María Rosa Menocal

María Rosa Menocal was a scholar of medieval literary and cultural history particularly known for her work on intercultural exchange and tolerance on the Iberian Peninsula. Born in Havana, her family left the country a year after the Revolution, settling in Philadelphia. She received her BA (’73), MA in French (’75), and PhD in philology (’79) from the University of Pennsylvania. Upon completion of her degree, she taught at Bryn Mawr and Penn before coming to Yale in 1986 first as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, then an associate professor the next year, before being appointed full professor in 1992. In 1993, she was named the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and in 2005 a Sterling Professor, one of only forty, the highest rank a Yale professor can attain. From 2001-2012, she served as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, overseeing an expansion of the center’s activities, including the appointment during her tenure of an incredible 285 new academic fellows, representing a wide array of different fields, as well as a half-dozen new funded fellowships. She introduced popular programs such as Films at the Whitney and the Franke Lectures in Humanities, invited academic lectures on a variety of subjects. In 2011 she was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, one of the highest honors a medievalist scholar can receive.

Menocal’s work focused on medieval cultural interchange during the so-called convivencia, a theorized period of religious and cultural tolerance under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs in Spain and their successors stretching from the conquest of Visigothic Spain in the early eighth century to the fall of the Emirate of Granada at the end of the Middle Ages in 1491. Her most prominent works on the subject are The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Pennsylvania, 1987), which called for a reexamination of cultural contact between the Islamic and Christian worlds in medieval Spain, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Duke, 1994), which discussed the literary aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the conquest of the last Islamic kingdom in Iberia, The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of Al-Andalus (Cambridge, 2000), which helped to introduce a non-Arabic speaking scholarly audience to the cultural development of Islamic Spain, and finally the book widely considered her masterpiece, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown, and Company, 2002), which made a powerful case for the existence of a convivencia, elaborating and introducing a wider audience to the idea first proposed by Spanish philologist Américo Castro decades before. Despite allegations of idealism, the concept struck a chord with both academic and popular readers, and the book continues to be read today; indeed, it was turned into a documentary released on PBS in 2019. A final book on the topic of Christian and Islamic interaction was The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (2008). Outside of her work on Spain, she continued to publish on Italian publications include the textbook Primavera: An Introduction to Italian Language and Culture, written with Helen McFie and Luigi Sera (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), a study of rewritings and re-imaginings of the work of the Italian poet Dante, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Duke, 1991).

More information:

In memoriam: María Rosa Menocal. https://news.yale.edu/2012/10/15/memoriam-mar-rosa-menocal

Maria Rosa Menocal, 59, professor of medieval Spain. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/obituaries/20121029_Maria_Rosa_Menocal__59__professor_of_medieval_Spain.html

María Rosa Menocal’s personal site. https://mariarosamenocal.com/