Ciudades de Andalucía: paisajes e imágenes. Siglos XIII-XVII by Andrea Mariana Navarro (review)

In Ciudades de Andalucía: paisajes e imágenes. Siglos XIII-XVII, Andrea Mariana Navarro makes an important contribution to a growing corpus of peninsular scholarship that connects the medieval to the early modern and the literary to the historical. Navarro's succinct and useful introduction (11–14) explains her approach to the study of urban images and imaginaries through the interdisciplinary lens of cultural history. By recuperating the individual and collective voices of those people who inhabited, governed, visited, or were otherwise tasked with visually or textually representing the Christian kingdoms of Córdoba, Jaén, and Sevilla (which were conquered by Ferdinand III in 1236, 1246, and 1248, respectively) between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, she explores the ways in which the subjective constructions of these kingdoms are marked by sensorial and affective experiences, social values, economic or political interests, and cultural expectations and models. This is especially pertinent to a key discussion woven throughout her book's four chapters and nearly four hundred pages: the relationship between the real and the ideal as these kingdoms' cities and territories self-consciously transformed into "modern" spaces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Significantly, Navarro's study includes the non-urban spaces (señoríos, villas, aldeas, etc.) that existed in often-complicated interdependence with the great Christian cities of medieval and early modern Andalucía—including, in addition to each kingdom's namesake, Úbeda, Baeza, and Andújar in the Kingdom of Jaén; and Carmona, Jerez de la Frontera, and Écija in the Kingdom of Sevilla. (It should be noted that, although this book covers the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries, the Kingdom of Granada, which was conquered in 1492, is not a protagonist of its pages but, rather, a secondary character.)

The relationship between the urban and the rural is privileged in the two chapters that comprise Part One of Navarro's book: "El espacio exterior de las ciudades" (19–149). Chapter One, "Imágenes de la ciudad y su territorio" (19–100), introduces the reader to the kingdoms of Córdoba, Jaén, and Sevilla, beginning with their jurisdictional construction and authority as they passed from Muslim to Christian rule, and the political and economic instability that these jurisdictions suffered after the fourteenth century. Then, by contrast, the rather stable textual constructions of Andalucía (in Castilian, Arabic, and other languages), century after century, asserted and praised the region's unparalleled beauty, riches, and fertility, often making use of classical texts, myths, legends, nostalgia, or sentimentality alongside first- and second-hand accounts and observations. Navarro then tackles the subject of the pictorial vistas urbanas that grew in popularity and demand from the sixteenth century onward, demonstrating their congruence with the major tropes already seen in textual constructions of Andalucía, which included a clear adherence to the traditions of laudatio and locus amoenus and a heavy focus on the symbiotic relationship between the city, its waterways, and its countryside. Chapter Two, "Imágenes de la ciudad-fortaleza" (101–149), examines the forms and functions of the walls (with their gates and towers), castles, forts, and other structures that physically and symbolically defined both Andalucía's cities and its fluctuating frontiers. The purposes of these fortifications went far beyond resisting enemy forces or serving as sites of rendition: they enabled and regulated trade, travel, and communication; they were wielded by nobles and royals in struggles for power and sovereignty; and they assisted in establishing and maintaining social hierarchies and cultural identities within the cities themselves. Even as city walls slowly transformed from defensive into decorative structures (if not into ruins), and the alcázares from military into residential compounds, they continued to characterize Andalucía's urban centers by projecting multivalent images, both without and within.

Appropriately, these physical and symbolic gateways also serve as entrée into to the second half of Navarro's study, which focuses on the material, social, and spiritual lives...