Reconstructing medieval minority ritual practice in Islamic Spain, 711-1400

forthcoming

Ritual is a powerful means for minority religious communities to express and preserve their collective identities. This has traditionally been said of Christians in al-Andalus, the area of the Iberian Peninsula that was under Islamic rule for half a millennium in the middle ages. The idea that minority Christians in this area continued to practice the same religious rites as before the Arab conquest is thought to show their resistance to Islamic rule. But can we assume this without establishing what their rites were? A lack of direct sources means little is known about the Andalusi Christian tradition. We must revisit the resulting assumptions about Christian ritual practice in al-Andalus, not least because of their use in modern political discourse to support the idea of Spain's 'Christian identity'. REMMINIS sets out to reconstruct what can be known about Christian ritual in al-Andalus. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates history, musicology, Arabic studies and archaeology, we aim to recover this important cultural heritage. Digital methods (corpus analysis, sequence alignment, handwritten text recognition) will provide new insight into a series of complex and diverse sources, including 1) liturgical manuscripts containing instructions for worship from diaspora Andalusi communities (text and music), 2) Arabic translations of biblical and canonical works, some with many hundreds of Arabic notes in the margins, and 3) the remains of churches, cemeteries and objects in which and with which Christians conducted their ritual lives. These sources hold great promise for revealing the extent to which Christians in al-Andalus followed unique ritual practices and engaged with Arabic and Islamic culture. Close collaboration between disciplines will allow us to gain a holistic picture that does justice to the multimodal nature of ritual and to the potential for diversity, hybridity and entanglement of religious identities in medieval Spain.