Chapter 8. A historical controversy about politeness and public argument

Admiration and Awe

10.1093/oso/9780198797456.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Antonio Urquízar-Herrera

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

The Other ◽

Cultural Hybridity ◽

Early Modern Spain ◽

Systematic Analysis ◽

Historical Discourse ◽

Ecclesiastical History ◽

Bell Tower ◽

Negotiation Of Identity ◽

Historical Controversy

This book offers the first systematic analysis of the cultural and religious appropriation of Andalusian architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Spain was left with a significant Islamic heritage: Córdoba Mosque had been turned into a cathedral, in Seville the Aljama Mosque’s minaret was transformed into a Christian bell tower, and Granada Alhambra had become a Renaissance palace. To date this process of Christian appropriation has frequently been discussed as a phenomenon of hybridisation. However, during that period the construction of a Spanish national identity became a key focus of historical discourse. The aforementioned cultural hybridity encountered partial opposition from those seeking to establish cultural and religious homogeneity. The Iberian Peninsula’s Islamic past became a major concern and historical writing served as the site for a complex negotiation of identity. Historians and antiquarians used a range of strategies to re-appropriate the meaning of medieval Islamic heritage as befitted the new identity of Spain as a Catholic monarchy and empire. On one hand, the monuments’ Islamic origin was subjected to historical revisions and re-identified as Roman or Phoenician. On the other hand, religious forgeries were invented that staked claims for buildings and cities having been founded by Christians prior to the arrival of the Muslims in Spain. Islamic stones were used as core evidence in debates shaping the early development of archaeology, and they also became the centre of a historical controversy about the origin of Spain as a nation and its ecclesiastical history.

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All Hail to the Archpriest

10.1093/oso/9780198840343.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Peter Lake ◽

Michael Questier

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Church And State ◽

Good Deal ◽

The Core ◽

Public Argument ◽

The Relationship ◽

Public Politics

This volume revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as the ‘Archpriest Controversy’. We argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy. Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualized by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic had been driven into irrelevance.

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