Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern IberiaUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 2005 - 218 pages 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. According to Dangler, these texts demonstrate the two fundamental precepts of medieval Iberian alterity: multifaceted subject formation and the embrace of contrasts and the negative. Medieval Iberia was a multicultural territory of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian societies. These communities had constant geographic, cultural, political, and economic contact with one another. Because medieval Iberia was not hierarchical and homogenous, medieval subjectivity was not always marked by essential qualities of character, but was mutable and shifting. The adverse was often esteemed in the making of meaning and the forging of the social order. 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. This shift accompanied the rise of the Castilian nation-state and its imposition of static hierarchies of value. This book will appeal to a broad range of medievalists. It makes an important contribution to the growing interest in medieval Iberia and offers a nuanced understanding of medieval history and culture in general. |
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Jean Dangler. relations were more permeable than this paradigm allows , the archetypal model of the powerful white subject and the marginal dark other continues to inform in a profound way modern ideas of otherness . " The modern paradigm ...
... paradigms that incorporated the de- formed yield to binary schemes of speculation that abolished the mediating third ... paradigm centered the basic na- ture of being in paradox , the scholastics viewed it in a logical principle . Based ...
... paradigms declined from about the twelfth century on , such as Peter Abelard's sic et non , an early triadic example that originated in monastic exegetical tradition . This paradigm held that the meaning derived from textual ...