Edging toward Iberia by Jean Dangler (review)

This short but extremely ambitious book can be seen as a manifesto that encourages us to rethink not only how “Iberia” might be conceived within the framework of Mediterranean Studies but also how such an effort may shed light on approaches to premodern history more generally. It is a curious feature of Mediterranean Studies that the study of medieval Spain fits awkwardly within it: too often, the region is seen as being at once exemplary of the Mediterranean paradigm, and completely exceptional. While Dangler’s work does not take on this challenge directly, it makes an interesting and useful contribution to current scholarship in the field. Dangler comments on how the field of medieval studies was “invented” in the nineteenth century by figures such as Gaston Paris and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and notes the fundamental role of national philologies in determining the future shape of the discipline (5). This aspect of Dangler’s work has been seen as signalling a lack of engagement with the current state of the field of Iberian Studies: “it is not obvious that such agendas continue to inform Iberian scholarship,” writes Miriam Shadis in a review of Dangler’s book in The Medieval Review. What it actually signals, I think, is an effort to situate the study of medieval Spain more squarely in the wider context of the study of the “non-modern” cultures of the lands within and around the Iberian Peninsula. While this effort may not be entirely successful, that does not mean that it is not worth making.

The seven short chapters of this book (117 pages of text in total) are divided into three parts: the first methodological, the second exploring economic and cultural exchange, and the third introducing more speculative considerations on culture and identity. Part 1 is, to my mind, the most successful in that it lays out several “fundamental problems” related to periodization, the definition of geographical regions, and the value of “the system or network as a method of analysis” (5). Dangler identifies the presuppositions that underlie the definition of the millennium from 500 to 1500 CE as the “Middle Ages” and, quoting Margreta de Grazia, suggests that the “medieval/modern divide” is not so much a marker of a temporal shift as a “ ‘value judgement’ ” (24). Accordingly, Dangler follows José Rabasa in referring not to the “pre-modern” but to the “non-modern,” as a way of avoiding the teleological assumptions that underlie such terminology (26–27). This section of the book is genuinely useful, and I would recommend it to students looking for a theoretical overview of medieval periodization. The following section, on geography, is somewhat less successful. It sets out Iberia as “a theoretical concept that designates a variable space of interaction between various groups of people” (31), “a network of interrelated attachments” or “series of associations” (32). Within this theoretical framework, “edging toward Iberia is edging toward Africa and the Middle East at the same time” (33). While the existence of such interconnections is indisputable, the resulting conclusion is less satisfactory. Having problematized the term “Iberia,” what kind of work are the terms “Africa” and —even worse— “Middle East” doing? Aren’t these, each in their own way, anachronistic theoretical constructs?

Part 1 continues, in the book’s second chapter, to address network theory and world-systems analysis. Dangler acknowledges that Castell’s foundational study of networks emerges from a modern paradigm, and notes the significant differences that result, especially with regard to economic history; she does not, however, address these differences in any substantial way. Moving to world-systems analysis as formulated by Wallerstein, we should be on firmer ground with regard to economic theory due to Wallerstein’s own commitment to theorizing the function and impact of capitalist systems. Citing the foundational work of Janet Abu-Lughod, who brought Wallerstein’s work to bear on the study of developments in medieval economic history (45), Dangler concludes that world-systems analysis, like network theory...