By Irena Choi Stern

Sep. 30, 2015:  For 700 years, Europe's Iberian Peninsula was profoundly diverse, with Spanish Christian and Spanish Islamic kingdoms each harboring cities where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side by side, according to Jerrilynn Dodds, who will deliver a lecture offered by the Bronxville Adult School titled "Christians, Jews and Muslims & the Arts of Medieval Spain." 

The lecture will take place on October 6 from 7:00 to 8:00 pm in the Bronxville Public Library. 

Dodds, a professor of art history at Sarah Lawrence College and a lecturer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore the interactions between these religious groups and how they can often be read more clearly in art and architecture than in written documents. 

"I always look forward to Jerri Dodds's lectures because she is both extremely entertaining and highly knowledgeable," said Chris Zufelt, past chair of the Bronxville Adult School board. "It's wonderful that we can have a great Met Museum speaker right here in Bronxville." 

"Europe's current immigration crisis has opened important debates regarding not just the demographic composition of EU states, but also the character of European identity," Dodds said. "One of the narratives that has resulted from this crisis still reveals the expectation that European identity must be intrinsically Christian, or secular, but formed from a long collective history of shared religious experience. That idea has its beginnings in the Middle Ages." 

"While there is little justification for imagining medieval Iberia as a site for uniquely idyllic inter-confessional understanding, there were moments of profound shared culture, and even in the most ideologically polarized areas, there were encounters with differences that transformed and expanded the experience, culture, and identities of its polities and peoples," Dodds said. "Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side by side, at times in peace, and at times in discord." 

The lecture will use art and architecture to explore some of the complex and often surprising interactions, against the backdrop of cultural, social, and political history. 

"The deeper we look into the workings of these cultural encounters of the past, the more complex our understanding of contemporary European identity will become," Dodds added. 

The registration fee for the lecture is $20. 

To find out more about the Bronxville Adult School fall course offerings and to register, go to www.bronxvilleadultschool.org or contact the office at 914-793-4435.

Pictured here:  Professor Jerrilynn Dodds.

Photo courtesy Bronxville Adult School