ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

The Nuns and the al-Faqih: Medieval Multiculturalism in Iberia

Judith Bennett has argued that for women, in the transition between the medieval and the (early) modern, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. This paper explores a medieval example of continuity with the modern. The traditional narrative is of cultures in competition, impenetrable barriers between one monotheism and another. Scholarship on colonial history shows that women may have a unique role to play in the zones of cultural conflict that occur alongside male-dominated wars for political domination. In the late twelfth century, Queen Sancha of Aragon undertook the construction of the monastery of Sigena and created a contemplative women’s institution, under the auspices of an active military order, on a profitable pilgrimage route to Compostella. Sancha then bequeathed Muslim and Jewish skilled workers to the new foundation. Her son Pedro gave the nuns a magister, son of Pedro’s father’s alfaquine. Despite repeated papal condemnation, landowners needing skilled labor persisted in enticements to attract non-Christians. Queen Sancha and King Pedro in the early thirteenth century saw a similar labor need for the nuns at Sigena. The monastery embodied cultural and gender conflation, with an Arabo-Persian style roof and Byzantine Sicilian paintings, alongside a massive, imposing military-style tower enclosing contemplative nuns. By looking at this unique creation of Queen Sancha and her heirs, this paper will explore the continuity of multiculturalism despite a growing rhetorical divide between cultures in the early thirteenth centuries and how gender may have mitigated the cognitive dissonance.