Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Download or read book Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia written by Jean Dangler and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Iberia was a multicultural territory of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian societies in constant geographic, cultural, political, and economic contact. In this engaging study, Jean Dangler examines the way that ideas of difference were forged in four types of medieval Iberian discourse: muwashshah/jarcha poems from al-Andalus, Andalusi "cutting poems," medical literature about the body, and portrayals of the monster. She argues that the texts demonstrate the two fundamental precepts of medieval Iberian alterity: multifaceted subject formation and the embrace of contrasts and the negative. Dangler explores how the four discourses she analyzes changed in the early modern period from an acceptance of difference to more rigid concepts of subjectivity and the marginalization of difference-a shift accompanying the rise of the Castilian nation-state and its imposition of static hierarchies of value.