Date:
Location:
"The Politics of Identity in the History of the Mozarabic Rite: From Medieval to Early Modern Iberia and Beyond"
Speaker:
Susan Leslie Boynton, Professor of Historical Musicology, Columbia University.
The Mozarabic rite is a medieval Latin liturgical tradition of Visigothic origin that was practiced by Christians in Muslim Iberia. The rite survived in the Mozarabic community of Toledo even though the cathedral adopted the Roman rite after the Christian conquest of the city in 1085. In the Middle Ages the collective identity of the Mozarabs, who had assimilated customs of the Arab-speaking majority, continued to be associated with their use of the Arabic language and their adherence to the Mozarabic rite. By the fifteenth century the community and its ancient rite were both on the wane. In the years around 1500, the Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, oversaw the production of new editions and established the regular observance of the rite in a chapel he endowed in the cathedral. Cisneros’s liturgical projects are related not only to his contributions to philology but also to his leading role in the conquest of Oran in 1509.
The consequences of Cisneros’ campaign for the Mozarabic rite ultimately extended far beyond Toledo to become a symbol of national identity in early modern Castile. After Cisneros, as the image of Christian Spain was being shaped through historical writing (including the forged “False Chronicles”), the liturgy became central to the notion of uninterrupted Christian observance as represented by the Mozarabs. Appealing to liturgical texts as a form of historical evidence (common practice in the early modern period) brought the Mozarabic rite to the center of debates concerning religious groups in medieval Iberia. However, even as the Mozarabic community became ever more crucial to protonationalist narratives, the meaning of the term “Mozarab” was increasingly controversial. Through the eighteenth century, the Mozarabic rite was the measure of cultural identity for a community whose relationship to the polity remained somewhat ambiguous but nevertheles served as a symbol of the Spanish nation. In the twentieth century and into the present, the Mozarabic rite continues to engender a panoply of constructed meanings that relate more directly to perceptions of the Mozarabic identity than to the liturgy itself.
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of the Classics, Harvard University.
Co-Chair:
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.
