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4.5
The last decade has seen fine work written in English dealing with Sicily's multicultural golden age. Only a few of these books have been authored by women (Dawn Marie Hayes and Jacqueline Alio come to mind). With this publication, Professor Sarah Davis-Secord assumes her well-deserved place in an elite sisterhood of scholars that is writing, and rewriting, the medieval history of a unique place and making the topic more intelligible to those just discovering it.Despite the monograph's focus, its title seems slightly misleading, for while Sicily's Byzantine and Arab eras were rooted in the "early" Middle Ages, the multicultural experiment continued, in some measure, throughout the Norman-Swabian period (1061-1266) into what is usually called the "high" Middle Ages. The author adroitly, successfully, explores this following her exposition on the civilisations that reached Sicily before the eleventh century.This work is a noteworthy contribution to a complex field, bringing us clear, erudite analyses of the topic. Much has been written about the multicultural, multifaith society of medieval Sicily, but this study offers enough background to place the island into its proper Mediterranean and European contexts based on research in various sources, including a few that were little-studied until now. In that sense, it fills a small but very real historiographical void.Here in Sicily, the term "Euro-Mediterranean" has taken hold to describe this historically-important region. It is not necessarily a facile concept to grasp, even for a highly-trained scholar, but Davis-Secord understands it well enough to convey its nuances to the reader/student. For centuries, Sicily found herself in the social, political and geographic centre of an environment characterised by contact with several major cultures. The emphasis here is the island's place in the Byzantine-Greek and Muslim-Arab worlds, and the Jewish diaspora. This involved commerce and science as well as literature and religion, and indeed much more. The idea that the waters of the Mediterranean wash the shores of three continents is perhaps irrelevant; maybe, like the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans of antiquity, we should define this region by its sea (or seas) rather than its land masses because it was the sea that facilitated contact, travel and trade.My only criticism concerns format, as the text and maps are not very large.Davis-Secord is a good writer. Not only are her thoughts expressed accurately, they hold the reader's attention. That is quite unusual in academic writing. It makes this book appealing to readers beyond the academic sphere, which is no small feat. This research and writing both reflect a certain scholarly maturity, something seen less and less among academics in our time.I've never seen her teach a class, but if Davis-Secord's courses are as good as this book, her students are very fortunate.
