Edging Toward Iberia

In Edging Toward Iberia Jean Dangler proposes a combination of network theory by Manuel Castells and World-Systems Analysis as devised by Immanuel Wallerstein to show how network and system principles can be employed to conceptualize and analyze nonmodern Iberia.

Jean Dangler is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University.

"Dangler’s book is animated by a thorough familiarity with a vast secondary literature. She has exhaustively mined the work of others in the field…Her reading of the secondary literature is always nuanced, generous, and polite…Dangler’s book is excellent reminder that we must approach the history of pre-modern Iberia with great caution….Let us, as Dangler proposes, see the past as the people who lived in it and wrote about it did."

David Wacks, University of Oregon:

"Edging toward Iberia is a major contribution to the field of Iberian studies. Jean Dangler deconstructs the basic assumptions of much research in the field and provides a wealth of new critical tools. It is a theoretical manifesto for the field that has the potential to catalyse much innovative research."

Simone Pinet, Cornell University:

"Edging toward Iberia is nothing short of a provocation. It calls on scholars of medieval Iberia to radically rethink their most basic categories, their founding principles of periodicity and geographical delimitation. Dangler, however, goes far beyond a mere questioning of the appropriateness of terminologies and periodizations – she provides an erudite history of these and their effects on scholarship, and challenges her readers with a complex theoretical framework to reorganize an entire discipline. This is a most original and rousing book."

Josiah Blackmore, Harvard University:

"With the concept and reality of the network, Jean Dangler charts a course for rethinking scholarly approaches to the study of early Iberia. What emerges from this suggestive book is a dazzling and fluid inter-connectedness of Christian, Islamic, and African peoples and ideas. Edging toward Iberia reveals Iberias we scarcely knew existed, until now."