Undoing the familiar notion of the Middle Ages as a period of religious persecution and intellectual stagnation María Menocal now brings us a portrait of a medieval culture where literature science and tolerance flourished for 500 years.The story begins as a young prince in exile—the last heir to an Islamic dynasty—founds a new kingdom on the Iberian peninsula: al-Andalus. Combining the best of what Muslim Jewish and Christian cultures had to offer al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways from the death of liturgical Latin and the spread of secular poetry to remarkable feats in architecture science and technology. The glory of the Andalusian kingdoms endured until the Renaissance when Christian monarchs forcibly converted executed or expelled non-Catholics from Spain. In this wonderful book we can finally explore the lost history whose legacy is still with us in countless ways. Author Biography: María Rosa Menocal is R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and head of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She lives in New Haven CT.
