the text? What communicative targets exist? Is any reaction of the addressee(s) reported?

This analysis will enable a comparison of how transmission of knowledge was depicted and seen as possible and will therefore make a contribution to the study of the transmission of knowledge and the history of science and philosophy.


Tom Nickson,
Gates of Paradise. Getting into Medieval Spain

This paper will focus on the bronze doors now found at Seville, Toledo and Córdoba cathedrals in order to assess changing Christian attitudes to the Islamic past and present. All three doors have in common their material, reticulated geometric design and use of inscriptions, and all originally hung in their respective city's Friday mosque. Yet where those at Seville have been preserved in the current cathedral cloister, those at Toledo were melted down and recast in the 1330s, those at Córdoba reworked in the 1570s. The paper will analyse the particular circumstances and symbolism of the doors' re-employment and recasting, the role of inscriptions and heraldry in Christian and Islamic buildings, the significance of craft and materials, and attitudes towards conversion - both of people and objects. It will also consider other traditions of bronze portals in medieval and Renaissance Europe, the wooden doorways of the Alcázar of Seville, and sacred Islamic structures. It will not dwell on the terminology of liminality, but will nonetheless question the significance of thresholds as revealed in illustrated miracle collections (notably the Cantigas of Alfonso X) and contemporary secular and ecclesiastical legislation.

The model of convivencia it will uncover is of a pragmatic redeployment of prestigious objects. This pragmatism was subject to polemical pressures at moments of inter-confessional tension, notably following the conquest of Seville in 1248, renewed Christian/Islamic tensions in the 1330s, and growing hostility to moriscos in the sixteenth century. The survival of these doors in Christian contexts belongs within a wider tradition of tolerance for objects that never entirely lose their original Islamic meanings, but by focussing on these specific instances this paper aims to move away from general assumptions about convivencia and consider its very mechanics - the differences between Christian and Islamic identities and the ways they are represented, sometimes ambiguously. Jewish responses to Islamic art and architecture will also be assessed, as too responses to Jews. And implicit in the study of these representations are the ways in which they have been constructed by subsequent scholarship, subject to its own distorting institutional, political and historical pressures now just as much as in the past.

Cynthia Robinson
Purposeful Polyvalence: Christ, the Virgin, Polemic and Devotions in a Multi-Confessional Castile (15th c.)

Iberian arts, literatures, social structures, political interactions and even religious practices are frequently characterized as “hybrid” – that is, as marked by characteristics believed to proceed from more than one of the cultures identified with each of Iberia’s three religions. The processes through which this “hybridity” was created, however, were often chronologically and locally specific, and these have not traditionally been well understood by scholars: until very recently, they have often been chalked up to “influence,” a vague and implicitly unidirectional process which frequently appears to lack intentionality. I believe that it is fair to say, moreover, that, art historians (with certain notable exceptions) have been among the the slowest to move toward an interdisciplinary and contextually grounded approach to the “hybridity” of their objects of study.

This paper, however, will propose that interactions in fifteenth-century Castile in the religious sphere resulted in cultural products (including images) which were anything but lacking in intentionality. Shedding the limiting constrictions of a “history-of-styles” approach -- dependent on out-dated labels such as “Mudéjar,” “Gothic,” and “Hispano-Flemish” -- and turning instead to a series of little-studied manuscripts and incunables (especially important will be Françesc Eiximenis’ Vida de Cristo, or Life of Christ, as well as a so-called “Life of the Virgin” authored by Dominican Juan López de Salamanca expressly for doña Leonor de Pimentel, Countess of Plasencia), I will demonstrate, first, that Castilian representations of Christ Crucified and the Virgin, both visual and textual, are characterized by striking similarities to important Islamic topoi which were central to Sufism, and perhaps particularly to Shādhilī mysticism. Second, I will argue that these similarities are hardly casual; indeed, that they are the product of conscious and deliberate processes of construction.

For many Castilians, Christ’s crucified body was, not the site of somatic identification or the focus of a “mysticism of the sacred event,” through which the Passion was recreated in all of its disturbing details. Rather, it was an empty cipher, subject to endless metaphorical transformations, a Divine Beloved who is strikingly reminiscent of the topoi of wine and love that drive, for example, the muwashshahāt of Andalusī mystic al-Shushtarī. Likewise, the Virgin was much more than the human mother of the human Christ. Rather, she is a quasi-divine figure who is both an object of veneration in her own right and, like the Qur’anic Maryam, a model of piety and devotion. Indeed, as I will argue, the portrait of her offered by both Eiximenis and López de Salamanca is that of the perfect Shādhilī: in exchange for her devout piety, she experiences ecstatic rapture, visited upon her suddenly at the benevolent behest of the divinity. She is the frequent recipient of divine revelations and angelic visitations, possessor of celestial knowledge of the highest order, second only to that of God himself. She is thus, as it turns out, the perfect transmitter of divine revelations concerning Christ’s divinity, as well as the truth of his Passion and Resurrection, all of which were notoriously difficult “sells” to members of Iberia’s two “Other” confessions, potential converts to Christianity.

The implications of my research for image production and reception – unlike, for example, scholarship’s often rather trite and generalized characterizations of the so-called “Islamic influence” represented by “Mudéjar” art -- are hardly straightforward. Rather, as has been so provocatively explored by Felipe Pereda, they are complicated by deeply embedded, contradictory and conflicted attitudes toward images. This makes a re-reading of such standard iconographic topoi as a Crucifix, a retablo depicting the Life of Christ, or the Pietà -- the “Europeanness” of which is so frequently taken for granted by scholars -- imperative, challenging and fascinating.


Beatrice Gruendler (Yale University)
Books, Notes, and Words: Communicative choices on the eve of Arabic-Islamic book culture (3rd century AH/9th century CE)

The emerging Arabic-Islamic book culture of the third/ninth century affected - among many other disciplines of knowledge - even the most oral of Arabic arts: poetry. Poets improvised more often with the aid of writing, poems were exchanged by letter or on inscribed objects, and writing  itself, its tools, techniques, and expertise figured more prominently within the repertoire of poetic motifs. These trends were supported by the introduction, at the end of the second/eighth century, of a cheap and abundant writing material, namely paper, as well as by the growth of secretarial handbooks and poetic manuals, which placed the know how of written composition at the disposal of a growing public, largely constituted by the urban elite.

The question is not so much the newness of the written format, as other supports of writing (papyrus and vellum) had existed, and the paper codex, notebook and letter were adopted almost immediately after their introduction to Iraq, as their ubiquitous mention in contemporary sources shows. Rather, the distribution among the various old and new modes, consulting books vs. memory, or writing vs. speaking, are of interest. The same holds true for the different purposes for which the modes were used, whether for short term or long term storage, for wide dissemination or to reach a small limited audience; and finally, which were the society's attitudes to the old and new media? As (recently translated) scholarship by Gregor Schoeler has shown, we are dealing not with a unidirectional shift from the oral to the written, but a coexistence of, and alternation among, several options (not unlike the variety of Internet culture). The present paper offers a preliminary survey of attitudes to media in records of the literary life from the late second/eighth and third/ninth centuries.


Felipe Pereda
Sacred Images and Conversions in Early Modern Spain

When the Bohemian traveler Leo von Rozmital visited the town of Burgos the year 1466 he was surprised to come across a miraculous image of Christ made of a strange material, nicht Holz, nicht Steinen … but soft and mobile, like if it was a real cadaver (der Leichnam ganz gestalt wie ein tot Mensch). Following the same pattern of well-known medieval precedents, the nobleman was told that the image had been found floating in the sea; that it was the work of Nicodemus, and that his miracles included the growing of his nails and hair. According to the same sources, the discovery had been first communicated to the “Jewish-born” Bishop of Burgos who, by the time, had already dreamt with its arrival. After bringing the crucifix to town, the Bishop showed it to his four still-Jewish brothers who immediately converted.

Von Rozmital’s testimony is the oldest primary reference to one of the most extraordinary sacred images of Early Modern Spain. But the story Rozmital heard in Burgos does not completely lack a historical base. In the XVth century, there had been in this diocese two bishops of Jewish origin: Pablo de Santa Maria (former rabbi Selomoh-Ha Leví), and his own son, Alonso de Santa María (d. 1456). In fact, since the middle of the XVIth century, the veracity of the miracles of the “Cristo de Burgos” were supported on the ground of an investigation carried out by Bishop Alonso the year 1454. Notwithstanding, an early XVIth century manuscript copy of the Bishop’s inquiry (Burgos, Cathedral Archive) clearly diverges from the “official” version printed several times during the next two hundred years. Contrary to the printed version, the Bishop’s inquiry followed the same skepticism to charismatic images that his own father had expressed in his apologetic anti-Jewish writings.
Relying on recent analysis of the image (most probably of Rhenish origin) this paper will deal with the role some images displayed in a “confessionalization” process.


Esperanza Alfonso
The Forgotten Sheaf: Exegesis and Poetry from Granada to Tlemcen

In 1492, Jacob Gabison (or Gabishon), a member of a distinguished Jewish family who had left Seville for Granada after the riots of 1391, was among the Granadian refugees who headed for North Africa—Tlemcen in his case—to escape the Christian conquest of the city. Roughly one century later, in 1574, his son Abraham b. Jacob Gabison (1520-78), wrote ‘Omer ha-Shikheh)ah [“The Forgotten Sheaf”], a commentary on the book of Proverbs that eventually was completed by his own son and grandson and later edited by one of his descendants in Leghorn in 1748.

While more than seventy commentaries on Proverbs had been written in the previous centuries, most of them authored by Sephardic exegetes, and many written either immediately before or after 1492, the Gabisons’ work was by no means an ordinary one. Expanding as the family grew, the book included not only passages from previous Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Provençal commentaries on Proverbs, as was customary, but also long quotations from didactic narrative works and, even more surprisingly, poems in both Hebrew and Arabic illustrating specific biblical verses, a feature that renders the commentary unique in that it challenges all assumed medieval genre conventions.

Edited in a facsimilar form in Jerusalem in 1973, this complex and atypical work has remained relatively marginal to modern scholarship. In this paper I intend to take the commentary as a witness to the cultural politics of 16th-century North African communities of Sephardic origin, and as a vantage point from which to raise broader questions on reception history and cultural contact. Unlike the Jewish exegetes and poets from the Iberian Christian kingdoms, who long ago had lost direct contact with Muslims and Islamic culture, the Gabisons lived in an Arabo-Islamic society, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Maghreb. They positioned themselves as inheritors of a Sephardic cultural legacy, written both in Arabic and Hebrew, but wrote in a different social, political and cultural setting from that of their Sephardic ancestors, and so transformed the culture they had inherited within this new setting. I will examine the ways in which the Gabisons—and by extension 16th-century Moroccan authors—built a cultural legacy for themselves; the ways in which this legacy differed from that imagined by Jewish authors in Christian Iberia; and their attitudes to Arabic and Hebrew, on the one hand, and Christian and Islamic societies, on the other.


José Martínez Gázquez
The Representation of Islam in Medieval Texts of the "Corpus Islamolatinum"

Commissioning the translations of the Qur'an and other related Islamic texts, Peter the Venerable became an outstanding example of the approach of Occidental Christianity towards the Islamic sources and the Lives of Muhammad. With regard to this project, James Kritzeck wrote: "As important as the financial results of Peter's journey undoubtedly were for Cluny, it produced an infinitely more important result, totally incidental to the others and probably also unpremeditated, which marks that journey as a momentous event in the intellectual history of Europe. For in its course Peter conceived, planned, and sponsored his project to study, comprehensively and from original sources, the religion of Islam". Later on, in the course of the Middle Ages and during Modern Times, further Latin translations of the Qur'an were realized, while at the same time one can observe the creation of an entire corpus of Latin literature devoted to a better understanding of Islam, which in turn should serve the purposes of controversy with and refutation of Islam and the reassessment of the Christian truth. This corpus reveals at least two relevant aspects:

a.- The growing familiarity of Latin Christians with the new doctrines, which spread very quickly, and the way in which their attitude towards Islam was conditioned by a large number of prejudices as well as strategic aims.

b.- The emergence of conflicts and misunderstandings concerning the perception of Islam and the critical appraisal of Islamic doctrines and of the image of its founder, Muhammad.
These texts, and in particular the prologues of the translators which serve as introductions, as well as the literature which accompanies these translations, allow us to study both, the methods and strategic aims which were involved in this process on the one hand and, on the other, its limitations and short-comings, due to the prejudices which hindered an adequate comprehension of the complex reality.

Rosa María Rodríguez Porto
Anatopic Visions, Displaced Conflicts. Translations of Roman Antiques in Medieval Castile

The Trojan War seems to have been translated to an Andalusian setting in the miniatures of the Crónica Troyana (Escorial, h.I.6, ca. 1350), a magnificent manuscript that contains the Castilian version of the Roman de Troie made for Alfonso XI. Far from anecdotal, the depiction of horseshoe arches in the gates of Troy, or the figuration of ancient heroes observing the Iberian hybrid courtly manners are visible symptoms of the appropriative process undergone by this secular imagery in order to be assimilated by medieval Castilian audiences. Along the same lines, other reelaborations of classical materials –the Libro de Alexandre (ca. 1200-30), the Libro de Apolonio (ca. 1250) and in Alfonso X’s General Estoria and Estoria de España (ca. 1270-84)– evince not only an acquaintance with the French romances which were their sources, but also a sophisticated manipulation of the values conferred upon ancient past in order to construct Castilian narratives of power. Images, which constitute translations of their own, play a crucial role in re-presenting the past and in visualizing the dialectic tensions between historical and present times. In the Crónica Troyana, the Trojan war takes place in fourteenth-century Castile and, thus, the ancient city becomes a virtual space, anachronistic and anatopic, where Iberian chivalry and even Castilian identity are to be negotiated. As a consequence, the classical legend is dressed in the garments of the courtly culture created by centuries of interaction with al-Andalus and the Castilian realm is turned into the core of a new mythic geography.

Therefore, the survey into these hispanic versions of romans antiques –texts and images– allow for an inquiry over the issues encapsulated in the proper notion of translatio: linguistic transfer, displacement of meanings and geographical transposition. Moreover, they may act as incitement to consider the role of Graeco-Latin legacy in the foundation of European identity since they force modern scholars to deal with an estranged classical tradition defined by its hybridization instead than by a monolithic and normative character. However, even if cultural conflicts seem to disappear in these courtly narratives by the projection onto a neutral ancient past, it should be taken into account that this picture of harmonious convivencia had its counterpoint outside the borders of the manuscripts: Castilian versions of romans antiques were conceived to strengthen royal authority and to encourage military expansion against Granada.

Claudia Rückert, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Islamophobic Tendencies in the Romanesque Sculpture of Northern Spain and France?

For some time, the assumption of “Islamophobic tendencies in Romanesque Sculpture” has been discussed, especially in relation to figurative corbels. These sculptures are regarded as depicting Muslims in compromising situations, in order to affirm their image as political and religious enemies. For a non-specialist audience, the exhibition “Islam in Kathedralen – Bilder des Anti-Christen in der romanischen Skulptur” (“Islam in cathedrals – Images of the Anti-Christians in Romanesque sculpture”) established this concept suggestively, especially in light of the background of growing Islamophobia in Western countries during the last decade. Taking place in 2003/2004 at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, this exhibition was curated by the artist, photographer and scholar in comparative religion, Claudio Lange, who was also responsible for the catalogue-book published under the title “Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in der romanischen Kunst” (“The naked enemy – Islamophobia in Romanesque Art”). Lange gained substantial benefit from the museum’s authority and listed scholars in philosophy and literature as supporters. In his exhibition and on lecture tours through Germany, he propagates his ideas using suggestive evocation of examples isolated from their architectural and historical context. Although his approach remains far below any methodological standard that has been reached in the discussion of Romanesque sculpture in Art History during the last decades, art historians have largely ignored his controversial theory, even though it must have had a significant effect on the lay-audience.

My presentation is meant to be a critical answer to Lange’s ideas and will show that some of the supposedly defamatory representations cannot be understood as depictions of Muslims. Even those figures actually representing Muslims, however, can be interpreted differently, taking into account the historically documented coexistence of Christians and Muslims in Northern Spain.

Ryan Szpiech
Hermeneutical Muslims? Islam as Witness in Christian anti-Jewish Polemic

In this paper, I examine the evolution of the representation of Muslims and Islam within medieval Christian polemical writing against Jews. I argue that, following the conquest of Seville in 1248, Islam came to be perceived as less of an immediate military threat to Christian sovereignty and, correspondingly, Christian polemicists began to depict Islam not as a threat to Christian ideas, but as a fellow opponent to Judaism.

While Muslim ideas about Jesus and Mary are fiercely attacked by twelfth-century  writers such as Petrus Alfonsi and Peter the Venerable, these same ideas, ironically, came to form the basis of a Christian appeal to Islam as a “witness” to Jews of Christian ideas in the thirteenth and fourteenth. In texts such as the anti-Jewish polemics of Raymond Martini, the Qur’an itself is invoked (and even cited as a “Judeo-Arabic” text written in Hebrew characters) as “proof” of Christian doctrines concerning Jesus and Mary. In fourteenth-century texts such as the Mostrador de justicia of Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid, Islam is depicted as being  “not as bad” as Judaism, and Muslims are even described as “Nazarines.” By the middle of the century, the Dominican Alfonso Buenhombre came to represent Islam as an actual Christian ally in the missionary struggle against Jews. In his Disputatio Abutalib sarraceni et Samuelis iudei, the Muslim is fictionalized into an advocate for Christianity who eventually leads his Jewish friend to convert to Christianity. Similar arguments can be found to persist into the early fifteenth century, such as in the writings of converted bishop Pablo de Santa María, but they disappear altogether by the mid-century polemics of Alonso de Espina, suggesting that just as the emergence of this trope corresponds to the military victories over Islam in the middle of the thirteenth century, its disappearance likewise corresponds to a resurgence in military struggle against Islam in the fifteenth.

By probing further what Jeremy Cohen has named “the Muslim connection” in anti-Jewish polemic, it is possible to trace the passage of Islam within Christian writing from being a real specter on the horizon of Christendom to an imaginary conceptual tool of Christian polemical argumentation.  A close consideration of the symbolic appropriation of Islam by Christian writers reveals how Christian polemical arguments concerning Islam were by no means static, but underwent a number of critical adjustments corresponding to the evolving social relations between the three faiths.

Avinoam Shalem
Face to Face: Cordoba and Baghdad

With the emergence of terms such as global or world art history and the focus being mainly given to ideas concerning the speeding of movement and the rapid transfer of ideas and things, art historians’ interest has been radically shifted and the dynamic, unsettled and mutable character of art.

Interactions and processes of artistic translations direct the scholarly reserach in general and questions about intercultural phenomena call our attention in particular. The field of Islamic art history has been also modified and tarnsformed according to these new parameters. However the majority of studies keeping with this line of methodology mainly discuss the interaction of the Islamic worlds with their “others”, namely Europe and China. The mobility and transfer of artistic ideas, style and aestheic theories within the Islamic worlds is rarely addressed. Moreover, rivality, especially between big cities and centres, which forms specific topoi in medieval Arabic literary sources, has been scarcely applied by art historians to explain works of art.

In this paper the rivality between Cordoba and Baghdad will be highlighted. Works of art reflecting this urban competative notion between two big cultural centres of the Muslim World will be discussed. Replica, copies, translations into other media and even fakes will be addressed. But also the circulation of artistic ideas, art objects and even of specific ‘ambassadors’ of culture will be discussed in this specific context.

David Sánchez Cano
Dancing for the Corpus. Muslim and Jewish participation in courtly and religious festivals

In 1440 Princess Blanca of Navarre entered Castile on her way to marry the future Enrique IV and was lavishly received by the Count of Haro in Briviesca: é alli les fue hecho muy solemne recebimiento por todos los de la villa, sacando cada oficio su pendon é su entremes lo mejor que pudieron, con grandes danzas é muy gran gozo y alegria; é despues destos venian los Judios con la Tora, é los Moros con el Alcorán, en aquella forma que se suele hacer a los Reyes que nuevamente vienen á reynar en parte estraña; Later festivals in the 16th and 17th centuries preserved “Moorish” characteristics such as costumes (turbans, adarga shields, marlotas), entertainments such as the cañas (canes game) or specific dances (e.g. a “zambra a la morisca”, from the zimr, a folk oboe used in Northern Africa); Jewish elements less explicitly. Festivals, whether courtly, civic or religious, were supremely public spaces of representation, where social hierarchies, structures and conflicts were expressed in spatial arrangements (processions, routes of triumphal entries), in symbolic decorations (allegories, emblems, ephemeral architecture) and in highly-charged rituals (giving of the keys to a city, hand-kiss of entering princes). Religious minorities – as well as other “marginal” groups (lunatics, Roma-Sinti, prostitutes, etc.) – also regularly participated in such festivities, as occurred in Briviesca in 1440 “in that form which is usually done”. Yet such participation, while inclusive, could also be obligatory and expressed hierarchical subordination, as when the Madrid town council in 1481 ordered “que los moros e los judios saquen el dicho día, los moros sus juegos e danzas, e los judios su dança, so la mesma pena." This was on the occasion of the annual Corpus Christi procession, although religious in nature primarily a civic event, and applied to the guilds as well, under threat of a draconic fine.

My paper will examine various examples of the symbolic space of festivals and the manners in which Muslims and Jews under Christian domination occupied and were (forcibly) arranged in this space. Direct participation as well as specific festival elements such as Muslim and Jewish dances, costumes or festive practices will be studied, principally in the kingdom of Castile during the 14th and 15th centuries. This investigation is the beginning of a new project for me, extending my work on festivals to previous centuries, and with which I hope to contribute to the study of the interaction between religious communities and of the sociological facets of festivals.


Hussein Anwar Fancy
The Mercenary Mediterranean, or The Microecology of Law

Based on archival material from the Crown of Aragon Archives in Barcelona, this paper addresses the little-known history of soldier exchanges during the period of the Crusades. Over the course of the late thirteenth century, thousands of Christian and Muslim soldiers in Spain and North Africa were traded to serve in the armies of kingdoms of the other faith. Relying on treaties, contracts, and court cases in Latin, Arabic, and Romance in order to map the movements of soldiers across the Mediterranean, I ask why, how, and when these alliances occurred. Perhaps more significantly, I attempt to answer what this service may have meant to the soldiers themselves. Beyond debates of tolerance or intolerance, this reading applies Horden and Purcell’s emphasis on microecologies to questions of religious and political ideology. As such, the mercenary Mediterranean emerges a zone of multiple and competing laws and legitimacies, one in which Christian and Islamic identities were inextricably linked and mutually constituting. Put differently, I hope to argue that these soldier exchanges did not signal the collapse of religious boundaries or the triumph greed over grievance but rather served both the enforcement and creation of confessional and political boundaries during the conservative thirteenth century.


Sonja Brentjes
On the shift from faith-neutral to faith-based scholarly communities in the Islamic Middle East

The success of translating scholarly works from Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi and Sanskrit into Arabic and creating a new intellectual culture is often seen as the result of massive courtly patronage and the participation of members of all communities that existed in the Abbasid realm in this process – various Muslim, Christian and Jewish denominations as well as Zoroastrians and Sabaeans. With the increasing number of conversions to Islam, the emergence of local dynasties within the Abbasid Empire as well as independent dynasties hostile to the caliphate and the spread of educational institutions reserved exclusively for the religious majority conditions for faith-blind scholarly communities in various parts of the Islamic world altered substantively. In my paper I will describe the ways in which biographical dictionaries and historical chronicles depicted relationships between scholars of different creeds and their professional, intellectual, political and other forms of participation in the public spheres of major cities of the Middle East between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. I will ask which places different authors ascribed to religious affiliations and in which ways scholarly activities transcended them. I also will investigate the changes that courtly patronage of scholarly disciplines underwent in these four centuries and I will ask what kind of impact these changes made upon the composition of the scholarly communities sponsored by different courts.

Ana Echevarría
Representation and knowledge of Islam among Castilian Muslims: Burials and Rites

The city of Avila housed an important Muslim community from the 12th to the 16th century, which has left the most complete collection of records about Mudejars to be found in Castile for the time being. Furthermore, the extensive excavation of the remains of the Mudejar cemetery in the banks of the river Adaja has provided a wealth of funerary slabs, some of which have inscriptions.

Based in this recent information, my paper will be concerned with two of the main themes proposed by the organizers. Firstly, the endurance of Islamic patterns of burial, combined with  the appropriation of forms of art of “the other” in Islamic sacred spaces. It seems that, while the very rich Muslims living in Avila cared for their religious differentiation by means of Koranic inscriptions in their tombstones, other members of the community were buried under more simple slabs, which imitated Christian patterns, adapted to monuments which maintained the form of contemporary memorial stones found in other places in dar al-islam. In the second place, I will focus on the transmission and transformation of traditional legal models by the Islamic community living under Christian domain, traceable through the written sources.

The use of very popular legal works such as the Kitāb al-Tafrī’ by Ibn al-Ŷallāb al-Basrī (10th c.), the Risāla fī l-fiqh by Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (d. 996), and the Talqīn fī l-fiqh al-malikī, by ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bagdādī (d.  1031) places Mudejar traditions in a more developed cultural environment than it had been thought commonly by scholars. It also means that their use of Arabic –at least passive knowledge, i.e., reading- by the learned elite was not completely lost until well into the 15th century. This is also proved by recent study of the private records of their meetings, written by their own scribes instead of Christian ones. It must be concluded that interaction had strange ways of showing itself, and that there was not one single space free from its effects. Sacred spaces such as cemeteries were the places where Muslims could show privately their religious identity without fear of being harrassed, and nevertheless they chose to be represented by slabs which could be part of a Christian monument. On the other hand, they used Christian legislation and courts when it suited them, while at the same time they maintained their own legal system alive for other matters. Definitely, convivencia was a mere effect of convenience and, why not, fashion.


Stefania Pastore
From popular to intellectual averroism: the "Marrano" Diego Hurtado de Mendoza

My paper examines the circulation of forms of skepticism and tolerance in Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century.

The movement that we shall term “popular averroism” acquired, over this period, different and interesting facets, ranging from the deep-rooted belief that “no hay mas que vivir y morir”, which enjoyed a rather widespread popularity, to the belief that Salvation could be attained through each Law, and to the ideas of double or common revelations. Behind this variety of solutions lay the need to compare the substance of different Laws and discover solutions which could reconcile the simultaneous presence of three separate cultures and favour their everyday coexistence even in the monoconfessional Spain of the Inquisition.

By presenting a series of examples garnered from Inquisitorial documents, I will attempt a mapping of these different attitudes and try to show how they were reflected in the thought of an intellectual of the caliber of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Born and bred in the Granada of the “Capitolaciones” and deeply attracted by Averroè and Arab culture, Mendoza had studied in the Italian universities at the time of the disputes concerning Pomponazzi and the mortality of the soul. He returned to Italy as Imperial ambassador in 1539, first in Venice and later in Rome and he also represented Charles V in the difficult negotiations of the Council of Trent and in the attempts at a conciliation with the Lutherans. An eclectic patron and a passionate bibliophile and collector, Mendoza was an important reference for non-conformist and dissident intellectuals in Italy during the 1540s. He participated vigorously in the debates surrounding Aristotelianism in Padua, he defended his belief in Averroism and he contributed to the appreciation of Sextus Empiricus and the spread of skepticism in Europe. In Italy and in Europe he represented the ideal of a different and plural Spain, claiming to that tradition of Spanish tolerance which had developed in the mixed communities of “moros” and “marranos” and by recalling that important lesson which the numerous failures of the Spanish Inquisition should have taught about the uselessness of coercing consciences. By the beginning of the fifties his views may well have appeared entirely outmoded and he himself an uncomfortable figure; his brilliant diplomatic career was brusquely interrupted by Charles V who relieved him of all responsibilities, thus giving a decisively conservative turn to his political action in Europe and in Italy.


Sabine Schmidtke
David b. Joshua Maimonides’ (fl. ca. 1335-1410) Commentary on Najm al-Dīn al-Katibiī’s (d. 657/1276) al-Risala al-Shamsiyya

In the medieval world of Islam Muslims, Jews and Christians constituted a unique cultural and intellectual commonality. They shared Arabic as their common language and often read the same books, so that a continuous, multi-dimensional exchange of ideas, texts, and forms of discourse was the norm rather than the exception. With respect to rational theology and philosophy, this has been amply demonstrated for the medieval Iberian Peninsula as well as for the intellectual history of the Eastern world of Islam, particularly for the 9th through 11th centuries CE.

The proposed presentation will focus on a case of Jewish-Muslim intellectual commonality from a later period that has been little explored in either Judaic or Islamic Studies, namely a commentary on Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-shamsiyya by David b. Joshua, a late descendant of the famous Moses Maimonides. The commentary, of which several fragments are preserved in the Firkovitch Collection, St. Petersburg, is heavily based on several earlier commentaries on the Shamsiyya, such as those by the ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325) and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 766/1364), and is replete with references to a large number of Muslim philosophical and logical writings that can be termed canonical for the period. As such, the document under investigation –which has so far escaped the attention of those (few) scholars who have studied David b. Joshua-- is an impressive example that shows how deeply Jewish scholars at the time were immersed into the authoritative Muslim philosophical world of thought.


Günther Schlee (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Ethnic and Religious Differences in the Study of Conflict and Social Integration: Exploration of a Comparative Perspective with a Focus on Convivencia Elsewhere and the Other Way Round

Social systems do not exist in isolation but as parts of larger systems. They are however, discernible by a dense web of internal relationships which justifies a special focus on them as separate sub-systems of larger units. Apart from studying such sub-systems in their interaction, they can be treated as separate cases and compared with each other. Integration in such social systems in this sense is not necessarily peaceful. War is also a social system characterized by regularized and habitualized forms of interaction. Into such a social system one can be integrated as a member of one of the groups in conflict, as an ally or as an enemy. In these processes of integration discourses about identity and difference play a great role. Somewhat paradoxically, sameness often is found in the context of conflictual relations (competition) while difference is often emphasized and maintained in association with peaceful and cooperative relations (specialization, exchange, avoiding competition).

After a general typology of forms of integration, the focus is narrowed and "convivencia-like" social systems are examined. These are characterized by religious heterogeneity with Islam being one of the components. "Convivencia elsewhere" means: comparable to convivencia but outside Spain. "Convivencia the other way round" means that also cases in which the Muslims are not the politically dominant symbionts are considered. This will allow the inclusion of cases from the colonial period, in which Christians or "Westerners" played the dominant part. Examples will reach from Mogul India to colonial West Africa, but the Sudan in different periods is treated as a somewhat privileged example.

The aim of the paper is to open perspectives and to raise questions. No final analysis of even one case will be possible in the framework of the presentation.


Mercè Comes, Mónica Herrera
Nautical Cartography as a Means of Intercultural Exchange: Some Mediterranean Chartmakers as Intermediaries between East and West

The aim of this paper is to explore the spaces of convivencia in the Mediterranean area, as far as the tradition of mapmaking (especially nautical charts) between the 12th and the 16th century is concerned. We will focus on the concept of convivencia (coexistence) across the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the main Mediterranean ports, as well as their funduqs and Consulados del Mar, became privileged spaces of interaction and influence between Muslim, Jewish and Christian chartmakers. Furthermore, also seafarers, traders, pilgrims, emigrants, and so on, contributed to the circulation of sea charts from different “schools”, mainly Majorcan, Italian and Islamic.

To date, only the role played by the Italians and the Majorcan chartmakers has been fully documented, while their Islamic counterparts have been often neglected. As we will see, the study of the charts provides extraordinary visual evidence which will be analysed in this paper in combination with the historical data.


Henrik Karge
Image and Space in Christian Andalusia. Ecclesiastical Buildings and Holy Images in the Neighbourhood of Islam

Through the 13th to 15th centuries, most parts of Southern Spain were under Castilian rule, but the Muslim kingdom of Granada was still felt as a threat to the Christian territories in spite of its relatively modest real power. The persisting frontier situation contributed to the emergence of a highly militant Christian society in Andalusia, especially in the 15th century.

Do we find reflections of this militarisation of the Christian society in the field of art and architecture?

The paper intends to give a comparative overview over the church buildings of late medieval Andalusia and their liturgical furnishings, particularly the pictorial images, in order to analyze their specific relationship to the artistic sphere of the neighbouring Islamic states. One of the most remarkable results consists in the evidence for a surprising autonomy of the artistic genres until the middle of the 15th century. So we find – especially in comparison with Italy which produced most of the artistic prototypes – very few traces of comprehensive pictorial programmes in the churches, but a characteristic tendency to isolated images representing the Virgin Mary in most of the cases. Many of them were worshipped as miraculous images in the tradition of Byzantine icons – and their legendary origins were connected with the struggle against the Muslims. A good example of such a holy image is the painting of Nuestra Señora de la Antigua in the cathedral of Seville which became an important model of miraculous images of the Virgin in the New World.

The ecclesiastical buildings of Andalusia kept to prototypes of European Gothic architecture, like ribbed vaults, which were used in an economical but effective way. Clock towers and rose windows had to demonstrate the Christian dedication of the buildings. The decorative systems adorning many of the walls and vaults with geometrical ornaments, on the other hand, were executed by special craftsmen and clearly derived from the ornamental traditions of the Islamic neighbours.

Because of the autonomy of artistic genres – exceptional in the European context – we find in late medieval Andalusian churches visual testimonies of convivencia as well as of militant religious zeal. The paper tries to develop approaches to a systematic explanation of this unique interrelationship.


Marina Rustow
Language, Power, and Cultural Transmission: Sicilian Jews and the Polyglot Phenomenon

The Jews of Sicily continued to speak and write Arabic for four centuries after the Normans conquered the island and ousted its Arab rulers (ca. 1060 to 1091) and for two and a half centuries after Frederick II expelled Sicily's last Muslims (1246). Sicilian Jews thus came to form an important link in the transmission of Arabic learning to Europe, as demonstrated by the fact that Hebrew transcriptions of Arabic scientific and philosophical texts came to form the core of many humanists' libraries. But surprisingly, the number of sources attesting to a vibrant community of Arabophone Jews in Sicily—both notarial records and copies of learned works—increases the later one goes, concentrating in the fifteenth century and ending only with the expulsion of the Jews themselves in 1492–93.

Those sources provide clues about polyglot practices that shed light on how multilingualism, translation, and cultural transmission served particular social functions in the medieval Mediterranean. Modern presuppositions about language often derive from tacitly nationalist conceptions of the relationship between language and community. But even if one jettisons those presuppositions, one must still explain why Sicilian Jews preserved Arabic for so long. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the multilingualism practiced in Sicily was a special case not just for the Jews but for everyone: the Normans (1060–1198) continued producing legal documents in Arabic, Greek and Latin; Frederick II (1198–1250) filled his court and chancery with polyglots and translators. But this context explains the survival of Judeo-Arabic in Sicily when Muslims still lived on the island, not why the evidence multiplies only when the Jews were Sicily's sole custodians of Arabic.

The paper proposed here begins with the premise that the survival of Arabic in 13th, 14th, and 15th century Sicily was sui generis, both in comparison with Arabic on the Iberian peninsula and in consideration of premodern Jewish languages such as Ladino and Yiddish. I propose two related explanations. After 1254, Jews used Judeo-Arabic for two main purposes: legal procedure and scientific and philosophical scholarship. The first was a function of the legal culture and administrative organization of the Jewish community, which had a long tradition of Judeo-Arabic diplomatic; and beginning in 1282, the Aragonese monarchs offered Jewish communities sweeping powers of communal self-regulation. The legal and linguistic independence of medieval Sicilian Jews must be seen as the effect of specific state policies, not as signs of some presumed Jewish marginality. Second, the Jews' role as transmitters of learned works suggests that preserving Arabic offered them specific social opportunities and forms of power in a polyglot world. Both hypotheses run in opposition to the two prevailing scholarly views: that Arabic made Sicilian Jews culturally distinctive and thus socially isolated, or, conversely, that the Jews' distinctiveness made them socially isolated enough to preserve a fossilized Arabic. Neither view explains the survival of Sicilian Judeo-Arabic in a way that accounts for the evidence, which suggests that Sicilian Jews, especially literate ones, preserved Arabic not as a cause or effect of social isolation but as an instrument of social power and cultural mediation.


Matthias M. Tischler
Spaces of “convivencia“ or Spaces of “polemics“? Tracking Manuscripts of Christian Anti-Muslim Traditions in the Intellectual Landscape of the Iberian Peninsula, 9th to 13th Centuries

The title of my paper suggests a twofold reading: The traditional reading of social and religious history from the left to the right confirms the widely accepted opinion that intercultural and interreligious encounters and exchanges in societies of ‚convivencia’ necessarily produce strategies of ‚polemics’ for constructing self-identity in the mirror of ‚the other’. But what about the more unconventional reading of modern theological and philosophical studies from the right to the left which wonders whether contextualising the manuscript transmission of interreligious polemics allows the reconstruction of concrete social spaces of ‚convivencia’? As one can detect from this question, there lies a multilayered concept of ‚space’ in the background of my paper: On the one hand it deals with ‚social spaces’ of daily encounters and exchanges between the members of the two monotheistic religious systems, we nowadays call ‚Christianity’ and ‚Islam’, as reconstructed by social history and comparative history of religions. But on the other hand my presentation operates with ‚textual spaces’ of Christian intellectual perception of the ‚Muslim other’ in their historical contexts of production and use.

Until today there has been no attempt of a critical survey of the specific intellectual Christian landscape of anti-Muslim polemics transmitted in the manuscripts of the Iberian Peninsula between the Early and High Middle Ages. My paper will therefore contextualise firstly the antihagiographical production, that means polemical lives and legends of Muhammad, transmitted as individual texts or as traditions integrated into the chronicle production from the Christian North of the Iberian Peninsula (Asturia, León and Navarra) between the 9th and 13th centuries. Secondly, my presentation will concentrate on the more elaborated theological and philosophical texts of polemics, which originate especially from Aragón in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The intention of my paper is to show how contextualising the Iberian manuscript tradition of Christian anti-Muslim polemics allows the refinement of describing our landscape of social and religious ‚convivencia’ of daily life. From this perspective the sensibilisation of modern scholarship for spaces and their medialisation will finally contribute to recover the cultural and religious meaning of Américo Castro’s original concept of ‚convivencia’.