Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain and Morocco: History, Literature, and Memory
DialogueRabat, Morocco Madrid, Spain Summer I, 2025
Courses
Introduces students to global works from the earliest literatures to 1500. May include texts from Africa (Sunjara); the Americas; Asia (Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji from Japan and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching from China); Europe (Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy from Italy, the Song of Roland from France, Homer’s Iliad from Greece); and the Middle East (The Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia and One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic, Indian, and Persian sources). Works in translation where necessary. This course will focus on the literatures of Spain in the Middle Ages in English translation.
Explores the intertwined histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in what is now Spain and Morocco. Focusing on the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, considers what characterized the societies, cultures, religions, and politics of the empires, kingdoms, and city-states that rose and fell in the southwestern Mediterranean and Atlas Mountains. Emphasizes the uses of history and the memory of religious coexistence by different groups living in Spain and Morocco today. Uses primary and secondary sources to gain an understanding of the complexities of interreligious conflict and cultural hybridity.
This program explores the intertwined histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in what is now Spain and Morocco. Focusing on the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, we will consider what characterized the societies, cultures, religions, and politics of the empires, kingdoms, and city-states that rose and fell in the southwestern Mediterranean and Atlas Mountains. Present-day Spain and Morocco both see their multireligious pasts through the lens of coexistence, cultural creativity, and tolerance. Yet religious intolerance, violence, power-politics, and money also fueled the conflicts that would lead to what would become modern Spain and Morocco, with Christians on one side of the Mediterranean, Muslims on the other, and a much diminished Jewish population on both. We will ask how this period is remembered and depicted by different groups living in Morocco and Spain today. We will look for answers in history, literature, art, architecture, food, and music to gain an understanding of the complexities of interreligious conflict and cultural hybridity. Traveling to multiple sites in Morocco and Spain, we will ask to what extent these three religious communities forged a cultural identity that transcended their differences; how the art, literature, architecture, and other cultural productions developed through mutual influence; and draw lessons about the value and limits of cross-cultural and inter-religious tolerance. We will study history on location, moving from Rabat, Marrakech, Fes, and Chefchaouen in Morocco, to Seville, Cordoba, Granada, and Madrid in Spain. Students will walk in the footsteps of great empires, traveling through the Atlas Mountains, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, and crossing southern Spain. We will enter the past of “al-Andalus” (Muslim Iberia) and the “Maghreb” (North Africa including Morocco) through medieval poetry, and local experts will teach us about the art and architecture and the history and present of these religious communities.
