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Book Reviews

the civil and ecclesiastical servants of the centralised bureaucracy of Byzantium, by Michael McCormack on the emperor, and lastly, by Cyril Mango on saints. There are some very well-known and well-respected authors arrayed here whose scholarship alone urges the reader to dip into the book. The writing is erudite and lively. Each chapter reflects the individuality of authorship both in style and content. Nevertheless the tone and approach is sufficiently consistent between the essays to create a coherent whole. The individuality extends to the extent of the bibliography at the end of each essay that varies from reasonably extensive to somewhat minimal. The text could have benefited from a short introductory chapter dealing with the time-span of the empire to enable the reader to better understand the significant changes that took place over that period. All too often the chapters, brief in themselves, seem to gloss over these issues. In that sense the book is a trap for the unwary. An essay on the ethnic mixes in the empire would have been highly germane to the issue of the identity of the Byzantines. There are neither illustrations nor maps: whereas the latter is understandable to a point in a book dealing with people rather than places, a geographical context is helpful to the reader if only to emphasise the extent of the empire and its consequent population diversity. This is a modest-sized book that can only touch briefly on its subject matter. This is not a book for the specialist but for the informed general reader or undergraduate student who has some knowledge of Byzantine history. For those it will supply useful insights to supplement the usual histories. A number of the essays are object lessons in how to extract a range of information from very limited sources. There are few other books available approaching the subject in the manner this one does. It is, therefore, a welcome addition to material available to the reader whose understanding of Byzantium may all too often revolve around the machinations of the elite in Church and state with little appreciation of the workings of ordinary daily life.
ROGER S. SHARP

University of Birmingham

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Interaction and cultural change MARK D . MEYERSON and EDWARD D . ENGUSH (Eds.), 2000 Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 322 pp. ISBN 0268022631 This book emerges from a conference celebrated at the Notre Dame Medieval Institute in 1994. In a remarkable introduction to the book, Mark Meyerson, the organiser of the conference, explains his twofold aim with this gathering: to integrate Spain in the field of medieval studies as it usually has a marginal status (p. xii) and to question the main approaches that the study of medieval Spanish multicultural societies bears - either a romantic view of a golden past of conviveneia or a gloomy and dramatic example of persecution and pogroms (p. xiii).

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Meyerson shows clear ideas of the main topics that should be present in an agenda on cultural interaction and change among diverse communities. He rejects the "ambiguous and meaningless categories of marginality and otherness" and finds it more useful to explore how each ethnic group deals with tensions between power and powerlessness, how boundaries between groups are established and crossed, and how such boundaries caused social tension among and identity crises within groups (p. xiii). In the line of recent post-modern American cultural studies (the contributors are all from American universities with the exception of Eleazar Gutwirth of Tel Aviv University), the target of the editors is not each single cultural group in itself but the interaction, interdependence, knowledge, perception, images, and attitudes among them in order to explain cultural change. The book manages to combine the erudite character of the specific contributions with this approach and, despite the usual disparity of the articles, it contains an ambitious array of 15 stimulating papers. They attempt to assess, in four sections, the impact on minorities, either Christians, Muslims or Jews, of dominant cultures during the Muslim ascendancy in Spain from the eighth to the twelfth century (Part I) or during the period of Christian dominance from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century (Part II). They also examine two fascinating social phenomena: the conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity, their status in the new scenario (Part III), and the problems faced by those who remained loyal to their religion in the example of the moriscos (Part IV). The first section (Christians and Jews in Muslim Spain) includes four articles. K.B. Wolff in "Muhammad as Antichrist in ninth-century Cordoba" makes interesting remarks on the non-Muslim character of the "Muslim conquest" and the turning point toward polemical literature in Christian production in the midninth century. Focusing on Paul Alvarus' Indiculus Luminosus, specifically on the commentaries on Daniel and the identification of Muhammad as the Antichrist, Wolf argues that the ninth-century Latin audience had a detailed understanding of Islam. The conclusion, following his earlier works, understands this anti-Islamic literature as a strategy towards a highly assimilated Christian community. TF. Glick offers in "Reading the Repartimientos: modeling settlement in the wake of Conquest", a revision of his own 1970s ideas of Spanish feudalism. Using what he calls unique evidence to study a cross-cultural transfer of landscape from Muslim to Christian hands, the Repartimientos of Mallorca, Valencia, Orihuela, Murcia, Sevilla and Loja, he tries to recreate the Andalusi model of landholding. The article includes an illustrating summary of the historiographical debates between archaeologists and philologists on the tribal model of settlement in the Iberian Peninsula and concludes, with strong critiques of Julio Gonzalez, that it was not the Roman heritage but Muslim land use and settlement that was the foundation for the new landscape. The last two articles of this section - J.L. Kraemer, "Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School", and S.M. Wasserstrom, "Jewish-Muslim relations in the context of Andalusian emigration" - are about thefi-uitfulcultural interchange between shared positions among Muslims and Jews. Both articles show that al-Andalus produced its own philosophical and theological system based on Aristotelian assumptions as opposed to the Eastern Neoplatonic thought. In this system, Muslims and Jews had similar agendas and questions. Consequently, Wasserstrom talks of "interconfessional circles of Spanish intellectuals".

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The second section (Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain) includes five articles. The only historiographical essay of this volume is written by R.I. Burns, "Mudejar parallel societies: Anglophone historiography and Spanish context, 1975-2000", who unfolds an informed and detailed list of scholars, publications, associations and events resulted from the boom in the studies of the Mudejars. More interested himself in the regional differences rather than the general features and/or the explanation of this historiography, the article only identifies one change in paradigm in this quarter of a century: the shift in emphasis from the issue of tolerance/intolerance towards Muslims to the concept of "parallel societies" to describe the coexistence between Muslims and Christians. L.J. Simon in "Muslim-Jewish relations in Crusader Majorca in the thirteenth century: an inquiry based on Patrimony Register 342" examines in a clear, wellexplained and organised article the case of religious communities in Majorca, his traditional area of research. His aim is to give a plausible explanation for the observed phenomenon of Jews allowing their Muslim slaves to redeem themselves which he finds in their lack of ability to keep ownership due to the conversion of their Muslim slaves to Christianity. Probably one of the strongest articles in terms of the application of sociological and anthropological theory is D. Niremberg "Religion and sexual boundaries in the medieval crown of Aragon". The author draws attention to the extreme legislation against sexual interaction among people of different religions developed in fourteenth-century Aragon. His tenet is that sexual taboo among different religious groups might serve to render other types of interaction less conflictual. The idea and case studies are stimulating. A relative flaw of his theoretical firamework is that one cannot help feeling that such a complex social phenomenon is explained on the assumptions of the rational choice theory in which individuals act following conscious strategic actions and choices (p. 149) rather than prejudices, stereotypes, identities, feelings, principles, ignorance, hate, repulsion and the like. Again the last two articles of this section are more focused on cultural than on social issues. Both E. Gutwirth, "History and intertextuality in late medieval Spain", and R. Chazan "Undermining the Jewish sense of future: Alfonso of Valladolid and the new Christian missionizing" base their inquiry on polemical textsj with, however, little else in common. Gutwirth argues that despite the historiography that has traditionally considered biblical allusion and citation in Jewish medieval chronicles as superfluous and ornamental, they show a great deal of the mentality, literary inheritance and paradigm of a cultural experience of the average medieval Jew. The author then provides a detailed analysis of two texts: Crescat and C^rga. R. Chazan, on the other hand, identifies a major change in the increasing interest of twelfth-century Christians to convert Jews and in the use of arguments based on reason rather than the Scriptures. Clear and to the point, Chazan isolates the new issue that emerges as central in the polemics: Jewish lack of hope for future redemption. He chooses the best representative of that attitude: Alfonso de Valladolid, before Abner of Burgos, and focuses on the epistolary exchange between him and the Jew Joseph Shalom. This is an exciting example not only of the missionising pressures that religious minorities had to endure, but also of the effect of conversion on the rest of the members of the community. The third section of the book (Conversos) contains three short contributions, all of them fascinating accounts of the fragile and subliminal world of those who

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renounce their religion and those who practise it in secret and silence. R.L. Melammed "Crypto-Jewish women facing the Spanish inquisition: transmitting religious practices, beliefs and attitudes" exhibits the strong thesis that the progressive isolation of Jewish communities during the sixteenth century meant that women and the household were the people and the place to reproduce the religious law and custom. The Inquisitorial rolls reveal great potential to study these women, whose names we even know. L. Martz presents a more demographical and quantitative article, "Relations between conversos and Old Christians in early modern Toledo: some different perspectives", studying the conversos' settlement in Toledo, the burial chapels and female religious institutions founded by conversos in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She argues that conversos had different strategies: the majority tended to donate or found institutions for themselves, but some paid a lot to place their daughters in nunneries with old Christians, despite the segregation that they suffered. D. Seidenspinner-Nunez, in a completely different study but again of great quality, works on fifteenth-century political theory produced by the well-known figure Pablo de Santa Maria and his son Alonso de Cartagena. "Conversion and subversion: converso texts in fifteenth-century Spain" follows too closely, at some points, the work of H. Nader and R.B. Tate in the analysis of the letrado and the political theory of the conversos applied to the Catholic monarchy, but the author"s review of three sentimental romances as a dismissal of the letrado political theory shows very clearly the contradictions of the practice of the political theory towards the Jews and the violence of unrestrained monarchical authority. Finally the fourth section includes three more short essays. The first one by S. Haliczer, "The Moriscos: loyal subjects of his Catholic Majesty Philip III", examines the correlation between religion diversity and political loyalty to the monarchy. It seems to me that the question will not take us far if we do not contextualise it highly and disclose the strategies and pressures of power upon the Moriscos. M.E. Perry, "Moriscas and the limits of assimilation" presents an ambitious and challenging contribution, bringing together theory, anthropological and literary. Strong in the definition of concepts such as assimilation and with an attractive topic-the role of women in the assimilation of the moriscos-xhe. article highlights the diversity in the morisco experience and the home as the central place to test assimilation. Finally C. Lopez-Morillas, "The Moriscos and Christian doctrine", works on the commentary on Qu'ranic verse of an aljamiado manuscript by Ibn Abl Zamanin describing the different sects of the Christians. She shows that the inability of Christians to agree on points of doctrine was a motive for scorn among Muslims, hence the interest of the audience in these texts. The article reviews, at some points in rather too much detail, the first councils of the Christian Church, but it finds its way to argue that sectarian differences cast doubt on Christian possession of the truth. The epilogue by J.N. Hillgarth - "After 1492: Spain as seen by non-Spaniards" shows a curious collection of examples of the shocking impact that medieval Spain caused on travellers who visited it in the sixteenth century and even on those who did not dare to visit it for the spiritual dangers involved: there were too many who seemed Jews and Muslims, and not even the Inquisition could be trusted. Hillgarth shows that "typical Spain", despite the efforts, has been actually rather atypical in its past.

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This is an excellent book for scholars interested in specific aspects and for those who want to reflect upon the interaction between different groups in medieval multicultural societies, particularly on the subtle issue of how identities and religion work and the images and attitudes that communities create for their own and others' consumption. Except for the contribution of R.L. Melammed's article, though, it is not a book for the average undergraduate student due to the erudite component of most of the case studies, the complexities of the sources explored and the subtle intellectual speculations of some of the thinkers reviewed.
ESTHER PASCUA

University of St. Andrews

The Architectural History of Venice DEBORAH HOWARD, 2002 Revised and Enlarged Edition New Haven: Yale University Press xvi -I- 346 pp., colour photographs, ill. and maps. USS 40.00 ISBN 0300090293 This volume provides an excellent introduction to the history of architecture in Venice, and to the evolution of its urban space. Howard updates her paperback edition of 1987 including expanded bibliography and new colour illustrations. She follows Venetian architecture since the Byzantine period, concluding with twentieth-century structures, while emphasising the political, social and economic framework that supported it. She also relates to pragmatic or social concerns, such as water supply, heating and others. Her survey encompasses the city's fascinating variety of buildings: churches, palaces, domestic dwellings, guildhalls, civil and military monuments including building techniques. She successfully shows how Venice's amphibious surroundings influenced the peculiar evolution of its urban environment and buildings. Furthermore, she convincingly shows the unique development of Venetian architecture in comparison to the European, due to the different character of the Venetian society and government, emphasising the Venetian archaism along with the adoption of outside infiuences. The first four chapters deal with the medieval period, from the Byzantine to the Gothic. Due to the unknown identity of the architects, the architecture of these periods is treated through actual monuments and the visual and historical changes that they refiect. The foundations of the Venetian architecture were laid in the Byzantine period (seventh century) in the Venetian lagoon. The creation of the actual urban space of Venice started in 810 with Rivo Alto (Rialto) as its nucleus, which became Venice's economic centre, after the completion in the thirteenth century of the building of Piazza San Marco, Venice's political centre. At the end of the century Venice's coherent urban organism was formed with streets and allies, separated only by canals. The Byzantine designing style of buildings persisted in Venice until the end of the thirteenth century, then ousted by the Gothic, whereas in mainland Europe the early Christian, Carolingian and Romanesque styles prevailed. The Byzantine heritage provided

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