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Book: Dogs of God, by James Reston Jr.
Jul. 4th, 2008 03:53 pmThis was the closest to a book on the Spanish Reconquest that my local public library had. It is subtitled with a long subtitle about Christopher Columbus, Moors, and the Spanish Inquisition.
So far Dogs of God is pretty decent (I'm only 50 pages in) in pulling out the family connections. The author is doing an admirable job of pointing out that Isabella, Ferdinand, and Torquemada all had converso (converted Jewish) family members, so their persecution of the Jews came from an odd place, psychologically. I hadn't know that the Tomas Torquemada of Spanish Inquisition fame had an uncle in the church who was famous for his please for tolerance towards conversos. I'm betting that Uncle and Nephew didn't get along well.
I'm noticing a real pattern in European history in general, which is that most of it treats Africans, Turks, Moors, etc as just "the other." The understanding and character detail in discussions of these groups seems lower in 1900s books than in the 1400s-1600s literature. I mean, Dryden's Conquest of Granada has lots of lively, noble Moorish generals and soldiers plotting and loving and arguing philosophy, but they don't seem to show up as characters in histories much. I'm sure there must have been Moorish ambassadors at various European courts or SOMETHING?
Northern European history also doesn't seem to talk much at all about the Eastern Orthodox church or the Russian one. I'm going to have to buckle under sometime soon and read a good history of the Church and try to get a handle on all the different schisms and fractures. I might have to read several histories, since I suspect that ones written from the viewpoint of Roman Catholics will be a bit different than ones written from a Byzantine or Russian viewpoint. I wonder if there are good Russian and Byzantine histories written in English?
The Dogs of God book does talk about how Europe got all sorts of words, science, literature, architecture, medicine etc. from the Islamic part of Spain, which is nice.
And I've got a bit of a better idea about major heresies within the Christian church that were popular at the time. I'm really starting to wonder, given the number of different, long lasting and wide spread heresies in the Catholic church, why school history suggests to us that Christian religion was sort of monolithic up until the big Protestant split. Is it just because Protestantism is still with us and most people in the U.S. aren't identifying themselves as Albigensians or Manichaeans or whatever?
This sudden interest in the Spanish Reconquest started because my "British and Spanish Empires in the Americas" book is a bit incomprehensible without more of an understanding of the Spanish Reconquest than I have. I've read a bit about the English wars in Ireland, but not about the Spanish Reconquest. The author of the other huge book kept talking about how the character of conquest in the Americas on the part of the two empires was affected by their previous experiences in colonization/conquest viz. Ireland and Moorish Spain, so I'm trying to catch up.
So far Dogs of God is pretty decent (I'm only 50 pages in) in pulling out the family connections. The author is doing an admirable job of pointing out that Isabella, Ferdinand, and Torquemada all had converso (converted Jewish) family members, so their persecution of the Jews came from an odd place, psychologically. I hadn't know that the Tomas Torquemada of Spanish Inquisition fame had an uncle in the church who was famous for his please for tolerance towards conversos. I'm betting that Uncle and Nephew didn't get along well.
I'm noticing a real pattern in European history in general, which is that most of it treats Africans, Turks, Moors, etc as just "the other." The understanding and character detail in discussions of these groups seems lower in 1900s books than in the 1400s-1600s literature. I mean, Dryden's Conquest of Granada has lots of lively, noble Moorish generals and soldiers plotting and loving and arguing philosophy, but they don't seem to show up as characters in histories much. I'm sure there must have been Moorish ambassadors at various European courts or SOMETHING?
Northern European history also doesn't seem to talk much at all about the Eastern Orthodox church or the Russian one. I'm going to have to buckle under sometime soon and read a good history of the Church and try to get a handle on all the different schisms and fractures. I might have to read several histories, since I suspect that ones written from the viewpoint of Roman Catholics will be a bit different than ones written from a Byzantine or Russian viewpoint. I wonder if there are good Russian and Byzantine histories written in English?
The Dogs of God book does talk about how Europe got all sorts of words, science, literature, architecture, medicine etc. from the Islamic part of Spain, which is nice.
And I've got a bit of a better idea about major heresies within the Christian church that were popular at the time. I'm really starting to wonder, given the number of different, long lasting and wide spread heresies in the Catholic church, why school history suggests to us that Christian religion was sort of monolithic up until the big Protestant split. Is it just because Protestantism is still with us and most people in the U.S. aren't identifying themselves as Albigensians or Manichaeans or whatever?
This sudden interest in the Spanish Reconquest started because my "British and Spanish Empires in the Americas" book is a bit incomprehensible without more of an understanding of the Spanish Reconquest than I have. I've read a bit about the English wars in Ireland, but not about the Spanish Reconquest. The author of the other huge book kept talking about how the character of conquest in the Americas on the part of the two empires was affected by their previous experiences in colonization/conquest viz. Ireland and Moorish Spain, so I'm trying to catch up.
