The Convivencia wars: Decoding historiography’s polemic with philology

The quincentenary remembrance of Columbus’s fi rst voyage, the expulsion of Iberian Jews, and the conquest of Muslim Granada produced a barrage of texts meditating on the nature of medieval Iberian multiculturalism, specifi cally as it might refl ect the convivencia (coexistence or cohabitation) of disparate groups. The concept of convivencia, while falling from favour among many academics, has (in historian Jonathan Ray’s words) “been embraced and distorted by an everwidening group of academics, journalists, and politicians” (1). 1 Despite the spread of this popularity and the persistently positive spin that the concept has come to acquire in current usage, not everyone can agree that convivencia equates with harmony. In 2005, historian Olivia Remie Constable posed the vexing question, “Is convivencia dangerous?” 2 As she explained, convivencia, or any form of cultural intermingling, was viewed with skepticism by many in medieval Iberia for its “potential to foster actual harm: whether physical, economic, social or sexual.” It is, more importantly, dangerous as a modern concept, “since it can tempt us to read the Middle Ages through a murky – though often rosy – lens of biased historical memory and deterministic modern values.” While convivencia may indeed be “dangerous” because it is too simple a model, it may equally be so because it is too complex: it may be “dangerous” for modern Iberianists, historians and literary critics alike, because it represents a conundrum that cannot be solved, an irreducible set of contradictions that can, judging by the manifold and contradictory spirit in which it has been employed, be easily evoked and yet not so easily explained. John Boswell adroitly captures this diffi culty in The Royal Treasure when he observes, “The question of convivencia, the living together of the various Iberian religious and ethnic groups, is intensely complicated, and the task of a