For our November museum visit, we headed to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World for “Madinat al-Zahra,” their exhibit of artifacts from the tenth-century capital of Islamic Spain.
This is a culture that I don’t know particularly well — Islamic, but two thousand miles west of the Middle-Eastern settings we typically think of.
It was interesting to learn that they collected artifacts from the Roman imperial era and displayed them around their capital to provide classical atmosphere and a connection to “the knowledge of a more refined past” in a way that’s reminiscent of the European Renaissance — but in the year 980, rather than 1580.
The environment of cultural exchange and relative religious tolerance provides a setting that is ripe for reenactment and romantic fantasy, and a point of contrast with the late-medieval Northwestern European setting that is the starting place for most Scadian shared culture.
