Writing the Nation: Locating al-Andalus in Castilian Histories of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
5:00pm - 7:00pm /
Monday 28th November 2016
Type: Seminar /
Category: Department
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The central question of this paper will be: how did Catholic Castilians portray the history of al-Andalus and its peoples in relation to Castilian history during the period in which they absorbed much of the Muslim population of southern Iberia? Writing and interpreting history was as important to the construction of national identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as it is today. Building on the recent work of Ana Echevarría and using histories written by men as diverse as Alonso de Cartagena, Mosén Diego de Valera, Fernando de Pulgar, Alonso de Palencia,Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Andrés Bernáldez, and Alfonso Carillo de Acuña, this paper examines how Castilians ideologically constructed al-Andalus even as they physically reconstructed and re-purposed many of its buildings. It also considers how Castilian histories, including new editions of many of the aforementioned authors’ works, changed after the establishment of the Inquisition and the conquest of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, the last independent Muslim kingdom in Iberia.