Let us continue this journey into
medieval Spain as you walk into this passageway through history.
Let's first consider one of the most important issues,
and that is the issue of convivencia or coexistence.
And we'll do that through this piece of artwork that we're looking at right now.
This particular door-knocker is from the Hispanic Society of America in
New York City and it's catalogued R111.
And I had the privilege of working with it in conjunction with the New
Mexico History Museum's 2016, Fractured Faiths Exhibition.
So what is coexistence or convivencia?
It is positive, negative, and ambivalent.
How do we define coexistence?
Well, coexistence in medieval Spain can be defined as
the sum of all relationships among Jews,
Christians, and Muslims, and their hybridized descendants.
Yes, coexistence includes friendly, productive,
collaborative, and mutually beneficial
relationships that allowed Iberians to work together and to live together.
It can include amity,
harmony, acceptance, intermingling, and interchange.
However, coexistence is also about conflict and violence,
animosity, discrimination, and suspicion.
I believe in its simplest form,
coexistence is the simultaneous occupation of physical,
intellectual, cultural, and religious space.
What does that mean?
It means that we are going to acknowledge that violence and
cooperation do coexist alongside of each other.
In this manner, warfare between two parties on the battlefield is a type of
negative coexistence because both parties are on that field and fighting.
They're physically there and it might end very poorly, yes.
But they are both existing at the same time and at the same place.
Coexistence thus is that continuity
of how long and what is the nature of that relationship.
Similarly, we can look at more positive forms of coexistence,
and that's why we're taking a look at this Mudejar door-knocker.
It's roughly from 1475 CE.
It is a blend of artistic methods,
and in this one,
we see Mudejar artwork which is a Christian adaptation of Islamic forms.
It is definitely a positive form of coexistence.
Personally, I find material culture or
these objects that we still have today whether those are pieces of architecture,
art work, day-to-day items like
this door-knocker as a particularly helpful way of appreciating the past.
There's some kind of tangible link that literally connects us to that past time period.
To know that a craftsman held this in his hands, or her hands,
and prepared it, and put care into it,
and brought a form out of these raw materials.
And now that we find it in our own hands,
that is a type of communion with the history.
So that's why I like these pieces in a way that
sometimes text might not be able to help us. So, what was Mudejar?
And I think this is an important kind of form that we want to
consider because it kind of encompasses a lot of what does coexistence mean.
So Mudejar was not a single unchanging style,
but rather an artistic approach that enjoyed the presence of Islamic elements.
Again, we want to remember that this is a Christian form.
Mudejar constantly reinvented itself
and in different influences can be detected clearly in different centuries.
What occurred was an art form that was heavy with detail and rich in decorate design,
that helped soften the austerity of the Christian ornamentation.
Specific Islamic inherentses within
the Spanish Mudejar resulted in interesting combinations of motifs and patterns.
In this door-knocker with a dragon depicted in the center,
the ironworker has made two screen like sheets of pierced iron.
The uppermost portion is composed purely of European Gothic Trefoil in organic motifs.
And we see these repeated at the bottom as well.
While the underneath unit,
that is below the top section,
maintains a paisley shaped holes corresponding to
gothic design but also creating an overall abstract pattern typical of Mudejar design.
It's vegetative you can see it.
On the left and right hand side we can see these traces of vines that run up and down,
but at the top, we have these surprising spires that rise above the grill,
reminiscent almost of a cathedral.
So we can see this is really,
this combination of elements that somehow or another seem to make sense,
and that is what coexistence,
I think, is in medieval Spain.
When kind of what might seem to be
kind of contradictory approaches to life or different approaches to
living can find a way to live together in some kind of
harmonious peace such as a piece of iron work.
So at this point,
I'd like to highlight the point that
coexistence and medieval Iberia is also deeply ambivalent.
What are we to make of the substantial conversions of Christians to Islam after
the initial Muslim conquest of Visigothic Spain in the eighth and ninth centuries?
Or what about the Christians who lived under Islamic rule who adopted
Arabic as their language as well as Islamic customs?
Are these positive, negative for more complicated types of coexistence?
Similarly, Jews converted to Christianity or conversos,
and Muslims who converted to Christianity, moriscos,
as Christian kingdoms regained portions of the Iberian Peninsula during
the Spanish Reconquista or the effort to reconquer Christian lands from Islamic kingdoms.
So if these conversions were not forced,
and they were adopted with a free conscience,
were they positive or negative?
Or more likely, was
the cultural and religious environment in late medieval Christian Spain
so weighted against religious minorities that any conversion was problematic?
Clearly the historical circumstances inform
our perspective about whether or not these conversions were good,
bad, or frankly ambivalent.
Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-DávilaAssociate Professor
