The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion by Jessica A. Coope (review)

306BOOK REVIEWS The library ofSaint-Riquier is lost,but we have a CaroUngian catalogue.The Ubrary owned Alcuin on the Trinity, and Alcuin was AngUbert's friend, but there is no discussion of Alcuin's Trinitarian symboUsm. A magnificent Gospel book feG???ß given by Charlemagne) now in AbbevUle and a Psalter (B.N. Lat. 13159) were made duringAngUbert's abbacy, but neither is mentioned here.Yet the Gospel Book has importantTrinitarian symboUsm Ui its initials. Dr. Rabe reproduces plans of the basiUca and the church of the Virgin from the 1959-1989 excavations of Dr. Honoré Bernard, but there is no mention of his 1993 Paris thesis "St-Riquier Archéologie et Historiographie." We should be told if this was unavailable, or if Bernard and Rabe disagree about the reconstruction ofthe abbey. Here again Dr. Rabe leaves her readers regretting that she was not able to write a fuUer study of such an important monument. Bernard has found porphyry and serpentine columns,which may be reused materials reflecting the influence of buUdings we know too Uttle about.The discovery of an atrium at the west end of the church, caUed "paradisus" in AngUbert's description , also suggests such imitation. But what is the symboUsm of "paradisus"? Where so much is lost, the exploration of CaroUngian architectural symboUsm requires speculation. This is a brave attempt at exploration, but whether AngUbert's "visual and sensory mimetic structure" was the "consistent symbolic vision" suggested here may be beyond what we can now know. David Ganz University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill The Martyrs ofCórdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age ofMass Conversion. By Jessica A. Coope. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 113. $25.00.) When Visigothlc Spain fell to Muslim invaders in 711, the Iberian Christian population found itself absorbed into the Islamic empire as a subject community .Though protected from forced conversion, the Andalusian Christians were expected to maintain a low profile religiously, sociaUy, and poUticaUy in the newly and incompletely Islamized al-Andalus. Over the course ofthe eighth and early ninth centuries, the numbers of Muslims in Spain increased due primarily to immigration but also as a result of increased conversion. During the same period , al-Andalus benefited greatly from its economic and cultural ties with the Muslim "heartland" in the eastern Mediterranean. In the face of the increasing numbers of Muslims and the growing strength and self-consciousness of Muslim culture in Spain, many Christians found themselves happUy participating in Andalusian society in ways that seemed, from the perspective of some other Christians, to be compromising their cultural-reUgious identity as LatinChristians .The most famous historical result of these circumstances was the socaUed "Cordobán Martyrs' Movement" of the 850's, when forty-eight Christians from Ui and around the capital city of Cordoba were executed either for denouncing Islam in pubUc or—in the case of products of mixed marriages—for BOOK REVIEWS307 refusing to renounce their Christianity and embrace Islam.VirtuaUy eveiythmg that we know about the victims ofthese executions comes from the apologetic treatises andpassiones that were written on behalf of the martyrs by Eulogius and Paul Alvarus, who Uved in Cordoba at the time. Both wrote in response to the lack of enthusiasm that the martyrs' actions eUcited from the more assimilated Christians of Cordoba. Coope's book is by no means the first to treat the subject.The earUest and most complete overview—in the anglophonic scholarly world, anyway—was Edward P. Colbert's published dissertation, The Martyrs of Cordoba (850859 ):A Study ofthe Sources (CathoUc University ofAmerica Press, 1962). More modern takes on the subject—which have insisted on scrutinizing the motives of Eulogius and Alvarus before assessing the meaning of the movement itself— began with JamesWaltz's article ("The Significance of theVoluntary Martyrs of Ninth-Century Cordoba," Muslim World, 60 [1970]) and continued with my own book (Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain [Cambridge, 1988]).Though Coope does not review the historiography of the subject in any detaU, it is clear from her work that she has,for the most part, read and benefited from the work of her predecessors.The end result is a balanced treatment of the avaUable...