̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Department of Spanish and Portuguese

̽��ֱ��last Muslim King in Spain

sjr81 — Thu, 18 May 2017 08:21:48 +0000

Based on original research, and drawing attention to the connections between the medieval Moorish king Boabdil, and current social and political concerns in Europe today, Drayson presents the first full account in any language of the Moorish sultan of Granada, and head of the Nasrid dynasty.

̽��ֱ��academic’s research has also uncovered a potential mystery regarding the final resting place of the last Muslim king in Spain. Long thought to have died in Algeria in 1494, experts are now hoping to exhume and DNA test what they believe to be the remains of the sultan beneath a derelict mausoleum in Fez, Morocco.

In the ten years before Boabdil’s fall in 1492, his kingdom of Granada was the theatre of one of the most significant wars in European history. ̽��ֱ��sultan’s territory was the last Spanish stronghold of a Muslim empire that had once stretched to the Pyrenees and beyond – including the cities of Barcelona, Pamplona and Cordoba, which had been home to paved roads, street lighting and more than 70 libraries at a time when London and other European cities were backwaters of disease, violence and illiteracy.

“How did Boabdil change the course of Spanish history? Does he now represent what he stood for in the past? And how significant is he as a figure of resistance to the forces of western Christendom?” asked Drayson, who spent three years working on her new book – ̽��ֱ��Moor’s Last Stand: ̽��ֱ��life of Boabdil, Muslim King of Granada.

“That Boabdil was a key figure at a crucial moment in world history cannot be doubted: the current tensions between Islam and the West have their roots in his reign and in the kingdom he lost. Christian posterity has treated him with scorn and pity – viewed from the perspective of the victors. But my account presents the other side of the coin, revealing that issues of violence, tension and compromise between Muslims and Christians were as pressing then as they are now.”

Betrayed by his family and undermined by faction and internal conflict, Boabdil’s defeat at the hands of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (the parents of Catherine of Aragon) symbolised the epoch-changing transition of Granada from Islamic state to Christian territory – a moment which set Spain on course to becoming the greatest power in early modern Europe.

̽��ֱ��Christian victory marked the completion of the long Christian reconquest of Spain and ended seven centuries in which Christians, Jews and Muslims had for the most part lived peacefully and profitably together.

“Five centuries after his death, it’s timely to consider the impact of his defeat then and now,” added Drayson. “Boabdil was a man of culture and war: a schemer, rebel, father, husband and brother. He was a king, yet also the pawn of the Catholic monarchs. I wanted to show why his life matters – and the meanings it now has at this time of extreme tension between the west and the Islamic states.”

̽��ֱ��end of Muslim rule at the heart of Spain came to an end on January 2, 1492 when Boabdil relinquished the keys to the Moorish capital to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. “These are the keys to paradise,” he said before leaving the city with his mother Aixa.

Legend has it that as Boabdil retreated into exile, he turned around for one final, distant look at Granada – sighed, and burst into tears. His mother, betraying little sympathy for her vanquished son, is said to have told him: “You do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.”

̽��ֱ��‘last sigh’ has long been used by historians to belittle and diminish Boabdil’s legacy, ignoring – according to Drayson – the immense sacrifice he demonstrated in saving his people from certain slaughter at the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella’s irrepressible armies which encircled Granada.

“ ̽��ֱ��fall of Granada was of such magnitude that a mythical story was needed to explain, accept or legitimise the immense upheavals the conquest brought about,” said Drayson.

According to her, Boabdil’s heroism, long repudiated by most historical commentators, is evident in his ability to recognise the futility of further resistance, and the choice he made in rejecting the further suffering, starvation and slaughter of his people. Instead, he bargained for the best terms of surrender possible, rejecting martyrdom and willingly sacrificing his reputation for the greater good.

“ ̽��ֱ��loss of Granada is viewed by modern writers as a prelude to the repression of the Muslim world,” added Drayson. “At a time when Europe is seeking a way of addressing issues of racial and religious intolerance, equality and freedom, we might look closely at the Spanish Muslim society of which Boabdil was the final heir, which successfully tackled some of these problems.

“Today, Boabdil represents a last stand against religious intolerance, fanatical power, and cultural ignorance; his surrender of the city and kingdom of Granada symbolised the loss of the fertile cross-cultural creativity, renewal and coexistence born out of the Muslim conquest of Spain.”

Elizabeth Drayson appears at the Hay Festival as part of the Cambridge Series on Sunday, May 28 at 2.30pm on the Good Energy Stage.

̽��ֱ��history, myths and legends surrounding the last Muslim ruler in Spain – whose surrender ended seven centuries of Islam at the heart of Western Europe – is the subject of a new book and Hay Festival appearance by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson.

I wanted to show why his life matters – and the meanings it now has at this time of extreme tension between the west and the Islamic states.

Elizabeth Drayson

̽��ֱ��Capitulation of Granada by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz 1882: Boabdil surrenders to Ferdinand and Isabella

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Opinion: Pirate, turncoat, survivor: the life and times of Anthony Knivet, a Briton in 16th-century Brazil

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 08:10:44 +0000

On a dark night late in 1592, a group of Englishmen was massacred on the island of São Sebastião, off the southeast coast of Brazil. Most had deserted the infamous English privateer Thomas Cavendish less than two weeks before in the hope they could find a living in Brazil. But this was not to be. A band of Portuguese and their allied Indians from Rio de Janeiro set upon them in the early hours: they were dragged to the shore, where their skulls were smashed with “fire brands”.

At the time, English subjects were considered enemies of Spain and Portugal, “heretic Lutherans” who were officially forbidden to set foot on the Iberian colonies in the New World. But Cavendish’s men were not innocent: only a couple of months earlier they had besieged towns, burned down mills and plundered villages along the Brazilian coast.

̽��ֱ��massacre in São Sebastião would have remained unknown, had it not been for one who managed to survive and later write what would become the earliest extensive account of Brazil written by an Englishman. This man was Anthony Knivet, a young soldier from Norfolk with few scruples and a great desire for fortune.

In country

Knivet would spend the next nine years living in Brazil – mostly in or around the incipient village of Rio de Janeiro – working as a drudge for the ruling Portuguese. After all, the only reason he escaped being killed in São Sebastião was his swift offer to trade information on the English in exchange for his life. This would be the first of many brushes with death that Knivet would experience in Brazil. He would also, while serving the Portuguese as a slaver, travel vast portions of a territory then virtually unknown by Europeans, encountering a myriad of native tribes, many of which would have been destroyed by the following century.

From the vantage point of an outsider, Knivet witnessed first-hand several aspects that characterised Brazilian colonial society in its very beginnings: the harsh life at the early sugar-mills – the “engenhos” – the multiracial settlements, the political disputes, the exploitation of labour and the violent expansion towards the unknown “interior”. Though we do not know exactly how he managed to finally extricate himself from the hands of the Portuguese, we know that he arrived back in England in 1601, and in 1625 the remarkable story of his adventures came out in print as ̽��ֱ��Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Antonie Knivet, who went with Master Thomas Cavendish to the South Sea, 1591.

Slaves working the sugar mill at an engenho. John Carter Brown Library’s Archive of Early American Images

Published in a compendium of travel accounts, the Admirable Adventures had not attracted much sympathy or credence until recently, and remained mostly unknown to the broader public. It received its first single annotated edition in English only last year.

One reason for this lasting disregard may have been Knivet’s obscure background, his poor writing skills, together with allusions to mermaids and “glistening mountains”. Even his original editor, Samuel Purchas, was reticent about endorsing some of his descriptions. However, on close inspection and when verified against Portuguese documents, several events, names and descriptions in the narrative turn out to be surprisingly accurate.

Portrait of a survivor

Perhaps there is another aspect that has kept Knivet’s story obscure: in a seeming endless string of narrow escapes from death, Knivet emerges as someone whose only loyalty is to saving his own skin at any cost, even if it meant betraying the English, the Portuguese or the Indians. In the ruthless world of colonial disputes and bloody encounters, Knivet became a master of survival, a skillful improviser who aptly manipulated cultural tensions to his own advantage.

Knivet tells us how, after breaking off from an expedition along with 12 young Portuguese, he encounters a tribe of Tamoio living deep in the hinterland. Knowing of the enmity between Tamoio and Portuguese, Knivet aptly declares himself French before all his Portuguese companions are executed and ritually devoured. ̽��ֱ��ensuing year is spent living with the tribe until he convinces his hosts to engage in a mass migration to the coast in search of fisheries and French trading ships.

What Knivet tells his readers (but did not tell his hosts) is that he in fact longed to find a safe passage back to England. In truth, Knivet led the tribe straight to a notorious slave-trading post kept by the Portuguese on the coast. As a result, the last known tribe of Tamoio to have escaped Portuguese conquest in the 1550s was then either massacred or enslaved.

̽��ֱ��Admirable Adventures renders the interplay between fact and fiction even more problematic as we deal with a narrator who can be disconcertingly frank while remaining unnervingly opaque. Apart from its fascinating glimpse into an under-documented time in colonial Brazil, Knivet’s account tells us a lot about the interplay of truth and fiction in early modern travel writing.

̽��ֱ��author will be giving a talk on Anthony Knivet as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas from October 17 to 30.

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá, Lecturer in Portuguese Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) discusses the life and times of Anthony Knivet, a young soldier from Norfolk who spent nine years living in Brazil in the 16th century. She will be discussing Knivet's life on 22 October as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

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«Dança dos Tapuias», célebre quadro do pintor neerlandês Albert Eckhout

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Read all about it!

lw355 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:44:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��flip side of contemporary fear of crime is our fascination with it. Repelled we might be, but the popularity of watching CCTV footage of real crimes or reading the latest salacious scandals in tabloids is testament to modern society’s appetite for stories that shock.

But this fascination with crime is not new; nor is the popularity of the materials that purvey it. Cambridge researcher Professor Alison Sinclair has set out to discover what Spain thought about wrongdoing between 1800 and 1936 by examining a wide range of sources, and in particular the equivalent of the mini-tabloids of the time – so-called chapbooks or pliegos sueltos – of which an extensive archive exists in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Sold on street corners by hawkers and luridly illustrated, the sueltos carried vivid tales of the unlawful, the improper and the morally corrupt.

‘Spain in the 19th century was chaotic and troubled. It has no literary work that is the equivalent of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and yet the figures for violent crime in the 19th century in Europe place Spain as one of the countries highest on the list,’ explains Professor Sinclair, whose three-year research project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

‘With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it, thus complementing in a completely original way other literary and cultural representations of wrongdoing.’

̽��ֱ��sueltos spoke to an audience entranced by the exploits of such characters as Francisquillo the Tailor, a boastful chap whose scissors turn out to be his major weapon in a series of dramatic standoffs about honour. A recurring (and real) character is Diego Corrientes, a Spanish Robin Hood figure who took from the rich and gave to the poor, and who died by hanging aged 24 years.

A key feature of the project will be to catalogue and digitise 4,470 sueltos held in the ̽��ֱ�� Library and the British Library. Many are in an exceptionally fragile state and a goal of the project is to create a world-class and accessible collection, which will be held in the ̽��ֱ��’s central repository DSpace@Cambridge (www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/).

Clearly related to a specific time and place, the project raises questions relevant for modern society. As Professor Sinclair, from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, comments: ‘ ̽��ֱ��research will help us to question, as cultural consumers, our excited and emotional responses to this sort of material, including processes of identification and voyeurism.’

For more information, please contact Professor Alison Sinclair (as49@cam.ac.uk).

A new study of wrongdoing and its cultures in Spain from 1800 to 1936 will explore the fascination of popular versions of crime and other misdemeanours.

With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it..

Professor Alison Sinclair

Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Pliegos sueltos Diego Corrientes (S743.1.c.8.2)

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Outstanding scholars awarded

bjb42 — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:00:54 +0000

Dr Emma Gilby from the Department of French and Dr Rodrigo Cacho from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese were honoured recently by ̽��ֱ��Leverhulme Trust for their outstanding research contributions: Dr Gilby for her meticulous scholarship of the 17th-century French literary-historical canon, and Dr Cacho for his research on Spanish Golden Age Literature.

During the tenure of their prizes, Dr Gilby will be working on 17th-century theories of indifference and free will, with particular reference to Descartes, and Dr Cacho will be editing the works of Quevedo and writing a monograph on the Spanish mock-epic.

Approximately 25 Philip Leverhulme Prizes are awarded each year across five different topics, each prize providing £70,000 to enhance the prize-holder’s research over a two-year period.

Professor Richard Hunter, Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities, is delighted for the two researchers: ‘ ̽��ֱ��prize is appropriate recognition for two outstanding early-career academics and a fitting testimony to the flourishing of research on European literature and culture in Cambridge.’

Two early-career academics in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages have been recognised by the Philip Leverhulme Prize.

̽��ֱ��prize is appropriate recognition for two outstanding early-career academics and a fitting testimony to the flourishing of research on European literature and culture in Cambridge.

Professor Richard Hunter

foshie from Flickr

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‘Sex, scandal and sermon’ in medieval Spain

ns480 — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:40:21 +0000

̽��ֱ��medieval poem Libro de Buen Amor (‘ ̽��ֱ��Book of Good Love’) by Juan Ruiz tells the story of 14 failed love affairs, combined with animal fables, sacred and profane lyrics, and doctrinal matters. ̽��ֱ��ribald tales, colloquial language and vivid characters (particularly the narrator, an Archpriest ‘fallen’ from grace because of his amorous dalliances) have led Ruiz to be dubbed the ‘Spanish Chaucer’. Its 1728 stanzas are the subject of a new analysis, which is due to be published in April 2008, by Dr Louise Haywood from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

̽��ֱ��canonical work by Juan Ruiz is of great importance for its contemporary references and literary scope. It is richly evocative of medieval cultural attitudes relating to love, religion and emotion, and hence is a much-studied work among students and scholars of Iberian literature from this era. ‘It is one of the most challenging and thought-provokingly diverse works in world literature,’ said Dr Haywood, ‘and its impact on Spanish culture continues to be felt today.’

Humour has long been recognised as an important part of Ruiz’s artistry but Dr Haywood’s study of the Libro will be the first to approach the role of humour systematically in this iconic work. ‘I have re-positioned Juan Ruiz’s Libro in relation to broader trends in 14th-century culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between humour and scholasticism, the body, and visual culture. In essence: sex, scandal and sermon.’

For more information, please contact Dr Louise Haywood (lmh37@cam.ac.uk), whose book Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz’s ‘Libro de Buen Amor’ will be published on 1 April 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan.

A new study of the 14th-century narrative poem Libro de Buen Amor explores how its earthy tales of failed love are shaped by humour.

I have re-positioned Juan Ruiz’s Libro in relation to broader trends in 14th-century culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between humour and scholasticism, the body, and visual culture.

Dr Louise Haywood

Jule_Berlin

Cloister of Santa Maria la Real in Najera

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