Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay

292 Pages·2002·1.14 MB·English

by  Roger Collins

Medieval Spain

Medieval Spain
Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence
Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay
Edited by
Roger Collins
and
Anthony Goodman
Editonal matter and selection © Roger Collins and Anthony
Goodman 2002
Chapters 1–14 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-79387-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Medieval Spain : culture, conflict, and coexistence/edited by Roger Collins and
Anthony Goodman
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Spain—Civilization—711–1516. I. Collins, Roger, 1949- II. Goodman,
Anthony, 1936-
DP99 .M34 2002
946’.02—dc21
2002022085
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
Contents
Introduction: Angus MacKay and the History of
Later Medieval Spain vii
Roger Collins
A Bibliography of Angus MacKay’s contributions to
the subject xvii
Anthony Goodman
Notes on the Contributors xxii
1 Continuity and Loss in Medieval Spanish Culture:
the Evidence of MS Silos, Archivo Monástico 4 1
Roger Collins
2 Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus
and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300 23
Simon Barton
3 Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidasof Alfonso X the Learned:
a Background Perspective 46
Robert I. Burns
4 Trading with the ‘Other’: Economic Exchanges between
Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Late Medieval Northern Castile 63
Teofilo F. Ruiz
5 Catalina of Lancaster, the Castilian Monarchy and Coexistence 79
Ana Echevarria
6 Alonso de Cartagena’s Libros de Seneca: Disentangling
the Manuscript Tradition 123
N.G. Round
7 Laus Urbium: Praise of Two Andalusian Cities in
the Mid-Fifteenth Century 148
Brian Tate
8 Peace and War on the Frontier of Granada. Jaén and
the Truce of 1476 160
Manuel González Jiménez
9 Songbooks as Isabelline Propaganda: the Case of OñateandEgerton 176
Dorothy Severin
v
vi Contents
10 Court Poets at Play: Zaragoza, 1498 183
Ian Macpherson
11 Conversion in Córdoba and Rome: Francisco Delicado’s
La Lozana Andaluza 202
John Edwards
12 The Making of Isabel de Solis 225
José Enrique López de Coca
13 The Conquest of Granada in Nineteenth-Century
English and American Historiography 242
Richard Hitchcock
Introduction: Angus MacKay and the
History of Later Medieval Spain
Roger Collins
Amongst the leading British hispanists of recent decades, Angus Mackay is
exceptional, not so much because he was trained as a historian as in the fact
that he has passed his entire scholarly career in university departments of
History; principally that of the University of Edinburgh. For most readers this
may hardly seem a paradox. Where else, it might be asked, would you expect
to find a historian of Later Medieval Spain, especially one of such eminence?
However, it has been one of the peculiarities of British universities that very
few history departments have felt able to include hispanists in their ranks. In
consequence, a surprisingly large number of the most outstanding British his-
torians of Later Medieval Spain have made academic homes for themselves in
departments of Spanish language and literature or of Hispanic Studies (that is,
including Portuguese). Put another way, this has meant that many of the best
known scholars of Later Medieval Spanish literature in the British Isles are by
training historians, and are as happy to devote themselves to historical as to
literary researches. This, it may be thought, has resulted in a very fruitful
fusion of two disciplines that ought to be closely linked, but that in many
other areas and periods of cultural study are all too often kept artificially sepa-
rated. It could be argued that this has been one of the great strengths of British
medieval hispanism over the past half century or more.
This may seem a round-about way of starting an encomium, but the partic-
ular circumstances described, which have affected the nature of the study of
Later Medieval Spain in British universities, may help to explain something of
the career, writings, and achievement of Angus MacKay. Thus, it should be
added that the reasons why departments of history have not found much
room for medieval hispanists are not the result of prejudice, so much as a
reflection of the limited role that any Spanish dimension, with few excep-
tions, has been allowed to play in most British school and university syllabus-
es. This in turn reflects something of the dead hand of a tradition that,
unthinkingly, regarded southern Britain (excluding Wales), northern France,
the Rhineland, and Italy from Rome northwards as the only parts of medieval
Europe in which significant events occurred in the medieval centuries, or
which had worthwhile contributions to make to the development of
European civilization.
To this may be added another, more pragmatic factor, in the form of the lim-
ited availability of works in English on the history of Spain in this period.
vii
viii Angus MacKay and Later Medieval Spain
However, it is one of the achievements of Angus MacKay and his generation of
hispanists that this second reason is no longer a valid one. There now exist
more books and articles written in English on Later (and Earlier) Medieval
Spain, as well as English translations of original Latin and Spanish texts, than
there are comparable items to be found that relate to the history of France or
Germany in the same period. One consequence of this is that there are now
really no excuses for Spanish medieval (and modern) history not to take its
appropriate place in the curriculum.
The situation outlined here so briefly, if perhaps a little provocatively, might
have been expected to have resulted in something of a chicken and egg
quandary. If little or no Spanish medieval history was being taught in Britain,
how would anyone become a Spanish medieval historian, and thus write the
books that should make it possible for Spanish medieval history to become
teachable? There must be strong reasons or particular circumstances that
enabled potential historians of Spain to defy the logic of this argument, and
emerge as fully fledged hispanists. So, it is not unreasonable to wonder how
Angus came to be the kind of scholar that he is.
In his particular case, it would at least be fair to suggest that his birth in Peru
in 1939, where his father was then working for the British Council, may have
given him an interest in, and certainly provided a close acquaintance with
Hispanic language and culture, even if not of a medieval kind. In particular,
the passing of several formative years in South America equipped him with a
more than enviable command of the Spanish language, not just academically
but also at the level of the street. To this would be added in the 1960s a thor-
ough submersion in the Spanish of Spain, while he was there carrying out the
research for his doctoral thesis. In subsequent years his unselfconscious
blending of the argot of the Lima back streets of his youth with the high
speech of Castilian polite discourse would provide ‘understandably a source of
great entertainment to his peninsular Spanish friends.’
As will be clear, while his youthful experiences and linguistic opportunities
may have given him a leaning towards matters Hispanic, an undergraduate
course in history in a British university in the early 1960s would not have
done much to strengthen or sustain it. Here, however, Edinburgh, where he
arrived in 1960, was a more than fortunate choice of university, as the influ-
ence of Denys Hay, who was for many years the holder of the chair of medieval
history, proved decisive. It was with his active encouragement that in 1963
Angus went on to undertake a doctoral thesis under his supervision on
Economy and Society in Castile in the Fifteenth Century. As a Renaissance scholar,
Denys Hay’s own research interests were primarily directed towards Italy, and
focused on cultural and intellectual history far more than economic. So his
willingness to direct Angus’s attention towards the relatively little studied
kingdom of Castile, and to support his research on its economic history, repre-
sented academic philanthropy of no mean order; something its beneficiary
warmly acknowledged.
Angus MacKay and Later Medieval Spain ix
That this thesis would involve extended periods of work in Spanish state
and ecclesiastical archives was inevitable. Such labours also form a right of
passage that bonds together hispanists of many generations; all of whom have
experienced the many and various eccentricities of Spanish archives and
archivists, especially of the ecclesiastical sort. The exchange of tales of the dif-
ficulties encountered, and how, in most cases, they were sustained or over-
come still provides a favourite topic of conversation when and wherever two
or more medieval hispanists are gathered together. While the ‘horror’ stories
are the most fun, it has to be admitted that there are some Spanish archives
that open for sensible lengths of time, which is to say, for more than an hour a
day, and some archivists indeed exist who welcome rather than repel
researchers. Angus’s published expressions of thanks to the custodians of the
municipal archives of Burgos and Seville and of the cathedral archive of the
former city, as well as the thesis based upon the documents in their care, may
reflect experiences of the latter sort, but there were no doubt many bizarre and
eccentric moments as well.
While no one of a hasty disposition or who is addicted to punctuality would
long survive as a hispanist – the difficulties in tracking down elusive custodi-
ans, the odd hours, and the periodic chaos of the archives and libraries have to
be taken as a source of delight for their sheer Spanishness rather than become
a cause for agitation or rage – the political complexion of the Iberian peninsu-
la in the mid-1960s can hardly have been congenial to Angus. Some foreign
researchers may at the time, for religious or political reasons, have found the
Franco regime positively congenial, while others may have been more inter-
ested in their own work than in the social context in which it was being car-
ried out. It is impossible for Angus to have belonged to the former category
and highly improbable that he fell into the latter.
While it would never have done, not least for the sake of his work and for
that of his growing band of Spanish friends, for Angus to have been expelled
from Spain or refused reentry into the country, he was able to give freer rein to
his own radical sympathies in his research and publications, while at the same
time breaking new ground in his chosen subject. That his initial chronological
preference, to which he has largely remained faithful, was for the fifteenth
century may have originally resulted from a wider interest in that period while
an undergraduate, but it was also the perfect choice for someone not in step
with the very conservative ideology that was not only that of the Franco
regime of 1939 to 1975, but which was also for a much longer period the dom-
inant one in Spanish medieval historiography.
Essentially, in an interpretation that acquired canonical status thanks to the
publications of an academically dominant group of literary and historical
scholars in the early twentieth century, the so-called ‘Generation of 1898’,
Spanish medieval history came to be equated completely with that of Castile,
and the promotion of strong centralizing government became the criterion by
which individuals and whole periods in the Hispanic past had to be judged.