this class, btw, is my later medieval spain seminar

[bedlamsbard]

OMG. This class, or at least the reading for this class, is so relevant to my interests and I didn't even see it coming. IT IS SO RELEVANT TO TELMARINE NARNIA. IT HAS ALL THE RELEVANCE. FROM CASPIAN I TO TIRIAN.

Listen to this:

We are accustomed to think of the arts, of language and literature, as being irrevocably attached to the religious and political context in which they were created. So that, from the beginning, linguistic or artistic forms that go on to cross political or religious borders seem anomalous. We have come to call decorative traditions like those we see at Palos "influence," which suggests self-contained cultures, Christian and Islamic, defined by the interests of their own political and religious hierarchies, half consciously receiving exotic words, foods, or artistic motifs and styles across clear and defended frontiers. But that is no more tenable than its mirror image, the notion that there existed on the Iberian Peninsula a single cultural world, in which political religious frontiers evaporated in the face of a shared language of forms. Both of these points of view suggest that culture is stable and fixed, particular to a time frame and a group of people. The first assumes that there is an Islamic culture and a Christian culture that are discrete, closed systems that only interact as separate unified entities. The second assumes a single artistic and literary culture detached from politics and religion as if the active intervention of religious and political tensions would make a hybrid culture impossible. It is in fact the shared assumption that religious difference, if allowed its potential to polarize peoples, would make cultural hybridity impossible that links these ostensibly opposed ideas.

But what if, in the Iberian Peninsula, religion, politics, language, and art never quite align? What if, like electrons, they revolve in different constellations, forming and reforming new bodies, each with different properties, evanescent attractions and repulsions? And as with electrons, one can never quite measure the location and movement of these parts of history at the same time. They are dynamic; intervention freezes the action. The Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages might be seen as scores of kingdoms attempting, through war, diplomacy, and law, to stop the action; to create the illusion of a stable entity in the face of kaleidoscopic change, stimulated even more intensely by the mulitple kinds of difference the peninsula offered.

...

Culture can bear the cherished scar, the suppressed memory of a civilization's unacknowledged parentage; it can coexist with religious difference and even with ideologies of dominance and opposition. The path by which tenty-century Castile traveled to fifteenth-century Spain was not a straight one, occasionally crossed by various enriching "bridges" and "intersections" with "Islamic" and "Judaic" cultures, as it is often represented. Perhaps Castilian culture did not develop along a path at all, but instead in a series of spaces -- castles, cities, battlefields, courts, mosques, synagogues, and cloisters -- spaces destroyed and redrawn scores of times over the centuries. It was formed from the competition, domination, envy, and assimilation that occurred in those places shared with different Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Far from a juggernaut driven by the force of reconquest, Castile was the product of its own countless tensions, desires, and struggles for authority.

-- Dodds, Jerrilyn D., Maria Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.


I JUST HAVE ALL THESE FEELINGS. I want to write about NAAAAAARNIAAAA. (Man, I think I posted something similar to this back in 2008, only that time, I was going through my other big Narnia theme moment -- the making of legends and identity, I think it probably had something to do with Thermopylae. Now I'm just, "I want to talk about the CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE OUT OF HETEROGENEITY." Or...something, anyway.)

Okay, now I actually have to read the rest of the book.

Comments

[cofax7]

Oh, very cool!

[bedlamsbard]

I just have all these thinky thoughts about post- and pre- Caspianic Telmarine Narnia.