Medieval Iberian Studies

Medieval Iberian Studies examines the languages, literatures, histories, and material culture of the Iberian Peninsula from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century, a period when Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and the emerging Romance vernaculars coexisted in unusually close contact. Scholars work directly with manuscripts—including richly illuminated collections like Alfonso X's *Cantigas de Santa Maria*, a thirteenth-century compendium of Marian verse and music—to understand how political power, religious identity, and literary imagination shaped one another across Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. Active debates center on the nature and limits of *convivencia*, the contested idea that these communities shared a genuinely pluralistic culture, and on how epic poetry and chronicle traditions constructed competing visions of Iberian history that later centuries would inherit and distort. Ongoing digitization of archival sources is opening new comparative questions about textual transmission, translation, and the circulation of ideas across the medieval Mediterranean world.

Works

97,227

Total citations

55,814

Keywords

MedievalIberianLiteratureHistoryManuscriptsCantigas de Santa Maria