Download Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia AudioBook Free
Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the politics and cultural need for marriages and other intimate encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth hundred years to the end of Muslim guideline in 1492. Interfaith liaisons taken powerful resonances, as such unions could work as an instrument of diplomacy, the catalyst for transformation, or potent subconscious propaganda. Examining a wide range of source materials including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visible art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced account of the ways interfaith couplings were recognized, tolerated, or feared, depending upon the precise politics and social contexts in which they occurred. Religious boundaries in the peninsula were complex and actively policed, often molded by an overriding concern with excessive social connection or assimilation of the three faiths that coexisted within the region. Barton traces the protecting ethnical, legal, and mental boundaries that the rival faiths of Iberia erected, and the functions where women, as respectable wives or slave concubines, actually traversed those edges. Via a close study of the realities and the creativity of interfaith relationships, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines highlights the amount to which intimacy, power, and personality were closely bound up with each other.
