Medieval Spanish ghost town becomes self-sufficient ecovillage

 It’s a utopian fantasy discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals-, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages (most dating back to the Middle Ages), some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that.

 There are now a few dozen “ecoaldeas” – ecovillages – in Spain, most build from the ashes of former Medieval towns. One of the first towns to be rediscovered was a tiny hamlet in the mountains of northern Navarra.

Lakabe was rediscovered in 1980 by a group of people living nearby who had lost their goats and “when they found their goats, they found Lakabe”, explains Mauge Cañada, one of the early pioneers in the repopulation of the town.

 The new inhabitants were all urbanites with no knowledge of country life so no one expected them to stay long. When they first began to rebuild, there was no road up to the town so horses were used to carry construction materials up the mountain. There was no electricity either so they lived with candles and oil lamps.

Click here to read this article from True Activist

María Rosa Menocal, medieval historian, passes away

María Rosa Menocal, a renowned scholar and historian of medieval culture and literature, passed away on October 15th after a three-year battle with melanoma.

 Menocal, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale and former director of the Whitney Humanities Center, focused her research on the literary traditions of the Middle Ages and on the interaction of various religious and cultural groups in medieval Spain.

 Her 2002 book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, describes the rich cross-fertilization that took place among those religious groups. The book placed the interactions of Jews, Christians and Muslims at the heart of the formation of a diverse and vibrant Western culture, and posed a vigorous challenge to the notion of inevitable polarization of Islam and the West in the popular imagination. It has been published in numerous languages, and received wide critical acclaim. A documentary for public television based on the book is under development.

 Menocal once noted that she was inspired to write the book because "... the medieval period has been, and continues to be, so grossly misrepresented in almost all of our histories — from the fact that we have so little knowledge that medieval European culture included, centrally, the study of Greek philosophy as it was interpreted by hundreds of years of Muslim and Jewish commentaries to the fact that we still use the word medieval to mean 'dark' and 'unenlightened' when, in some respects, Europe has never been as enlightened … as it was then."

Click here to read the full obituary from Yale University

See also Culture in the Time of Tolerance: Al-Andalus as a Model for Our Time 

See also her website for more information about María Rosa Menocal

Former church caretaker arrested for the Codex Calixtinus theft

A former caretaker of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, along with his wife, son, and another women, have been arrested by Spanish police n connection with the theft of the Codex Calixtinus, an important 12th-century manuscript.

 The manuscript has not yet been recovered, but police believe that they will soon find it. The Director General of Police, Ignacio Cosido, said in an interview, ”I think we’re in the right direction to solve the case. The investigation is ongoing, but the main objective is to find the Codex.”

 The police have also recovered €1.2m in cash, eight other copies of the Codex as well as other manuscripts (“of great value”) that had disappeared from the cathedral, and other church documents.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Academic seeks origin of mysterious Spanish cloister

Could a poolside folly at a private Mediterranean resort in Spain owned by a reclusive German billionaire actually be a 12th century architectural treasure spirited away from its original home?

 This is the historical mystery being unraveled by a medieval art expert who has been investigating a cloister that has stood since 1958 on a northeastern Spanish estate owned by wealthy German philanthropist Curt Engelhorn and his family.

 Gerona University Medieval Art History Professor Gerardo Boto believes the cloister, now nestled in a pine forest on the estate in Palamos, some 120 km north of Barcelona in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, could be the remains of a romanesque monastery that was originally built several hundred miles away in the central region of Castilla y León.

 "If its authenticity is confirmed, that could help us rewrite a few aspects about Spanish romanesque," Boto told Reuters on his first visit to the cloister.

Click here to read this article from Reuters


Click here to read Who has a cloister around their pool?

Segovia: Within medieval walls

The throne clad in red velvet was magnificent, the embroidered eagle stared menacingly, and the dome embellished in geometric motifs surreal. Mariano Vela Bautista, the dapper guide with a salt-and-pepper beard, doffed his fedora and stood still in Segovia Alcazar’s Throne Room.

“This is where Christopher Columbus stood when Queen Isabella gambled on his proposal for a western route to China, a voyage that would lead to the discovery of America.” I looked at the ground beneath my feet — I was standing on history.

 Almost."That is what Segovia is all about. History,” Bautista began his story about Segovia, a UNESCO World Heritage City which sits coquettishly close to Madrid, Spain’s capital. It is replete with twisted alleys, Romanesque structures, and legends that could tire any storyteller.

Click here to read this article from the Deccan Herald

See also this video: Old Town of Segovia and its Aqueduct

Who has a cloister around their pool?

An exceptional 12th-century cloister has been sitting for half a decade inside the garden of a private home in Girona province without anyone knowing about it, except its owners and a few locals. Gerardo Boto, a professor of medieval art at Girona University, unveiled the discovery at a recent Barcelona art convention, where he amazed Romanesque architecture experts with a detailed description of the find, which is already being compared to the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Burgos. Most remarkably, it does not show up in any official inventory, nor does it enjoy cultural protection from any public agency.

Click here to read this article from El Pais

University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts symposium on medieval Spanish literature

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will host an international symposium to celebrate two of the greatest works of Spanish literature: the 14th-century "Book of Good Love" and the late 15th-century "Celestina."

Events will begin Sunday, April 15 and run through Tuesday, April 17, with related activities on Wednesday, April 18.

The conference will be a triple celebration: first, a commemoration of the two Spanish literary masterpieces and the scholarship of María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, one of the greatest 20th-century scholars in the field of medieval Hispanic studies, who wrote some of her most important critical work on the two texts.

Second, it will recognize UW-Madison's distinguished scholarly tradition in Hispano-medievalism, celebrating the important publications of its faculty and staff and illustrious alums. Finally, it will be a celebration of the dramatic tradition of "Celestina" on the Madison campus in three productions from the 1950s and 1970s, all directed by emeritus professor Roberto G. Sánchez.

The symposium will bring together some of the most world-renown experts in the field, including several Madison graduatess, from the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, and across the United States; members of María Rosa Lida de Malkiel's family; and UW-Madison students and faculty.

Events will include roundtable discussions, dramatic readings of the "Book of Good Love" and "Celestina" presented in English translation by UW-Madison students, and an array of conference papers and lectures. All events will be free and open to the public and will take place at several venues on campus, including the Memorial Library, the Pyle Center and Van Hise Hall.

Click here to see more details about the Symposium

President Obama to award National Humanities Medal to medievalist

UCLA’s Teofilo F. Ruiz, an internationally recognized historian whose work focuses on medieval Spain and Europe, will be awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama today.

Ruiz, who is among nine intellectuals nationwide selected this year for the prestigious honor, will receive the medal at a White House ceremony, after delivering brief remarks about his work at the headquarters of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A reception with the president and first lady will follow the ceremony.

The National Humanities Medal, inaugurated by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1996, honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened the engagement of American citizens with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand access to important resources in the humanities. Previous medalists have included Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison, novelist John Updike, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and author Elie Wiesel, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.


Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

What a Real-Time Copy of the Mona Lisa Reveals About Leonardo

The most mysterious painting in the history of European art just got a little more mysterious. For centuries, Madrid's Prado Museum has held what was believed to be a mere replica of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. But researchers at the museum recently discovered that their copy wasn't just any copy. Thanks to the use of infrared technology, they deduced that the work was not only painted in Leonardo's workshop, by one of his students, but that it was done at the same time as the master was completing the original.

Although the copy, which depicts La Gioconda with a narrower face, redder dress and significantly more pronounced eyebrows than the original, has been in the Prado's collection for centuries, no one thought much of it, and it was generally attributed to an unknown Flemish artist. But when the Prado's conservators began to study it in preparation for an upcoming show in Paris, they realized there might be more to the work than previously recognized. Using infrared technology, they detected a lush Tuscan landscape — the same as in Leonardo's original — hiding beneath the coat of black varnish that had been added probably in the 18th century and obscured the original background.

Click here to read this article from Time Magazine

Book Review: 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half

In one of cinema’s most beloved scenes, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator plays in his office with a beachball-sized balloon representing the globe – and his own insane pretension. The game and the sentiment were not, alas, unprecedented.

In 1493, the voluptuary Pope Alexander VI (fans of Bravo’s The Borgias know how wholly unholy His Holiness was), sat down at his desk and traced a line on a map of the Atlantic Ocean. He was carving up the world, unilaterally.

The following year, intent on tweaking the papal cartography, envoys of Spain and Portugal met in the dusty Castilian town of Tordesillas and agreed on a division of the world between them – and them alone. Thus was born the far-reaching Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, a Renaissance beachball bounced about by the squabbling ruling families of Iberia.

And when the “known” world had expanded in the generation following the treaty’s signing, the usual suspects met up again, in the Spanish border town of Badajoz, this time to divvy up the Pacific Ocean. A young boy, of a temperament worthy of Chaplin’s, is said to have greeted the haughty Portuguese delegation on a bridge by mooning them and saying, “Draw your line right through this!”

Click here to read this book review from The Globe and Mail

Two poets from medieval Spain

The great medieval Jewish poets of Spain are part and parcel of our Jewish heritage; names like Dunash ibn Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra, Samuel Hanagid and Yehuda Halevi immediately come to mind. However, it comes as no surprise that all of them were men.

What is surprising is that during this period, there were numerous Muslim women whose poetry has been preserved. Although Muslims refer to the Jews as ahl al-kitab or “people of the book,” Muslim women seem to have been more successful in creating lasting poetic works.

It is rather difficult to account for this discrepancy, for it seems odd to imagine that Muslim women in medieval Spain were far more educated than their Jewish counterparts. Arabic became the lingua franca following the Muslim conquest of the country in 711. When Jewish poets began to compose in Arabic and later in Hebrew, were the women entirely excluded? There are very few extant poems written by Jewish women dating to this period. Although only a fraction of all poems from that time have survived, this does not mean more were not written. The poems that are available are of a high quality, but the problem of quantity cannot be ignored.

Click here to read this article from the Jerusalem Post

The Inquisition featured on a special issue of Hispanic Research Journal

Hispanic Research Journal has released its February 2012 issue today, with a special issue entitled Negotiating Power in the Iberian Inquisitions: Courts, Crowns, and Creeds. Five articles dealing with the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions are published in the issue, which will be freely available until mid-February.

The papers were originally contributions to a one-day conference held at the University of Oxford in March 2010. In their introduction to the issue, editors Tyler Fisher and Catarina Fouto write, ”while the Spanish Inquisition has long attracted the bulk of both scholarly and popular attention, its younger sibling, the Portuguese Inquisition (established in 1536), also played a major role in shaping Iberian influence in the Atlantic and beyond.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Priceless Roman mosaic irreparably damaged by thieves in Burgos

A priceless fourth-century Roman mosaic in Baños de Valderados, Burgos, has been irreparably damaged by thieves, who ripped out three separate sections, including one measuring almost 2.5 square metres, in a theft which was discovered on Wednesday.

The 66 square metre mosaic was only discovered in 1972 and depicts the Roman god Bacchus and was one of the best preserved Roman mosaics of the Iberian Peninsula. The local Mayor, Lorenzo Izcara, told El País that the thieves caused havoc and tremendous damage when they ‘barbarously’ chipped out the stolen sections, ‘probably with a chisel’.

The remains of the Roman villa where the mosaic lies is some 300 metres outside the village with no security on site in winter. Visitors who wish to enter must use a telephone at the site to call for someone to let them in, and it was two tourists from Cataluña who arrived for a visit there on Wednesday morning who noticed the break-in.

Click here to read the full article from Typically Spanish

Click here to read a Spanish article about the theft

William and Mary professor chronicles history of 700-year-old missing Spanish document

t’s been a decade and a half since manuscript hunter George Greenia discovered a missing medieval Spanish document in the archives at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.

Now Greenia, who serves as professor of Hispanic studies at the College of William and Mary, has chronicled his discovery and the historic contents of the 700-year-old manuscript in “The Lost Privilegio de Alcalá de Henares de 1295.” His essay is one of several pieces written by a group of medievalists in the anthology, La pluma es la lengua del alma: Ensayos en honor de E. Michael Gerli, published in September 2011.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

When pregnancy gets you out of a bad relationship – female slaves in medieval Spain

Recent research has uncovered that female slaves in the Spanish city of Valencia were using a novel way to escape their enslavement – they got pregnant with their master’s child. In the article “As if she were his wife”: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late Medieval Spain, Debra Blumenthal examines 33 cases found in the archives of the Spanish city between 1425 and 1520 where female slaves sued to get their freedom on the basis that they bore the children of their male masters.

One such case was a Russian woman named Rosa, who was purchased by Arnau Castello while he worked in the city of Naples. At the time, she was according to the archival records, “a pretty, young, white slave woman between eighteen and twenty years of age.” During their stay in Naples, and after they returned to Valencia, Rosa and Arnau were lovers, even after Arnau married. She bore him two children – Lucrecia and Julia, both of whom died in infancy. Later, in 1476, Rosa went to Valencia’s city courts to demand she be released from slavery, invoking local laws which stated, “Any Christian man who lies with his female slave and has a son or daughter by her, that son or daughter should immediately be baptized and both the mother and the son (or daughter) shall be free.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Pilgrim’s progress

The Camino de Santiago is one of Christendom’s most sacred pilgrimage routes, ranking third after Jerusalem and Rome. In effect, it comprises several itineraries, with take-off points scattered across Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and northern Europe. Each has its name, its own pathways and characteristic scenery, all converging on Santiago de Compostela, the ancient city of St. James the Apostle, in the far northwestern corner of Spain.

In the past two decades this medieval pilgrim trail has undergone an amazing revival, making it one of Spain’s biggest tourist attractions.

Legend has it that the body of St. James – Santiago in Spanish – was beheaded in 44 CE by King Herod and brought by boat from Palestine to the Iberian peninsular, to be buried there and then forgotten. The cult of the saint dates from the mid-ninth century, when he made a miraculous appearance and defeated the Moors in the battle that led to the Reconquista of Spain by the Christians. The great cathedral in his name was erected and his remains reburied in the crypt.

Click here to read this article from the Jerusalem Post

“The Hidden Alhambra” project to give public virtual access to historic site in Spain

The World Monuments Fund and American Express have announced a partnership for the conservation and improved access to the Alhambra, the famous palace and fortress of the last Muslim rulers in Spain.

“The Hidden Alhambra” is a sustainable tourism project supported by American Express and World Monuments Fund in the form of a donation of $200,000 through the American Express Partners in Preservation program, in collaboration with World Monuments Fund. The support will allow for a strategic reworking of the tourist route through the complex, reducing pressure on the most trafficked areas while also giving visitors the ability to see a number of places previously closed to the general public but of significant historical value.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Latest News on the theft of the Codex Calixtinus

The Spanish newspaper El Pais is reporting that the police are looking over hundreds of hours of video footage and having teams go into the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella to look for forensic evidence. A helicopter flew over the church as well, to see if there was a hole in its roof which could have been used by the thief to enter the building. Click here to read the article from El Pais

Correo Gallego reports that many questions are asked about the security in the cathedral, including where the key to the safe which held the 12th-century manuscript was kept. Click here to read the article from Correo Gallego.

The Associated Press adds that Galicia regional police are setting up a special unit to try to recover the Calixtinus Codex. They also quoteM ariano Rajoy, head of Spain's leading conservative Popular Party, as saying "The theft of the codex strikes me as disgraceful because it was very important for Santiago, Spain and the world." Click here to read this article.





And yes, someone produced this little bit ;)

Codex Calixtinus stolen from Santiago de Compostela

In what is being called the ‘robbery of the century’, a priceless 12th-century manuscript has been stolen from the Santiago de Compostela. The Codex Calixtinus, which contains a kind of travel guide to the famous pilgrimage way of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, was found missing from the cathedral’s archives on Tuesday. It is believed that the manuscript may have been removed on Sunday, but the theft went unnoticed for days.

On Tuesday afternoon an archivist found the safe which held the Codex unlocked (with the key still in the locking mechanism) and the manuscript missing. Church staff spent hours looking for the manuscript before calling in the local police at 10pm that evening. Dozens of police experts have since been examining the cathedral for any evidence and reviewing the video from five security cameras. Unfortunately, none of the video cameras was trained onto the area where the safe was kept.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

12th century manuscript goes missing from Spanish cathedral

A hugely valuable illuminated manuscript has disappeared from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, say police. The Codex Calixtinus dates from the 12th Century and was compiled as a guidebook for medieval pilgrims following the Way of Saint James.

This is the oldest copy of the manuscript and is unsaleable on the open market. Only a handful of people had access to the room in which it was kept.

Click here to read this article from the BBC


Priceless medieval Spanish pilgrim guide 'missing'

A priceless 12th century guide to Spain's Way of Saint James pilgrimage, the Codex Calixtinus, has disappeared from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, police said Thursday. One of the Western world's first 'guidebooks', it is only shown to the public on special occasions such as Pope Benedict XVI's visit last November to the northeastern Spanish city.

Cathedral staff reported it missing on Wednesday afternoon, said a police spokeswoman. "We are investigating its disappearance," the spokeswoman said. "It is usually kept in a room to which only half a dozen people have access," she said, and special security measures are taken whenever it is unveiled to the public

Click here to read this article from Agence France-Presse

Click here to read an article from the Spanish media Correo Gallego: Robo del siglo: desaparece el Códice Calixtino de la Catedral de Santiago

See also this article from El Pais: El Códice Calixtino sustraído de la Catedral de Santiago no estaba asegurado