notes to pages 67–69 201
American Medieval Studies.” American Historical Review 103 , no. 3 ( 1998 ): 677 –
704 ; Paul Freedman, “The Medieval Other: The Middle Ages as Other,” in Mar-
vels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagina-
tions, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, 1 – 26 ; Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry
22 ( 1995 ): 1 – 33 ; and Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic His-
tory, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 , no. 1 ( 1990 ): 87 – 108.
107. Particularly influential is Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System”
( 1966 ) in The Interpretation of Cultures, esp. 90. See the epilogue for a fuller dis-
cussion of Geertz.
108. With Iberian studies, see Thomas F. Glick and Oriol Pi- Sunyer, “Accul-
turation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 11 , no. 2 ( 1969 ): 136 – 54 ; and Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and
Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and
Cultural Formation. Glick and Pi- Sunyer, “Acculturation,” 138 : “The whole pro-
cess of national formation has hitherto been discussed in the absence of a scien-
tifically valid theory of cultural relations. This failure to come to grips with the
cultural determinants of national identity has landed the historiographic polemic
in a morass of confusion and guaranteed that it shall remain there, appeals to
philosophers and historical experts notwithstanding.” See also Glick, Islamic and
Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, xviii: “In general, viewed from the com-
parative perspective that motivates this volume, the study of medieval Spain, of the
conflict between two opposing and radically different cultural and social blocs, has
suffered from an inadequate theory of culture or, from the incomplete conjunction
of cultural and social theory.”
109. Borrowing a phrase from Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and
Function in Latin Christianity, 13 : “Plainly, some solid and seemingly unmovable
cultural furniture has piled up somewhere in that capacious lumber room, the back
of our mind.”
110. Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?”
111. Michael Taussig’s notion of a “public secret” highlights this same tension.
See his Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative.
112. Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?”; Asad, Gene-
alogies of Religion; and Gregory, “The Other Confessional History.”
113. Lourie, “A Jewish Mercenary,” 368 ; Barton, “Traitors to the Faith?” 38 ;
Catlos, “Muhammad Abenadalill,” 279 , 302 ; Echevarría Arsuaga, Caballeros en la
frontera, 86 ; García Sanjúan, “Mercenarios cristianos,” 443 – 46 ; and Burns, “Ren-
egades, Adventurers, and Sharp Businessmen,” 341 – 42.
114. Wieruszowski, “La Corte di Pietro,” 196.
115. See chapter 4.
116. Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 76 – 118 ; Jean Bethke
Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self ; Walter Ullmann, “The Development of