Of all the English-language historians of medieval Spain, Thomas Glick has paid the greatest attention to multidisciplinary approaches and to theoretical developments in the historiography of medieval Europe and the Islamic world. From his Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (1970) through Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (1979, expanded in a Spanish translation in 1991) to this volume, Glick has strengthened the scholarly foundations of medieval Spanish history.
In From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle, he relates the state of the scholarly art in a series of major questions. In particular, he uses the recent work of archaeologists working on patterns of settlement in areas of Islamic and Christian Spain (particularly Valencia and Murcia). Relating their work to the theories of Pierre Toubert, whose emphasis on the social and political role of castles helped change conceptions of feudalism, Glick attempts to document and analyze the social changes that accompanied the transition from late Roman-Visigothic times to the early Muslim period and the series of later Christian reconquests of areas of Muslim Spain. In the first case, he assesses the importance of tribal elements in the reorganization of society and the social landscape. For the latter, he surveys scholarly debate over the nature and extent of Spanish feudalism.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, the prevailing view was that Spain, except for Catalonia, was incompletely feudalized because Christian settlers in newly reconquered regions secured considerable personal freedom. The new argument is that personal freedom quickly declined as the frontier receded and the settlers’ descendants slipped into dependent roles, thus giving many parts of Spain a feudal development as complete as that anywhere in western Europe. Glick shows how the new archaeological findings support this view and takes broad swipes at scholars who have failed to heed the implications of what he calls an archaeological revolution.
Because of Glick’s profound familiarity with the ongoing and vigorous work in archaeology and other fields, and his provocative and usually persuasive interpretations, his book is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand medieval Spain. Unfortunately, it is not a user-friendly guide. Glick operates at a high level of analysis, reporting the findings of scholars and showing how they fit into theoretical constructs but often failing to take the next step, to state explicitly how the history of medieval Spain must be rewritten to take into account the new evidence and the interpretations arising from it. It is all there by implication, but Glick needs to make it more accessible, so that even nonspecialist readers can have a view of a new and more satisfying history of medieval Spain.
