This essay explores María Rosa Menocal's approach to the culture of medieval Iberia. It focuses particularly on her interest in the cacophonous, or competing and sometimes contradictory voices that lay at the heart of much literature as well as other cultural forms. Her scholarship explored this multiplicity of voices in poetry like the muwashshaḥa, as well as in individual figures who sometimes embraced the culture of the enemy even as they advocated holy war against them. By highlighting these complex forms and figures, María sought to problematize proto-nationalist narratives of Iberian history while also demonstrating the “modernity” of the medieval world. This essay addresses how medieval Iberia has shifted, in both academic and popular perception, since the 1980s when Menocal began writing, and argues that her legacy can best be carried forward by extending her emphasis on the multivalent and cacophonous beyond the Iberian Peninsula and the medieval period.
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