Parables of Coercion
Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain
Description:... Seth Kimmel challenges the conventional cultural and intellectual history of early modern Spain by arguing that religious intolerance, rather than consolidating the fields of canon law, philology, and history, instead created the conditions for a radical transformation in religious reform and disciplinary innovation in the Age of Inquisition. After the fall of Granada, Kimmel shows, competing scholarly communities in Castile and Aragon were forced to come to terms with the eradication of the traces of Judaism and Islam from the peninsula, obliging the legal scholars, linguistic experts, and historians of the time to go beyond their immediate fields of expertise in order to establish their political relevance and defend their interpretive methods to a wider audience. For Kimmel, it was the disagreements among the experts--inquisitors, university professors, Arabic and Hebrew scholars and translators, royal chroniclers, and even the Moriscos themselves--on the issues raised by conversion, inquisition, biblical exegesis, and historical discourse that drove reform and innovation. It was the need for what we today call "interdisciplinarity" that caused the disciplines, and the scholars in them, to reinvent themselves, with New and Old Christians working together to redefine the meaning of religious conversion and to redraw the limits of their particular fields. As Kimmel notes, we need to rethink our understanding of early modern Spanish scholarship and revisit documents with fresh eyes, because the methods we have used to gauge religious tolerance and intolerance are too limiting--they fail to recognize that peninsular and transatlantic debates of the period about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over those interpretive methods and pedagogical practices that demarcated one discipline from another.
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