Category Archives: Retellings of the Hebrew Bible

The Curse of Ham in Medieval Iberia and the Enslavement of Black Africans

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image of manuscript of Crónica dos feitos da Guiné

Gomes Eanes de Azurara, Crónica dos feitos da Guiné (BNF Port 41 f. 1r)

Modern capitalism has its origins in the institution of chattel slavery, in particular the enslavement of Black Africans. As we know, all institutions require complicated symbolic systems to legitimate them and reinforce their power in society. Enslavers attempt to justify and support their actions with robust symbolic systems. One of the ways in which Europeans justified the enslavement of Black Africans was the Curse of Ham, or the idea that Black Africans are descended from Ham, who was cursed among his brothers for not covering his father’s nudity, and for not abstaining from sex with his wife while sheltering on the ark for forty days. In order for this Biblical legend to justify the enslavement of Black Africans, two things have to happen. First, Ham must be identified with Black Africans, and second, actual Black Africans must be identified as slaves.

Scholars frequently cite the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by Gomes Eanes de Azurara, written in 1453, as the first documented example of these ideas coming together as a justification of Early Modern slavery. In it, Azurara identifies Black Africans living in Guinea as the descendants of Ham, whose slavery is a result of the Biblical Curse of Ham:

And here you must note that these Blacks, given that they are Muslims like the others, are in any event the slaves of the latter by ancient custom, which I believe to be because of the curse that Noah cast upon his son Ham after the flood, by which he cursed him, that his generation be made subject to all the others of the world.

E aquí haveis de notar que estes negros, posto que sejam mouros como os outros, são porém servos daqueles por antigo costume, o qual creio que seja por causa da maldição que depois do dilúvio lançou Noé sobre seu filho Cã, pela qual o maldisse, que sua geraçao fosse sujeita a todalas outras do mundo… (Zurara 85; Tinhorão 51)

Azurara links the two curses of Ham: (1) Blackness and (2) Slavery in what is considered a pivotal moment for the theory of race in Europe, one shaped by the incipient Portuguese slave trade. This ideological turn is one of the ideas that unlocks the possibility of modern chattel slavery and consequently the development of modern capitalist world systems, so it is worth drilling down a bit into the ideological landscape of race and of interpretations of the story of the sons of Noah and in particular, the curse of Ham.

What is the genealogy of this idea on the Iberian Peninsula? How do we get from the Biblical Ham to the beginnings of Biblical justifications of slavery in the Early Modern period that were shaped by and in turn reinforced the transatlantic slave trade?

We’ll begin with the text in the Hebrew Bible, then trace the development of the Curse of Ham in medieval sources, focusing on Iberian writers and artists.

The question of the geographical distribution of the sons of Noah and their relative skin tones is post-biblical. The Biblical Curse of Ham deals strictly with enslavement. As a punishment for his disrespect and disobedience, the descendants of Ham (through his son Canaan) are cursed to be slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japheth:

May God enlarge Japheth,
And let him dwell in the tents of Shem;
And let Canaan be a slave to them. (Gen 9:20-29)

It’s clear to see how this story was used in the Biblical context to justify the Israelite subjugation of the Canaanites in their conquest of the Promised Land, but less so how it came to justify the enslavement of Black Africans. For this, two things need to happen: First: Ham needs to be Black. Second, Blackness needs to be associated with slavery.

How does Ham become black?

The idea develops over time. In sources from antiquity there is no clear link between skin color and slavery. Late antique Rabbinic traditions such as those of R. Huna and R. Joseph (fourth century) in Genesis Rabbah distinguish between blackness on the one hand, and slavery on the other, but do not conflate the two (Goldenberg, Curse 168). In his study of the Curse of Ham in Jewish tradition, David Goldenberg argues that over time, as slavery in the Mediterranean began to be associated increasingly with Black Africans, Ham’s twin curses of Blackness and slavery became more common (Goldenberg, Curse 174).

Medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions attribute the blackness of Ham’s descendants as God’s punishment for his disobedience and sexual incontinence, two characteristics stereotypically attributed to Black Africans by white supremacist pseudo-science. According to these traditions, although Noah and Noah’s sons were commanded to abstain from sex with their wives during their time on the ark, Ham and his wife ignored the ban and as a punishment God turned Ham’s semen black, which would ensure that his son Canaan, and in turn all of Canaan’s children, would be born Black. This is repeated in a number of influential sources known to Iberian authors, who in turn introduce their own innovations to the legend.

The Muslim commentator Ibn Mutarrif Al-Tarafi, writing in Sevilla in the eleventh century, repeats the tradition that Ham’s semen turned black as a punishment for disobeying God on the Ark, but changes Ham’s crime from having sex with her during a period of mandated abstinence to beating her, swapping out sexual incontinence for domestic violence as supposed characteristics of Black Africans:

Qatada relates that there were only eight people on the Ark: Noah, his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japeth; Ham hit his wife on the Ark and for this reason Noah asked God to turn his seed black, and that is the origin of the Blacks (al-Tarafi 69)

Another variation of the legend found in the Talmud that circulated in the Iberian Peninsula states that there were three of the ark’s passengers who were cursed for violating the abstinence order: the dog, the crow, and Ham. The dog’s punishment was to remain attached to his partner after coitus, the crow’s was to spit during coitus, and Ham’s was for his seed and therefore his descdendants to turn Black (Goldenberg, Black and Slave 52). The first Western Latin reference is found in the 1245 Extractiones de Talmut, a Latin translation of key passages of the Talmud meant to serve as a resource for anti-Jewish polemicists. Luis Girón-Negrón observes some fifty years later, this legend makes its way into the Libro del Cavallero Zifar. Interestingly, here the author conflates the name Ham (Cam) with that of the dog (can) (Wagner 37; Girón-Negrón 284).

Noahic geographies and race

twelfth century T.O. map, British LIbrary

T-O Map Etymologiae 12th c. British Library, Royal 12 F. IV, f.135v

Later medieval copies of Isidore of Seville’s 7th-century Etymologies feature maps that associate the continents with the sons of Noah: Japeth with Europe, Shem with Asia, and Ham with Africa, and Medieval Arabic sources typically associate Ham with contemporary Black Africans. The influential Persian historian Al-Tabari (9th c), whose work is widely cited in al-Andalus, confirms this tradition in his History that Ham’s son Canaan is the progenitor of the  “Blacks, Nubians, Fezzan, Zanj, Zaghawah, and all the peoples of the Sudan” (al-Tabari 2: 11).

Christian sources, some of which draw at least partially on Arabic geographers, likewise bring different agendas to bear on the legend. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, in his De Rebus Hispaniae, composed around 1250, notes that the sons of Ham occupy Africa, but reserves part of Asia, normally apportioned to Shem, to the sons of Japhet. His comment “that which the sons of Ham and Japhet possessed in Asia was by way of war.” This is a reference to Crusade, for he also details that the sons of Japhet also possessed the “mountains Amano and Toro, of Cilicia and Siria, that are in Asia, and all of Europe to Cádiz of Hercules, at the farthest reaches of Spain” (Jiménez de Rada 62). Cádiz was at the time still under Muslim rule, and would be for another decade, and the Crusader siege of Antioch was in 1098, but grew to great symbolic prominence as a model for holy war on the Peninsula.

Map indicating locations of Taurus and Nur Mountains in Asia Minor

Taurus and Nur Mountains source: Google Maps

The compilers of Alfonso X’s universal history, the General estoria, begun in the late thirteenth century and completed during the reign of Alfonso’s son Sancho IV in the early fourteenth, further develop the Noahid legacy in the context of military and political struggle between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula:

Whereas, anyone who wishes to know from where this great and longstanding enmity between Christians and Muslims may here see the reason; for the Gentiles and Christians that are alive today come primarily from Shem and Japhet, who populated Asia and Europe. Yet still, despite the fact that some of the descendants of Ham have become Christian, either by preaching or forcefully as prisoners or slaves. And the Muslims come principally from Ham, who populated Africa, but there are some of them descended from Shem or Japhet, who by the false preaching of Muhammad become Muslims, whereby we have, according to this right and privilege that our father Noah granted to the descendants of Shem and Japheth, that wherever the Muslims may be in whichever other lands, that because they are Muslims, are all from Ham, and if we might take from them their property through combat or by any type of force, and even capture them and make them our slaves, that we commit no sin or error in so doing. And should we cease to fight them it should only be out of our better judgment or if by chance we are not prepared because of their greater numbers… (Alfonso X 1: 91)

Here the compilers of the GE build on Jiménez de Rada’s crusader geography with a bit of crusader theology, reinforcing the bulls of crusade that supported military efforts against Islam first in the Iberian Peninsula and later in the Eastern Crusades. Still, there is no reference to Blackness per se, only to the association of Muslims with Africa.

Miniature of Banquet of Balthazar in Alba Bible

Banquet of Balthazar, Alba Bible (source: Wikipedia)

It is not until the Biblia de Alba, compiled over a century after the General estoria, but still some years before Azurara’s chronicle, where we see one of the first explicit links between Ham, Blackness, and slavery. Completed in 1433, some twenty years before Azurara’s Chronicle of Guinea, The Biblia de Alba or Biblia de Arragel was a collaboration between Rabbi Moshe Arragel and an anonymous Christian cleric or clerics and is unique in its ecumenical approach to combining Christian and Jewish commentaries on the Torah.[1] In any event, Arragel equates the offspring of Ham’s son Canaan with the Muslim Black Africans of his own day. He writes: “And Canaan was a a slave of slaves, and some say that they are the Black Muslims, who are slaves wherever they be” (“E Chanaan fue siervo de siervos. Algunos dizen que son los moros negros, que do quier que cativos son”) (Paz y Meliá f. 33r; Goldenberg, Black and Slave 108 n 7). The miniature that illustrates this passage (below) depicts Ham with stereotypically Black African features, and is the first such depiction of Ham I was able to identify.

Miniature depicting sons of Noah from Alba Bible

MS Alba Bible f 33r. Courtesy Fundación Casa de Alba (Goldenberg 111)

These examples together form a fairly clear trajectory of a theory of race used to justify the enslavement of Black Africans. Just as soon as Iberians began the exploration of West Africa and began to develop what would in the space of decades become a full blown global slave trade, Iberian writers expanded on previous uses of the Curse of Ham to identify Black Africans as the descendants of Ham bearing the curse of enslavement, and to locate these Black Africans in actual time and space building on existing geographic traditions and by the time of Azurara, on actual Black bodies in real time.

Works Cited

  • al-Tarafi, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Mutarrif al-Kinani. Storie dei profeti. Translated by Roberto Tottoli, Il melangolo, 1997.
  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • al-Tabari. The History of Al-Tabari: An Annotated Translation. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, SUNY Press, 1989.
  • Carasik, Michael, editor. The Commentator’s Bible: Genesis. Translated by Michael Carasik, Jewish Publication Society, 2018.
  • Girón-Negrón, Luis M. “La Maldición Del Can: La Polémica Antijudía En El Libro Del Caballero Zifar.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), vol. 78, no. 3, 2001, pp. 275–95.
  • Goldenberg, David M. Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. de Gruyter, 2017.
  • —. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press, 2005.
  • Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. Historia de los hechos de España (De Rebus Hispaniae). Translated by Juan Fernández Valverde, Alianza Editorial, 1989.
  • Jordão, Levy Maria, editor. Bullarium patronatus Portugalliae regum in ecclesiis Africae, Asiae atque Oceaniae: bullas, brevia, epistolas, decreta actaque Sanctae Sedis ab Alexandro III ad hoc usque tempus amplectens. Ex Typographia nationali, 1868.
  • Paz y Meliá, Antonio. Biblia de Alba. 1899.
  • Phillips, William D., Jr. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
  • Tinhorão, José Ramos. Os negros em Portugal: uma presença silenciosa. 3a edição., Caminho, 2019.
  • Wagner, Charles Philip, editor. El libro del cavallero Zifar (El libro del Cauallero de Dios). University of Michigan, 1929.
  • Williams, John. “Isidore, Orosius, and the Beatus Map.” Imago Mundi, vol. 49, 1997, pp. 7–32.
  • Zurara, Gomes Eanes de. Crónica da Guiné. Edited by José Bragança, Livraria Civilização Editora, 1973.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2021 MLA for the New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies panel. Thanks very much to presider Simone Pinet.

Medieval Iberian retellings of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden

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Medieval Iberia was a hotbed of cross-cultural medieval literary activity. Jewish writers adapted Arabic poetics to give birth to a new Hebrew poetry. Muslim poets penned elaborate Arabic poems based on popular Spanish lyrics. Christian writers pioneered the use of the vernacular to tell Saints’ lives and write court histories. One tradition all three religions had in common was the Hebrew Bible: all three groups retold its stories in both their classical (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic) and vernacular languages. Medieval Iberians of all three religions participated in a common culture of biblical retellings that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with the languages and cultures common to all three groups.

Illumiated page from Cloisters Bible

They have this in common
(Cloisters Bible, Castile, 14th c. Source: wikimedia.org)

In all of these retellings we see the influence of the unique circumstances of the Medieval Iberian coexistence (sometimes peaceful, at other times violent) of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the creation of a specifically Iberian Biblical storyworld. The creators and audiences lived in a world in which the three traditions were conscious of one another and competed for supremacy: their visions of the Biblical world were at once a product of their distinct religions and of the shared reality in which they lived.

I’ve written previously on the General estoria’s (13th c.) retelling of the Song of Songs, the Abraham and Sarah story, and more generally on the influence of rabbinic literature on the emergent vernacular fiction in the General estoria. In this series of posts I’d like to both narrow the focus of each to a single episode, and broaden the scope to include multiple Iberian sources from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions.

Illuminated manuscript page showing Adam and Eve with fig leaves covering genitals

Escorial Beatus
(Escorial, Biblioteca Monasterio, Cod. & II. 5) (source: wikimedia.org)

The story of Adam and Eve addresses in narrative form some of the most fundamental human social issues, from family life to the establishment of an agricultural society. The tale of the awareness gained by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and subsequent expulsion from the garden is an allegory for the development from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society, technology, and the complications that this changes precipitates. 

Jewish sources frame the Adam and Eve story as the blueprint for the human relationship with God, with creation, and as a model for heterosexual family life, and to a lesser extent to explain the role of human error and its consquences. Muslim sources emphasize Adam’s role as the first prophet in a line that end with Muhammad. Christian sources follow the Church’s doctrine of supersessionism, by which Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible point toward redemption in Christ. 

Here I’d like to take a look at three versions of the tale of the expulsion from Eden, from the General Estoria (Castile, 13th c.), the Compendi historial de la biblia (Catalonia, 15th c.), and the Misteri d’Adam i Eva (Valencia, 15th-16th c.). In these works we see very different approaches to brining Biblical narrative to vernacular audiences, and get some sense of how Jewish, Muslim, and Chrstian traditions of the Hebrew Bible shared space in the Medieval Iberian biblical imagination.

Image of Homer and Marge Simpson as Adam and Eve, with Mr Burns as the serpent

Retellings
“Simpsons Bible Stories” (The Simpsons, Season 10, Episode 18, 1999) (source: wikimedia.org)

The General estoria is the universal history of Alfonso X, begun in the mid-thirteenth century and completed by Alfonso’s son Sancho IV at the end or the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century. As part of its history of the world from the earth’s creation to the time of Jesus it includes large sections of a number of biblical books, supplementing the biblical text primarily with the twelfth-century biblical interpretation of French scholastic Petrus Comestor, titled Storia scholastica, and with material from Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, but also with material drawn from Muslim scholarship, Jewish biblical commentary, and a wide selection of Christian apocrypha. 

The chief concern of the compilers of the General estoria seems to be to enrich the telling of the tale with historical and geographical information, but also with details that explain the motivations of the characters and that flesh out the details of the material world in which they live. 

Still from One Million Years BC with Raquel Welch and John Richardson dressed in animal skins

“and clothed them”
Raquel Welch and John Richardson in One Million Years B.C.(dir. John Chaffey, 1966) (source: Chroniques du Cinephile Stakhanoviste)

When Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden, they need clothes to survive in their harsh new reality. After God explains to them the consequences of their disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (exile, childbirth pain, grueling subsistence farming), Adam names Eve, and before showing them the door, “the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife, and clothed them” (Gen 3:21). According to the GE, it is Adam’s contemplation of the skins of the (dead) animals that leads him to realize the fact of his own mortality:

When he threw them out of Paradise, he gave them leather garments made from the skins of dead herd animals that had been alive. And here the gloss says that Adam had never before seen a dead animal, nor knew what death was, and that he then understood that the skins he wore had come from living animals that were now dead, and from this perceived something: that likewise, he himself would die.

E cuando los echava del paraíso dioles unas pelliças fechas de pellejas de ganados muertos que fueron vivos. E diz aquí la glosa que Adam nuncua aún viera cosa muerta ninguna sin sabié qué era muerte, e que entendiesse que de cosas vivas fueran aquellas pieles que él vistié, e eran ya muertas, e que apercibié de sí algo por ello. E esto es que assí morrié él (Alfonso X 1:10)

This makes God, and not Adam and Eve, into the first technologist, showing them how to manipulate their environment to improve their chances of survival, a matter to which the GE is very attentive in its subsequent accounts of the development of a range of technologies by Adam and Eve and their descendents.

Saudi man wearing traditional wreath (source: boredpanda.com)

However, looking at the various sources to which la glosa might refer (the Glosa ordinaria, the Postillae of Nicholas of Lyra or of Hugh of St. Cher), none spells out in such detail Adam’s deduction of his own mortality. Here is where the compilers of the General estoria jump in. They explain that if the animals whose skins Adam wore were once living and now were dead, he deduces that himself would one day die. This novelizes Christian theology that links the exile from the garden with the origin of human mortality.

Elsewhere the General estoria draws on Muslim sources in fleshing out the details of Adam and Eve’s experience. While Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve cultivate the land after their expulsion, it is silent on the particulars. What did they cultivate? Where did they get the seeds? Again, the General estoria addresses this gap in the narrative, this time drawing on the work of “Arab sages”:

According to the writings of the Arab sages who write on the matter, they say that upon the expulsion from Paradise, Our Lord also gave Adam and Eve seeds of grains and legumes and the other things that they would sow and reap in the land they made their living.

E segund que fallamos en escritos de arávigos sabios que fablaron en las razones d’estas cosas dizen que en aquella echada del paraíso que dio otrossí Nuestro Señor Dios a Adam e a Eva las simientes de los panes e de las legumbres e de las otras cosas que sembrassen en la tierra e cogiessen dond se mantoviessen” (Alfonso X 1:11)

These details are found in writing of al-Tabari (9th c.) and al-Tha‘labi (11th c.), both of whom recount a number of traditions in which Adam arrives on earth after the fall wearing a wreath with leaves and seeds from 30 different fruit-bearing plants, or various versions of how he brought grains of wheat to earth, sometimes assisted by the Angel Gabriel (al-Tabari 296; al-Tha’labi 60–62). 

These details about the seeds of agricultural practice (horrible pun intended) serve the General estoria’s goal of accounting for all aspects of human history, not just those that relate to theological issues. Alfonso X employed a number of Christians, Jews, and Muslims at court, and famously translated several Arabic works into Castilian. It is hardly surprising that Jewish and Muslim sources found their way into his works of history.

Corpus Christi procession (Granada, 2013) (source: flickr.com mcsgranada)

Later Christian Iberian retellings are more doctrinaire than the Genera estoria. The fifteenth-century Catalan Compendi historial de la biblia, or ‘Collection of bible stories,’ which sermonizes the action quite heavily. The text deals explicitly with the Adam and Eve’s sin as both a source of human fallibility and an opportunity for redemption in Christ, probably due to the popularity of the Adam and Eve plays during the festival of Corpus Christi, when the consecrated host was paraded through the streets in a procession that included dramatized biblical scenes.  

The narrator introduces the episode of Adam and Eve focusing on Adam’s first sin, the original sin, that of pride, and subordinates all of the Seven Mortal Sins to it. In this way, it brings the biblical tale in line with Catholic theology of sin:

Adam committed the first major sin, which in itself contains the seven mortal sins, that have attached to his entire lineage. The first is pride, in wanting to be equal to our Lord [by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil].

Adam feu .i. peccat maior que tot lo mon, en lo qual encloy .vii. peccats mortals en que hach a esser envolcat tot lo seu linatge. Lo primer es superbia, quant volch esser egual ab nostre Senyor (Serra 9)

Likewise, the narrator glosses God’s words to Eve as she and Adam are expelled from the garden, including the uniquely Christian doctrine that her punishment includes not only the pain of birth but also the sin of conception itself:

And with these words that our Lord said to Eve (that she would birth in pain), we understand that if she had not sinned that women would conceive without sin and birth without pain.

E per aquesta paraula que nostre Senyor dix a Eva, que infantaria ab dolor, se enten que si no hagues peccat que devia la fembra concebre sens peccat e enfantar sens dolor (Serra 10)

The dramatization of this scene in the Valencian drama Misteri d’Adam i Eva (staged as part of the Corpus Christi festival to this day) uses the sources of dramatic dialogue, rather than sermonizing narration, to emphasize women’s deceitfulness and absolve Adam of his complicity, both ideas that were developed in Christian sermons and misogynist literature of the times. 

Adam and Eve float in procession of Corpus Christi (Valencia, 2017)
(source: elvalenciano.es)

Here the author puts the serpent’s lie “you will not die” into the mouth of Eve, who not only gives her husband the forbidden fruit, but actively tricks him into eating it, a detail absent from the biblical text. Eve mocks Adam, asking him why God would provide them with a garden and all the plants and animals within it only to set them up for a fatal punishment?  Why would God, who has provided us with all this, kill us? She even protests that Adam must not think much of her if he won’t even believe her in this:

What’s it to you? Can’t you see that our all-powerful God, in order to scare us innocents, to punish us, told us ‘you will die’? How can you believe that God did not know that I would sin on this day? I’ll say no more; if you don’t want to [eat it], I don’t care, now that I know and clearly understand how little you must think of me. Are you so blind that you cannot see that he has given us life, property, and such standing, that he would neither kill us nor take any of this away from us?

Què us costarà? / ¿No veu que nòstron Déu omnipotent, / per espantar-nos, inosens, / per castigar-nos, / nos dix ‘morreu’? / ¿Com creu que ignorava Déu / que io avia  / de pecar en aquest dia? / No os vull dir més; / si no voleu, no m’i do rés, / que ara conech, / i molt clarament entenc, / quant m’estimau. / ¿Tant sego sou que no mirau. / que qu·ms à dat / vida, béns y tal estat, / no·ms matarà / ni res de asò ens disparagà?” (Huerta Viñas 112–13, ll. 196–213)

This harangue of Eve’s is familiar to us from misogynist literature that portrays women and hysterical, fickle, and verbally aggressive. In fact, this is a well known stereotype in the literature of 15th-century Valencia (see, for example, Jaume Roig’s Spill) that would resonate with popular audiences of the times (Archer). However, for me what most stands out about the dramatic version is how the resources of the genre are brought to bear in making the doctrinal point using the popular language and misogynistic tropes of the day.

In all three examples we see how the texts respond to the biblical narratives using the intellectual and cultural resources of the communities to which they are addressed, and depending on their purpose and the ideology, shape the retelling to reinforce different aspects of the same tale. The General estoria is concerned more with human history and civilization, and therefore places more emphasis on technology and its effects on the development of human society. The Compendi historial de la biblia, as a homiletic and didactic text, seeks to reinforce Christian readings of the Tanakh that connect the narratives to Christian doctrine. The Misteri d’Adam i Eva  does likewise, but is more popular in its disposition and so uses more colloquial language and broader comic tropes as one might expect from a popular drama. All draw on the learned and popular culture of their times in the novelization of the Biblical text, and as we see in many cases, this culture does not hesitate to share resources across religious groups, especially in the case of the General estoria, with its liberal use of Muslim and Jewish scholarship to present a textured retelling of the Biblical text. 

Works cited

  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • al-Tabari. The History of Al-Tabari: An Annotated Translation. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, SUNY Press, 1989.
  • al-Tha’labi, Ahmad ibn Muhammad. Qisas Al-Anbiya (Lives of the Prophets). Brill, 2002.
  • Archer, Robert. The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature. Tamesis, 2004.
  • Huerta Viñas, Ferran. Teatre Bíblic: Antic Testament. Editorial Barcino, 1976.
  • Serra, Guillem, translator. Compendi historial de la Biblia: que ab lo títol de Genesi de Scriptura. A. Verdaguer, 1873, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/21384135.html.

Material from this post was adapted from talks planned for, but, thanks to COVID-19, not given at the Committee for Comparative Literature of the University of Denver and the Mediterranean Studies Group at the University of Colorado.