1. Simon Doubleday: Congratulations on your new book! There is already quite a buzz about it. Can you say something about why you chose the term “ambivalence” for the subtitle?
Jerrilynn Dodds: Yes, that word was quite important to me as I wrote. The book explores specific artistic interactions between Christian and Muslim artists, patrons, and communities over seven centuries on the Iberian peninsula. So it confronts the popular discourse regarding religious encounters on the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages, which tends to toggle between assertions of extraordinary understanding between religious groups on one hand, or irreconcilable struggles between them on the other. From the start, it is important to remember that these two alternatives existed simultaneously: at the same time that artistic languages of expression reflected encounters between different religious groups, both Muslims and Christians often ardently sought to perform the illusion that their religions defined separate, inviolate identities. Cross-confessional encounters were ubiquitous in political, social, and economic life, and profoundly present in material culture, so the struggle to achieve a pure cultural identity founded on faith was never possible, however much it might have been desired. The “ambivalence” the book is located in this tension, revealed in works of art and architecture as patrons and communities sought to assert the transcendence of their faith, while they were, at the same time, irrevocably rooted in rich visual cultures reflecting multiple artistic languages: forms and styles that had long promiscuously crossed confessional lines, and could not be contained.
Two alternatives existed simultaneously: at the same time that artistic languages of expression reflected encounters between different religious groups, both Muslims and Christians often ardently sought to perform the illusion that their religions defined separate, inviolate identities.
SD: I like that word “promiscuous”: it suggests an entanglement of abundant natural growth: a wild garden of culture! In your book, though, you reject a particular term for cultural exchanges that you used in Arts of Intimacy (your collaboration with Maria Menocal and Abigail Balbale) — “hybridity”— in favor of the term “transculturation.” In Visual Histories, you suggest that “hybridity” may involve some problematic assumptions. Can you say more about why you now consider this term so perilous?
JD: I like your image “wild garden of culture.” But yes, I now see transculturation as the most productive term for exploring the transformations in material culture that accompany encounters and exchanges, though I have sympathy for some of the reasons why hybridity is favored. Transculturation has the advantage of not getting one entangled in the implicit hierarchy of “hybridity,” which implies the existence of a normative “pure” (non-hybrid) art. And I think it moves beyond the bipolar interpretive structure that hybridity invites, which simplifies the conditions of these encounters a bit too much. The term transculturation also steers clear of hybridity’s biological and genetic resonances. Advocates for the use of hybridity point to its utility in bearing witness to the unequal power relationships between groups. And indeed, it is essential not to romanticize transcultural subjects as reifications of an ideal, or to simplify the meaning of their seemingly inclusive visual language (as still often happens when people use the term “convivencia”). The multiple artistic threads read in a transcultural object cannot be assumed to be evidence of toleration or unity. So, I think that we need to be careful to view the formation of transcultural works within shifting social and political frameworks that are often imposed in the name of religion, studying their mobile cultural identities without erasure of the presence of the multiple subjects involved, noting the constraints and agency surrounding their production.
I now see transculturation as the most productive term for exploring the transformations in material culture that accompany encounters and exchanges, though I have sympathy for some of the reasons why hybridity is favored.
2. SD: Yes, these identities are very mobile and fluid. In fact, you insist on the complexity and uniqueness of every cultural interaction between Christians and Muslims in medieval Iberia, and you write: “If we were to assume that the presence of Muslims on the peninsula entitled us to treat these divergent centuries and geographies as a theoretical whole, it would relegate our analysis to a kind of naïve rehearsal of a medieval idea”. Are you alluding specifically to the idea of Reconquest? Or more broadly to what you memorably call the “tired medieval bipolar opposition engrained in the Euro-American collective conscious” (105).
JD: Ah, thank you, I was speaking of the broader idea, the “tired medieval bipolar opposition…” One of the themes that resurfaces from time to time in the book is our subconscious presumption that Europe developed as an intrinsically Christian place into which an interesting “diversity” is periodically injected. This makes the Iberian Peninsula into a sort of fetishized case study; it fuels our need to offer special explanations for what we view as an exotic and incongruous situation. I think that this assumption is probably founded on the notion that an uncontested Christian political and cultural dominion was the framework within which the history and cultures of the “West” evolved. As long as we imagine that a multi-confessional medieval society is an aberrant intellectual problem that needs to be managed, we are witlessly channeling the goals of the reformed papacy, which attempted to define Europe in opposition to Islam under its aegis. This is particularly interesting when we think of inclusions and exclusions from the canon of Romanesque architecture, for instance, both on the Iberian peninsula and outside of it.
3. SD: Talking of the papacy, when I first heard the Slade lectures in which this book is based, I loved the line in which you suggest that “the idea of territorial “recuperation” was a rhetorical device developed by Rome to restrain Iberian kings from acting like Iberian kings”. (I still do!). How long do you think Iberian kings continued to behave in this irritating way?
JD: Oh, if only they still would!
4. SD: Haha! I suppose some modern kings have proven irritating for altogether different reasons. But to return to medieval Iberia: can we talk of a common aesthetic vocabulary? To the extent that we can do so, did this common vocabulary (or culture?) cross beyond the visual arts into – say – the arts of ruling or the more broadly social arts of co-existence?
JD: There are certainly moments in which patrons or collectives of different religions share visual languages of expression, and in which arts originally associated with a polity ruled by Muslims become part of the expressive language of a kingdom ruled by Christians or the reverse: think of the encounters and exchanges found in the Alhambra, the Alcazar in Seville, the synagogue of Samuel Ha-Levi and the monastery of Tordesillas. But of course, one of the things I very much wish to emphasize in this book, is the particular nature of each of these cases. We cannot talk of a stable artistic vocabulary in Medieval Iberia. This is not because we are dealing with different religions– but it is rather because we are talking about dozens of polities, communities, territories and cities; scores of social and political arrangements constantly in flux, ranging over seven centuries at different corners of a vast peninsula. The changes in patronage, in political, cultural and social relationships are kaleidoscopic (as Thomas Glick so memorably put it), and the meanings of the arts produced under these different circumstances are constantly changing as well. But that, of course is part of the thrill of working in this place.
We are talking about dozens of polities, communities, territories and cities; scores of social and political arrangements constantly in flux, ranging over seven centuries at different corners of a vast peninsula.
SD: Absolutely. I suppose even shared cultural vocabularies—and their nuances and resonances—change radically over time and place, much like linguistic vocabularies. And on the subject of changing meanings, I was delighted to see that you insist — as I have done too! — that the term “convivencia” (“living together,” but often used with idealized overtones) did not mean (for Américo Castro, or in Spanish) an ideal state of Edenic harmony. Have Anglophone scholars sometimes been barking up the wrong tree, using this term as a simplistic foil to their own ideas, and distorting Castro’s own complexity?
JD: I think you are right… there is a tendency to dine out on debunking “convivencia”. In a way, those who flog that poor lifeless horse are also engaged in its serial resurrection, because they find it so hard to let go.
SD: Rocinante rides again!
JD: Of course, the romanticized “convivencia” needs still to be dismissed in popular and tourist culture; I think in a scholarly sense it was neatly dispatched in a state of the question by Maya Soifer Irish in the JMIS some years ago. But as you have said, we also need to remember that the concept as envisioned by Castro was not responsible for that romantic version: he did not propose a utopian world of interconfessional harmony. Indeed, he saw Christians, Jews and Muslims as “forced to live with the other two at the same time it passionately desired their extermination.” The impact, in his eyes, was profound, but more often than not ambivalent, fueling not only the sharing of cultural forms, but also a resistant religious identity as well.
SD: Yes: and, in his view, a kind of existential cultural insecurity.
JD: Ah, yes! The problem for me lies above all in his assumption of uniquely sectarian categories of identity, which limited the complexity of his interpretations. Identity was far more complex and layered.
5. SD: Writing about the Great Mosque of Córdoba, you observe that “The presence of a congregational mosque, where the Muslim community joined for prayer on Fridays, was an essential first step in establishing a colonial presence in the city”. Later, you also talk about the Cluniac order as having “something like a colonial presence”, and refer to “Castilian urban colonial policy”. You demythologize Alfonso X, referring to his “expropriative cultural colonialism” (and I couldn’t agree more!). Do you think we can essentially envision medieval Iberia as the arena for competing forms of colonialism? Is “ambivalence” perhaps intrinsic to colonial presences?
JD: Yes, I do think that ambivalence is intrinsic to colonial presences, but I also think it is present in situations in which you might not so readily expect it. Ambivalence is present in forms from Umayyad Cordoba, and in the arts of Christian monasteries built under the rule of Christian kings from Leon and Navarre, for instance. And ambivalence is a powerful agent in the paintings of the Alhambra, which take on a figural language shared with Castile and Aragon, though their message is one of deep political and religious defiance.
Ambivalence is a powerful agent in the paintings of the Alhambra, which take on a figural language shared with Castile and Aragon, though their message is one of deep political and religious defiance.
6. SD: I think your vision of eleventh-century Iberia resonates with the line of argument that the late Bernard F. Reilly and I developed in our recent book on León and Galicia under Queen Sancha and King Fernando: that is, we reject the idea that this was an age dominated by religious binaries or the triumphant subjection of Muslim ta’ifa rulers to a resurgent Christianity and instead argue in favor of geopolitical pragmatism. Would you agree with this view?
JD: I agree wholeheartedly, and by the way, congratulations for your excellent book! The period was one indeed in which political pragmatism trumped the performance of Christian triumphalism. A Taifa king might pay tribute and military duties to a Christian king, but either was just as likely to fight against a Christian as a Muslim rival.
The period was one indeed in which political pragmatism trumped the performance of Christian triumphalism.
SD: Yes, and in fact—to use your keyword—the meanings of these “tribute” payments may also have been more fluid and ambivalent than we have generally assumed.
JD: And the impact of those policies can be read in the arts even later. Ferdinand’s son, Alfonso VI, experienced the palaces and mosques of Toledo when he has exiled there, to the court of his Taifa client and ally; and when he took the city in 1085, he made those same palaces his own. When the Great Mosque of Toledo was converted into the city’s cathedral in 1086, it became, on one hand, a victory monument. But over time, it also brought Toledan Christians into intimate and proprietary contact with the mosque’s visual language of expression; it became, theirs. As the most important Christian building of the city, this mosque-turned-cathedral would transform community experience, and their own visual ideals— an impact more pervasive and profound than the simple imposition of a narrative of Christian victory.
8. SD: I am really drawn to the rhetorical style of your book, which retains some of the elements of the verbal lectures (e.g. “I am remembering a remark of Ibn Hazm”, p. 53). You are also delightfully transparent about the ways in which you have changed your mind, over time, in relation to some of the works you address in this book!
JD: Thank you, and well, yes, the book is riddled with confessions of nearly a half century of academic sins and changes of heart. That might be, in fact, my favorite part. What a privilege to work in this field for so long that one can change one’s mind every couple of decades. And I think of it, still, as a conversation.
The book is riddled with confessions of nearly a half century of academic sins and changes of heart. That might be, in fact, my favorite part. What a privilege to work in this field for so long that one can change one’s mind every couple of decades. And I think of it, still, as a conversation.
9. SD: Yes, it’s an endlessly fascinating conversation, isn’t it? When is the book coming out in paperback?! It would be ideal for classroom teaching!
JD: Inshallah!
Simon Doubleday is Professor of Medieval History at Hofstra University (New York); he specializes in the kingdoms of Galicia, León, and Castile between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. He will be a Beatriz Galindo senior researcher at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela between 2024 and 2028.
Jerrilynn Dodds is Harlequin Adair Dammann Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York. The author of numerous publications centering on transculturation in the arts, she was awarded the Cruz de la Orden del Mérito Civil by the King of Spain in 2018 for her contribution to the history of the arts of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.