Bible and Historiography in Transcultural Iberian Societies, 8th to 12th Centuries

The project addresses the uses of the Bible in the transcultural environment of the medieval Iberian Peninsula from the 8th to the 12th century. How did the holy book/s shape the perception of cultural/religious others in al-Andalus and in the Christian realms of the Iberian Peninsula? And how, on the other side, did the conflicts and contacts between Christians, Jews and Muslims influence the transmission and the uses of the Bible? The project has a double focus. First, it proposes to study in detail the biblical manuscripts transmitted from the period, their illuminations, marginal notes and the inclusion of other texts. Second, it will deal with the uses of the Bible in the historiography of the period, in particular, in its presentation of the struggles and exchanges between the Islamic and the Christian realms in the peninsula. Preliminary studies by the project team have already shown that there is rich and little-used evidence available to create a new picture of the issue, which will yield results also significant beyond the immediate field. The Bible, the great code, provided a matrix both for narratives and for norms that channelled the perceptions and practices of dealing with people of different culture and confession. Christians living under Muslim rule present a particularly interesting case. Translations of key texts, their movements between the political realms and, more broadly, processes of cultural translation form the context of the present project. Tensions and hybridity, stereotyped arguments and ambiguities all characterize the transcultural zone in the focus of the project. Thus, the evidence from a marginal area in Europe becomes a test case for changing attitudes towards the sacred books, and for their cultural and political impact. The project combines minute textual and codicological research with an acute interest in broad questions about cultural difference, change and exchanges, about the political impact of religious discourse and about the significance of text and context in a normative and codified holy book. A monograph by the senior post-doc in the project will seek to weave all these threads together. The PL will contribute comparative studies on the early medieval uses of the Bible in historiography and the formation of identities. The project complements, and will closely cooperate with the SFB Visions of Community Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Religion and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE) (VISCOM), of which the applicant is the speaker, and which addresses similar questions in different contexts. It presents an opportunity to integrate the rich material from the transcultural zones of the Iberian peninsula into related research being conducted at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy in Vienna.

In most of the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was divided between areas of Christian and Islamic rule. This led both to fruitful cultural exchanges, and to conflict and prejudice. In the earlier Middle Ages, from the eighth to the twelfth century, Christian states were limited to the mountain areas in the north of the peninsula, whereas the Muslims occupied the richer parts of Iberia. How did contemporaries perceive and interpret this situation? The project departed from the assumption that Christian observers looked to the Bible to find answers to their often puzzling situation at the frontiers of a thriving Islamic commonwealth. It looked at two types of text in which readers would find explanations for the problems of their time. First, there is an extraordinary number of Bible manuscripts still extant from eighth to twelfth century Iberia. One of the results of the project is that in many of them, prophetic and apocalyptic texts were added, reflecting the attitude that supernatural forces had an impact on contemporary events. Second, the project looked at chronicles and other historical works that reported current events or depicted a more distant past. Biblical quotes, images and allusions figure very prominently in them. Rather than to the New Testament, they refer to examples from the Old Testament, more or less implicitly linking the emerging Christian kingdom of Asturia to the kingdom of Israel. Its rulers were pictured as the new Moses or the new David; and its people were punished for the sins of their forefathers, or for their own, as biblical Israel had been in the Bible. This self-styled people of God hoped to regain His grace by a mix of devotion and violence. Most notably, the Muslim neighbours and enemies were hardly ever called by their actual names: rarely Arabs, never Berbers or Muslims, sometimes Mauri, 'Moors' (derived from the Greek word for 'dark'). Normally, they were given biblical names. Either, these were names of rather disreputable female characters in the Old Testament: Saracens, Ismaelites or Agarenes - which meant that they were regarded as relatives of the chosen people of Abraham, but clearly inferior ones. Or names of the enemies of Israel were used: Chaldeans, Babylonians, or Moabites. Thus, events acquired a meaning in the history of salvation going far beyond what actually happened. Medieval authors in Iberia were looking for the transcendental significance of history.