A Spanish Science?: Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and the National Value of Muslim and Jewish Spain

The talk would explore the construction of knowledge about the Iberian Muslim and Jewish past in Spain at the last part of the 19th century. Tracing the principal concerns of Spanish historians in turning their attention to a part of the history of the country that had been largely neglected, the talk would underscore the capital influence of the works of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in the development of orientalist scholarship. It would be suggested that the “patrimonialization” of the scientific, philosophic, and literary works of Iberian Muslims and Jews proposed by Menéndez Pelayo against the backdrop of the famous “Polemic of Spanish science” would set a full research agenda through which a new generation of scholars tried to unravel the influx of oriental ideas in the Iberian Peninsula. Underlying these historiographical queries was a “nationalist” argument that sought to underscore the greatness of the Spanish intellectual tradition.

You can follow the event here

Speaker: Pablo Bornstein (Postdoctoral Researcher at Complutense University of Madrid)

Sponsors: RCCHU; Complutense University of Madrid