Dr S.J. Pearce discussing the 'Myth of the Andalusian Paradise' by Dario Fernández Morera

First of all: I'm glad someone is making this sort of post ("here's something interesting someone else wrote regarding a 'badhistory' frame"). This seems like an interesting article I'm going to take more time to finish at a later date.


I haven't read the book, but he's fundamentally correct to place Ornament of the World (a book I have read) in his crosshairs as part of a utopian vision of Islam & Multiculturalism in the middle ages (as the PDF mentions). As others in this thread have pointed out, this image is a real one that's floating around in popular culture and lingers along as a historical remnant impacting future scholarship and cultural productions.

That's perfectly consistent with Pearce observing that the geneology of convivencia debates often unfairly fail to give Castro his due as a careful scholar who reaches more nuanced conclusions than are conveyed in quick pop historiography.

As David Nirenberg has observed

David Nirenberg's scholarship isn't at the roots of the popular conception of convivencia. Communities of Violence is a pretty direct refutation of a tolerant and multicultural middle ages that was especially popular as a left wing rebuttal to perceived right wing concerns (e.g. reactions to war on terror in addition to Spanish contexts). This may somewhat undercut Morera's point but it's also something that's genuinely useful as a useful scholarly counterpoint given how frequently you'll find that left wing utopian vision.

The task of the historian is not to prove the superiority of one civilization or culture over another, and nor is history as a discipline equipped to pass that kind of judgment; that is the role of the politician, the propagandist, the polemicist.

I mean, tell that to the 1619 project. Scholarship and journalism foregrounding advocacy is a heavily debated issue people openly discuss. Historical writing includes its fair share of jerimaids.

On a less partisan note, it's also embedded in the statements of massive amounts of historical work trying to look at big picture analyses of history. Moral judgements can't be completely divorced from historical worldviews.

In a US context, how many historians have explicitly argued over the last 200 years that a free labor civilization is explicitly better or worse than a slave society? I can think of quite a number. This sort of high level civilizational judgment is not rejected today.

Although the framing of Jews, Christians, and Muslims as participants in three separate or one unitary cultures does reflect some scholarly and many popular discussions of life in medieval Spain, the notion of a zero-sum historiography pulls this perspective toward the extreme right, which holds that “Jews [are] a separate ‘race,’ and one with interests that are inimical to whites

There are some good points in places like this, but it also feels as if he's often framing some of these issues as it imply there's no space between "anti political correctness" and "pro-extreme far right" stances. This is being published by ISI not Virginia Dare.

Also, in an era of declining academic job prospects, is it really so wrongheaded to talk about a zero sum world concerning what is or is not receiving academic focus?

/r/badhistory Thread