Nonmodern Iberia was a fluid space of shifting political kingdoms and culturally diverse communities. Scholars have long used a series of obsolete investigative frameworks such as the Reconquista, along with modern ideas of nation-states, periodization, and geography that are inadequate to the study of Iberia’s complex heterogeneity.
In Edging Toward Iberia Jean Dangler argues that new tools and frameworks for research are needed. She proposes a combination of network theory by Manuel Castells and World-Systems Analysis as devised by Immanuel Wallerstein to show how network and system principles can be employed to conceptualize and analyze nonmodern Iberia in more comprehensive ways. Network principles are applied to the well-known themes of medieval trade and travel, along with the socioeconomic conditions of feudalism, slavery, and poverty to demonstrate how questions of power and temporal-historical change may be addressed through system tenets. Edging Toward Iberia challenges current historical and literary research methods and brings a fresh perspective on the examination of politics, identity, and culture.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Part One: Fundamental Problems; Models and Methods
Chapter One: Fundamental Problems: Periodization and Geography
Chapter Two: Models and Methods: Network Theory and World-Systems Analysis
II. Part Two: Application of Methodology: Trade, Travel, and Socioeconomic Conditions
Chapter Three: The Islamicate Trade Network
Chapter Four: Nonmodern Iberian Travel and the Islamicate Travel Network
Chapter Five: Socioeconomic Conditions: Feudalism, "Slavery," and Poverty
III. Part Three: New Themes: Politics; Identity and Culture
Chapter Six: Politics
Chapter Seven: Identity and Culture
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Jean Dangler is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University.
Review :
"Dangler’s book is animated by a thorough familiarity with a vast secondary literature. She has exhaustively mined the work of others in the field…Her reading of the secondary literature is always nuanced, generous, and polite…Dangler’s book is excellent reminder that we must approach the history of pre-modern Iberia with great caution….Let us, as Dangler proposes, see the past as the people who lived in it and wrote about it did."
- Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, LA (Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Vol 43 no 1)
