Were Women Part of Convivencia?

Abstract

Women were, in their daily lives, part of the convivencia among Muslims, Jews, and Christians that existed to a greater or lesser extent in medieval Spain. Like men, women interacted with people of different religions and negotiated their way through the mixture of cooperation, prejudice, and cultural borrowing that made up convivencia. Many texts from the period, however, almost all of which were written by men, ignore or devalue women’s roles in a multicultural society. These texts often either neglect to mention women at all or express ambivalence about their value as members of confessional communities, characterizing women as so weak and malleable in their identity and faith that they can be easily converted to another religion.