The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

Maria Rosa Menocal - Speaker
R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University

Professor Menocal's educational background includes three degrees from the University of Pennsylvania: a BA in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures, an MA in French, and a PhD in Romance Philology. She also studied at the Institut d'etudes francaises d'A vignon of Bryn Mawr College, as well as the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Menocal completed a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr and a Senior Faculty Fellowship at Yale University, where she was also a Fellow in the Whitney Humanities Center. Her writing and teaching is in the field of medieval literatures and cultures, with special focus in recent years on the vibrant mixed cultures of medieval Spain. Her teaching credentials include professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College and Yale University, where she is currently Director of the Whitney Humanities Center.

Her numerous publications include The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage,Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: FromBorges to Boccacio,and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. The Literature of Al-Andalus in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series is a recent co-edited project and The Ornament of the World: How Muslims,Christians and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain has recently been published by Little, Brown. Presently Dr. Menocal is organizing an extended collection of newly gathered visual materials with roots in medieval Spain; these materials are connected to a series of lectures titled “Out of Arabic: The Foundations of Castilian Culture,” recently delivered at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

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