Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Mystical imagery and belief provided Iberian intellectuals a shared discursive space beyond the political and cultural specificities (including doctrines) that often divided them into discrete faith groups such as Christians, Muslims, and Jews. By the fifteenth century, many texts penned by and related to the religious minorities and their descendants in the peninsula, the conversos and the Moriscos, reflect such mystical imagery and beliefs and reveal that their authors conceived of a direct connection between knowledge, texts, and mystical illumination. This is true for individuals engaged in projects of linguistic/cultural translation—in the first case, a first-person epistolary account by a fifteenth-century Castilian Muslim religious and community leader, Yça Gedelli, explaining his willingness to assist the Christian cleric, Juan de Segovia, in the creation of a vernacular and Latin translation of the Qur’an; and in the second case, the anonymous author of a fifteenth-century poem expressing a mystical framing of the...