The Valley of the Six Mosques: Work and Life in Medieval Valldigna by Ferran Garcia-Oliver (review)

This book concerns a valley in Spain; principally, it was occupied by Muslim peasants, and ruled by a Cistercian monastery. It is an extraordinarily detailed study of medieval peasant life. Ferran Garcia-Oliver is sensitive to the particularities of this Muslim peasant culture and its various relationships with Christian neighbours, lords, the kingdom, and the wider Islamic Ummah. These relationships provide fascinating insights into inter-religious interactions and understandings at an everyday and sub-elite level. Even more interestingly, the book covers a period of the later Middle Ages when it would be easy to assume that Christian conquest had largely obliterated Islam in conquered territories.

Garcia-Oliver's picture of mosques becoming churches at the close of the Middle Ages - with minaret towers continuing to stand for generations until gravity and time, or wider programmes of restoration and refurbishment, saw their disappearance from the landscape - is a poetic description of a long process. In fact the whole book, despite being an English translation and slightly revised version of the original Spanish edition, is beautifully written. It is also deeply analytical. The widespread peasant recourse to violence for challenges to honour or masculinity is a good example of how the occupants of this valley are treated with an approach which is close to anthropological.

This research reveals, not a story of lordly oppression or religious bigotry, but rather one of almost timeless persistence. Garcia-Oliver is at pains to highlight precisely how 'the peasants' culture identified itself with the mountains and the forests' (p. 42). It is a study that unpicks the rhythms of the agricultural cycles, and which engages with intra-communal cooperation and competition. Peasants vying with each other for land, jockeying for social position, worrying about their old age and descendants, and counting their animals, and watching their crops, all populate the pages of this book. In this respect it is a snapshot of the longue durée of Iberian peasantry. We are also introduced to particularly Iberian novelties like silk and rice. We see the economic life of the peasantry in considerable detail. Networks of debt and credit, the lack of legal tender, and widespread peasant mobility will be familiar to specialists concerned with other valleys and other peasants.

This is a magnificent study, and one could almost believe that, for a time, Garcia-Oliver lived in the Valley of the Six Mosques.