Traces the development of the Jewish community in Barcelona from 1050 to 1300 and its interactions with greater Catalan society and its rulers

The history of the Reconquista - the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Arabs - has proved an increasingly stimulating field of historical research. On the one hand, the struggle forced Spanish society into a mould which then shaped the course of its expansion into the Americas, on the other it gave rise to a unique process of accommodation and acculturation. Dr Lourie here concentrates on the realms of the Crown of Aragon in the 12th-14th centuries. The first articles deal with the evolution of the crusading spirit, with geopolitics, notably the rivalry between Aragon and Castille, and with the progress of Christian colonisation. The next section examines the conflicting demands of ideology, demography and colonisation, and includes one major new study on Christian ambivalence towards the Mudejars, the conquered Muslim population. Dr Lourie seeks to throw this attitude into sharper focus by comparing the Muslim situation with that of the Jews, and it is to the latter and their relations with Christians that her last five articles are devoted.

The Reconquista left unprecedentedly large numbers of Muslims living under Christian rule. Since Islamic religious and legal institutions had been developed by scholars who lived under Muslim rule and who assumed this condition as a given, how Muslims should proceed in the absence of such rule became the subject of extensive intellectual investigation. In Islamic Law and the Crisis of the Reconquista, Alan Verskin examines the way in which the Iberian school of Mālikī law developed in response to the political, theological, and practical difficulties posed by the Reconquista. He shows how religious concepts, even those very central to the Islamic religious experience, could be rethought and reinterpreted in order to respond to the changing needs of Muslims.

A study and edition of one of the most ignored works of early Spanish literature because of its strong sexual content, this work examines the social ideology that conditioned the reactions of people to the events it describes as well as Fernando de Rojas's masterpiece, Celestina.

This bibliography - intended to be as complete as possible - provides information on written material in 22 languages about "muwassa?" and "zajal" (poetical strophic forms in al-Andalus during the Middle Ages) and the "kharja" (final segment of "muwassa?" and some "zajals"), and about their popularity in East and West.