THIS BOOK OFFERS a ground-breaking perspective on Judeo-Christian coexistence in medieval Spain, in particular on the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), one of the most important pilgrimage routes in Europe. The concept of peaceful, parallel religious societies in medieval Spain was first described by the Spanish historian Américo Castro. Castro envisioned a utopian period of cultural interchanges, but did not make an adequate case that an interconfessional Utopia surfaced in the writings of the period. In reaction to this overarching depiction of coexistence, David Nirenberg “questions the very existence of an age of peaceful and idyllic” relations by arguing that anti-Semitic violence “was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minorities in medieval Spain.” Similarly, Mark Cohen writes of “the gloomy position” of Castilian Jews during the Middle Ages. While the historical records examined by Nirenberg and Mark Cohen expose the non-monolithic character of abutting belief communities, these scholars fail to take into account literary testimony of cooperation between Christians and Jews. In this book, I uncover new evidence of Judeo-Christian cooperation in Castilian monasteries on the Camino de Santiago. My book reveals that a collaborative climate endured in these monasteries as demonstrated by the transmission of cuaderna vía poetry from Christians to Jews.

I focus on poems written by Jews in Castilian (Spanish) during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that illustrate a progressive mastery of cuaderna vía poetry. This metrical form began to take shape within twelfth-century French monastic circles as an outgrowth of a renewed appreciation for Classical Antiquity. Much attention was paid to the Greek ruler Alexander the Great (b. 356–d. 32 BCE), whose life was recounted by clerics from the order of Cluny in narrative poems which comprised dodecasyllabic alexandrine verses. During the early thirteenth century, Castilian cuaderna vía poetry was created by clerics working at Castilian monasteries on the Camino de Santiago, who were influenced by French Cluniac monks invited to teach at their monastic schools. The Castilian monasteries that received Cluniac monks sought integration within Catholic Christendom by practising customs popularized by Cluny, such as the versification of liturgical hymns. Castilian clerics also had an economic motivation for adapting French metrics, namely, the familiarity of alexandrine verses to French pilgrims travelling along the Camino de Santiago might encourage them to make donations.