Tuesday, September 13, 2016

"Repudiated", "(Hi)Stories", Iberia should be considered in the broadest reasonable terms (and I have an expansive view of "reasonable").

While the description of the panel includes some ideas that might merit consideration, I offer these in addition, to perhaps provoke possible comparative work:
  • Alfonso X's repudiation(s) 
    • his repudiation of Sancho IV 
    • the greater repudiation in his subsequent offer of Castile to Philip III if his De la Cerda grandchildren did not survive to inherit
    • repudiation of Alfonso X during the 13th-c. civil war waged by Sancho and other "rebellious" nobles
    • the Partidas as repudiation of autochthonous legal traditions and legal culture
    • the public repudiation of the Partidas along with their implementation in various ways
    • our repudiation of this side of Alfonso X's behavior, very seldom brought forward in our discussions
  • Repudiation of Iberian kings and dynasties by nobles, commoners, subgroups
  • Repudiation of the French by the Castilians -- perhaps related to Alfonso X's attempted gift of the kingdom to them?  (Once upon a time when I was touring this and that historical monument in Spain, each and every "docent" at said monuments arrived at a point in their shtick when they said the equivalent of "...and everything was fine until the French came [meaning of course Napoleon's armies], at which point they stole what they could and defaced what they left behind..."
  • Repudiation of the orthodox view of the effects of conversion, i.e. conversos as always already suspect of not really being converted
  • Repudiation of their previous religion, their previous lives by those who convert from one to another religion 
  • Repudiation of autochthonous poetic and intellectual traditions -- indeed, repudiation of autochthonous medieval liturgies, scripts, documentary practices
Herewith I reproduce, in finer fettle, the Call:

Repudiated (Hi)Stories

Both in the Middle Ages and now, many narrative and historiographical texts of medieval Iberia are slandered and deprecated, with sides taken on whose story to accept. 

Texts and other forms of cultural production were and are denounced for their faithlessness to facts, tendencies toward mere propaganda, irritating anachronisms, poor technique, lousy characters, general dullness, desecration, or obscenity -- indeed, one might begin to fear that they outnumber the pure, the admirable, the artful, the inspiring, the chaste.  

Too, stories that began as acceptable and orthodox in the fifteenth century wound up surprisingly often on the Index librorum prohibitorum, an extraordinarily effective repudiation. 

For another example, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, considered one of the earliest "real," "modern" historians of fifteenth-century Castile, considered the Crónica Sarracina to be a farrago of historiographical bad behavior.  

In our own day, many modern publications and translations of medieval works are accompanied by introductions in which the editors comment that their work creating the edition has made an authentic but mediocre-to-execrable medieval or early modern text accessible to modern readers for purely academic reasons. 

This panel seeks papers examining such repudiated (hi)stories from medieval Iberia and medieval Iberians from any perspective: language, ethnicity, religion, philosophy, literary features, etc.

Please submit a one-page abstract and the Participant Information Form.https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions

Submissions by Sept 15 to Linde Brocato, linde (.) brocato AT gmail.com.

 THE 'ZOO
INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan
11-14 May 2017

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