Article of the Month - May 2022
“Islam Concealed and Revealed:
The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse,”
(Lucy Pick: Independent Scholar)
Lucy Pick, “Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse,” in Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711- 1085): In Honour of Simon Barton, ed. Simon Barton and Robert Portass (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 257-82.
Article Abstract:
When we examine the relations between Christians and Muslims in medieval Iberia exclusively through a lens of Reconquista,we set up expectations of this relationship that lead to blind spots where our evidence does not seem to fit the expected model. One of these blind spots has surrounded our interpretation of two closely contemporary texts, the Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, the former written by a Christian in Muslim Spain and the latter in the Christian kingdom of the Asturias. Neither appears on the surface to pay much attention to the Islamic nature of the new occupiers of the peninsula and, viewed as both coming “before” the Reconquista, this has not been seen as surprising to scholars. I read the chronicle and the biblical commentary against each other to show that what they appear exclude — explicit reference to Islam — is not a real exclusion at all. Both are anchored by a historical sensibility; a sense of embeddedness in time. Both promote ethical reflection on time, its passing, and the individual’s place within time. Their aims are theological and exegetical; their perspective is historical. They invite their readers to make an evaluation of the current condition of the peninsula as well as ethical judgements about who is on the side of God and who is not.
Keywords: Chronicle of 754 • Beatus of Liébana • Apocalypse • Isidore of Seville • Augustine of Hippo • historiography • Islam • Mohammed • al-Andalus • Asturias • Reconquest • Reconquista • Antichrist • Oviedo • Córdoba
Nomination Statement:
This article offers an altogether innovative reassessment of the Chronicle of 754 and Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, two texts markedly different in genre. Despite this obvious difference they are both the products of the same historical moment, and, as Pick argues, they also advance the same methods or goals, which are essentially heuristic. While scholars have long been puzzled by the lack of explicit denigration of Islam in both of these polemical texts, Pick demonstrates the centrality of Islam in them as part of a historical and ethical interpretive strategy. Their seeming exclusion of Islam, she writes, is no exclusion but an invitation to their readership to “make ethical judgements about who is on the side of God and who is not” (380). The argument is elaborated through close and careful textual analysis framed by wider historical (and art historical) stakes. The implications of the article are both methodological (asking us to think differently about some of our most important texts of the period) and also historiographic (asking us to think about what we miss by only thinking in terms of Iberian exceptionalism). I see it as model scholarship.
Authors’ Comment:
My article forms part of a longer volume of essays called Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) put together by Simon Barton and Robert Portass. and designed to interrogate one of the most contested yet tenacious organizing themes of the history of medieval Iberia, the notion of Reconquista (the other being, of course, Convivencia). My own concern was not so much with the institutional or ideological freight of the term for understanding the territorial conquest of the peninsula by Christian polities, or even broader issues of the complexities of medieval interactions across religious lines. I was interested in how, as I see it, focus on Reconquista has deformed the history of medieval Iberia as a whole by suggesting somehow that "Spain is different" -- that things and practices and concepts that exist elsewhere in this time don't happen here because Reconquista, whether named as such or not, is what is happening here. My lens into this question in the article is historical writing, and I argue that in medieval Iberia no less than in other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean world, the writing of history was a theological project and the writing of theology was a historical project. To do this, I engage with authors who are not generally brought to bear on the question of Reconquista like Karl Morrison and Mary Carruthers on the cyclical, visual, and visualizable quality of Christian Iberian texts, but I emphasize the particularity of the historical moment in which my texts were written. When I do that, I discover that texts (and objects, and buildings) that seem on the surface to have nothing to do with Islam, have a lot to say about it.
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