Thomas Glick is perhaps best known to scholars of medieval Spain, although he has made evidentiary and methodological contributions in several scholarly arenas. This festschrift, a welcomed collection of erudite studies and admiring essays, treats a range of subjects with detail and new insight reflective of Glick's broad interests and accomplishments.
Some readers will find the title of the book a bit odd. Convivencia has become so defining of much scholarship on medieval Spain that some readers will wonder what it means to speak of convivencia "and" medieval Spain. The odd construction points to three challenges treated by Brian Catlos, the series editor, who offers the forward, and Mark T. Abate, the volume's editor and writer of the lengthy opening chapter that sews a biography to an excursus of themes. The first challenge is to reflect on the depth and breadth of Glick's career. The second is how to structure a book encompassing the diversity of the essays offered in his honor, only a few of which study convivencia directly and not all of which stay inside peninsular boundaries. The third is about the changing shape of convivencia as a scholarly topic.
The introductory essay, as the lengthiest and most contextualizing piece, deserves special attention for the way it puts Glick's career into the context of his influences and training as a young scholar. Mark Abate opens the essay by giving Glick a few lines in which to address his own unusual scholarly preparation and inclinations: trained as an Islamist whose research has focused mostly upon Spain, Glick describes himself as traveling the interface between two cultures. We learn, moreover, that Glick's undergraduate experience at Harvard included participation in the History and Science Program founded by George Sarton, from whom he learned to give ample consideration to what Sarton perceived to be a basic unity of Islamic and European civilizations as well as to appreciate the central importance of the transmission of ideas. From his Spanish literature professor, Juan Marichal, a direct disciple of Américo Castro, the young Glick came into contact with the polemic of Spanish history from the perspective of those advancing the convivencia thesis. It was at this time too, according to Abate, that Glick began to ask himself deep questions about identity and ethnic boundaries. In the same years, José María Millás Vallicrosa guided Glick to the recognition of place and environment in the shaping and transmission of culture and especially to what Abate calls the historical sociology of medieval science. We learn that it was in 1964 that Glick first heard the word "acculturation," which appeared to him similar to what Castro was describing by the term convivencia and which led him over many years to criticize and give precision to Castro's work, reconfiguring it in ways more useable for historians.
As Abate points to the influences and questions that grounded Glick's fruitful explorations of the convergences of science, environment, identity, acculturation, and convivencia, the reasons for the book's structure become more apparent. After the introduction, the book offers fifteen chapters in four parts each addressing an area of interest to Glick: water movement and management; the complexities of contacts between religious communities; complications in inter- and intra- religious group perceptions about contact and boundaries; and the diffusion of astrological, scientific and philosophical knowledge. The collection concludes with the personal reflections of Abdalghafour al-Rozi, which illustrate Glick's role as a teacher and mentor while simultaneously offering insights into the modern crossing of cultural boundaries.
Part I offers two essays on irrigation, a subject of primary interest to Glick. Helen Kirchner begins with an overview of water management systems across the medieval Mediterranean. Kirchner highlights the diversity of techniques for moving and making use of water from the Roman through the early and later medieval periods and emphasizes the variety of forms of political engagement with water management systems. A point clearly made is that we should be wary of speaking of a uniformity of Islamic hydraulics. Systems in the Maghreb shared similarities with those in Andalus, but a great variety of questions of geography, scale and extent of water movement, and many other factors illustrate a great deal of difference from place to place. Enric Guinot Rodríguez follows with a careful study of the transformation of water management, focused on the relationship of irrigation and politics in medieval Valencia after the Christian conquest begun in 1233. As Valencia grew more feudalized as Christian colonization proceeded, water management techniques became so diverse that they seem to differ almost system to system.
Parts II and III, entitled "Contacts" and "Perceptions" respectively, bring together ten essays that a reader might discern as directly or indirectly touching upon convivencia. The section on contacts includes the following focused studies: Torki Fahad A. Al-Saud (chapter 4) contextualizes the complexity of dhimmi politics and participation within the Islamic world; Kenneth Baxter Wolf (chapter 5) looks at Eulogius's account of the Martrys of Cordoba as an effort to strengthen a divided Christian community by identifying dhimmi status as persecution; John Tolan (chapter 6) offers a critical edition of Raymond of Penyafort's "Responses" to questions of law related to the boundaries between religious groups; Josep Torró (chapter 7) describes the "failed" integration of a Military Andalusi family into a newly-Christian society in Valencia; and Doug Kierdorf (chapter 8) studies diffusion of and change in the role of the mustassaf as appropriated by James I following the conquest of Valencia. Part III, on perceptions, offers examinations of the following: William Granara (chapter 9) examines a mingling of poetic and prose conventions in two accounts of the Battle of Zallaqa; Mark Meyerson (chapter 10) studies what two cases in Christian courts can reveal about feuds played out between Muslim contenders; and studies by Jessica Coope, Thomas Burman and Lydia Walker, and Jonathan Ray (chapters 11 through 13) investigate a variety of constructed social imaginations (how women could be viewed by men as demarcating faith boundaries; a description of the "amnesia" inside the Dominican Order about the multi-religious context of its Iberian origins; division inside Jewish communities about the status of conversos).
The book devotes its Part IV to inter-faith aspects of knowledge diffusion in the sciences. Julio Samsó (chapter 14) reports on the purposeful and selective computations of Abraham Bar Hiyya as he deciphers the astrological importance of the rise of Islam. Michael Weber (chapter 15) describes the diffusion of Greco-Arabic science, especially Al Farabi's Enumeration, through the Toledo school of translators and into the university curricula. Michael McVaugh (chapter 16), studying the notes of a young master reading the Colligetat Marseilles in the early fourteenth century, offers us insight into the diffusion and reception of Averroes.
The third of the challenges of this volume is to situate this eclectic collection of essays within the context of Glick's contribution to the historiography of convivencia. Convivencia emerged in debates about whether a multi-cultural or multi-religious past is essential to the nature of Spain and Spaniards. Américo Castro suggested that such was the case, although his use of the term started with the presumption that these religious groups initiate interaction with each other from a position of difference: Jews are Jews who sometimes interact with Christians, etc. Glick and others complicated the formula, seeing occasions for acculturation, diffusion of ideas and practices across boundaries, and moments of positive association even in the midst of conflict. In recent decades, some researchers have employed convivencia as a moralistic or propagandistic tool, as if to sweep violence under the rug of one or another golden age or to advance visions of a cross-confessional multicultural utopia. This volume is, at least in part, a reaction to that latest move, suggesting a return to the careful analysis of interactions for which Glick is much appreciated. But the volume goes further, suggesting that perhaps convivencia as a concept has been so misused and overused that it has lost its relevance to scholars even as it has entered the public sphere in popular histories, documentaries, and heritage publicity and tourism enticements. Recent research, including the essays in this volume, makes a strong argument that, as Abate asserts, the final fall of convivencia seems imminent. "Amorphous, simplistic, anachronistic,"(42) convivencia is just the latest of the many myths of Spain that have failed to secure a stable Spanish identity.