(no subject)
In the bookelfe Reading More Nonfiction Initiative, the one I am probably happiest to have read so far is Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.
("That is not beach reading!" said my mom, when she saw me pull it out in Puerto Rico. "Yes, but I want to read it anyway!" I said.
She probably wishes she had succeeded in talking me out of it, since I spend the next hour or so sitting up every ten or fifteen minutes and going "HEY LISTEN isn't this cool!" while the rest of my family stretched out on beach chairs and tried to ignore me.)
The book covers the history of Andalucia - a region of Spain that was, for a long time, predominantly Muslim, with a large Jewish population, before fractioning into a set of variously Muslim and Christian city-states - from 786 to 1492, when the last of the Muslims and Jews were exiled from Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain. The history is fascinating, though almost certainly too idealistic at times in its examination of the 'culture of tolerance.' Menocal is writing with a clear goal in mind, and you can tell that sometimes she's skipping straight to the super-optimistic view - so occasionally you have to grain-of-salt the history, but then again, I can't think of any history you don't have to remember to liberally season in that way.
Anyways, what I found really, really cool about the book is the examination of the intellectual and linguistic cultures and the impact each had on the other. There's a chapter that starts out with a quote from a Christian scholar freaking out about the degeneracy of youth these days, because all the Christian kids in Muslim-ruled Andalucia are learning Arabic so they can go hang out at *gasp* THE LIBRARY. And LEARN THINGS. Kids these days! Which, admittedly, I find sort of hilarious, but it also leads off into a really cool discussion of secular and religious languages, and the development of Hebrew and Castilian as secular languages following the Arabic model, since there were so many literary works published in Arabic.
(Along more shallow lines, I also learned the brilliant factoid that medieval religious-celebrity-scandal power couple Heloise and Abelard named their kid Astrolabe, after the scientific instrument. Thus clearly kicking off a CELEBRITY BABY NAMING REIGN OF TERROR for millenia to come!)
("That is not beach reading!" said my mom, when she saw me pull it out in Puerto Rico. "Yes, but I want to read it anyway!" I said.
She probably wishes she had succeeded in talking me out of it, since I spend the next hour or so sitting up every ten or fifteen minutes and going "HEY LISTEN isn't this cool!" while the rest of my family stretched out on beach chairs and tried to ignore me.)
The book covers the history of Andalucia - a region of Spain that was, for a long time, predominantly Muslim, with a large Jewish population, before fractioning into a set of variously Muslim and Christian city-states - from 786 to 1492, when the last of the Muslims and Jews were exiled from Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain. The history is fascinating, though almost certainly too idealistic at times in its examination of the 'culture of tolerance.' Menocal is writing with a clear goal in mind, and you can tell that sometimes she's skipping straight to the super-optimistic view - so occasionally you have to grain-of-salt the history, but then again, I can't think of any history you don't have to remember to liberally season in that way.
Anyways, what I found really, really cool about the book is the examination of the intellectual and linguistic cultures and the impact each had on the other. There's a chapter that starts out with a quote from a Christian scholar freaking out about the degeneracy of youth these days, because all the Christian kids in Muslim-ruled Andalucia are learning Arabic so they can go hang out at *gasp* THE LIBRARY. And LEARN THINGS. Kids these days! Which, admittedly, I find sort of hilarious, but it also leads off into a really cool discussion of secular and religious languages, and the development of Hebrew and Castilian as secular languages following the Arabic model, since there were so many literary works published in Arabic.
(Along more shallow lines, I also learned the brilliant factoid that medieval religious-celebrity-scandal power couple Heloise and Abelard named their kid Astrolabe, after the scientific instrument. Thus clearly kicking off a CELEBRITY BABY NAMING REIGN OF TERROR for millenia to come!)