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What inspires someone to create a museum? While the foundation of many public museums includes private collections, museums established by an individual reflect a unique vision and passion that is ...

This chapter employee's strategies of contextualization and interdisciplinary interpretation similar to those the author adopted in two recent publications concerned with the "Mudejar" phenomenon. Outside the context of discussions of methodology, to which the following two sections are devoted, "Mudejar" will be rejected as a useful designator of either a coherent group of monuments or a definable "Islamicizing" aesthetic. Topoi such as the towers, divine light, and birds that will form the particular focus of the chapter, while generalized throughout much of Islamic and Arabic speaking culture, acquire concrete associations once they are deployed in a Nasrid context. The Comares complex is the better understood of the Alhambra's two principal palaces. In the Mariale from Avila, as in Marian literature throughout Christian Europe, the Castilian Virgin is praised, among other epithets, as a sacred garden, a tower of refuge, and the Throne of Wisdom. Keywords:Alhambra; Castilian; Christian; divine light; Methodology; Mudejar; Nasrid; Virgin

Building on the increasing number of programs designed to enhance brain development, a program developed in Korea, Brain Respiration, was adapted to a school in Nevada. Classes were offered twice weekly to a class of fourth and fifth grade students with control group classes assessed in the same school. Self-report surveys, teacher observations, and standardized reading and math scores were used to determine effects of the program on the students. Some differences were found in the pretest for the survey and the observation, with control groups scoring higher. There were differences in some post-test scores, with treatment group children scoring higher when differences did occur. There also were differences in the reading and math scores, with control groups scoring higher than the overall treatment group, but not higher when compared to those actively participating in the program. Such differences are discussed as well as other issues possibly influencing the effects.

This essay reconsiders the "Arthurian" identification of a number of the scenes that compose the ornamental program of the painted ceilings above the northern and southern alcobas of the Alhambra's Hall of Justice, proposing a reading that privileges Castilian versions of well-known courtly romances over French ones. The scenes are read as representations of the stories of Flores y Blancaflor, as well as Tristán de Leonís. Both tales, however, have been further altered and adapted in order to privilege the ideological concerns of the Nasrid court, both as an Islamic political entity with an agenda of jihād and—in a fashion that could easily be viewed as contradictory—as a participant in medieval Iberia's much-discussed frontier culture, which involved a "marriage of convenience" with Castilian allies.

I have only cruel absence to ask, for he has dispersed them, [I know not] if to the mountains or to the plain. Time has worked its tyranny on them, and they were dispersed to all ends of the earth; most of them have died. Destiny has invaded their dwellings: they have changed, and their former inhabitants are not what they were. Time has refused to [again] create light in its courtyards, which [before] almost set hearts ablaze. For such as Cordoba, the wails of he who weeps with only one eye are but little, for her tears flow unceasingly. I am afflicted by the memory of that springtime house where fresh gazelles wandered about a spacious courtyard, and the gazes when the gazes of all nobility turned toward her from everywhere, and the days of unified power, in the hands of its Amir and the Amir delegated by him, And the days in which every peaceful hand was raised in salute, hurrying anxiously toward her. My sadness is renewed for her chiefs, narrators, people of confidence, and defenders. My soul sobs for her rectitude, grace, splendor, and grandeur. My entrails are split for her benevolent wisemen, her poets and her elegant men.1

This paper explores the tandem functioning of visual and literary modes of communication in the specific context of the Andalusi taifa courts. The Aljaferia, built by the Banū Hūd, taifa lords of Zaragoza, during the last half of the eleventh century, serves as the basis for this interpretation. The audience for which this tiny, precious palace was constructed was limited to the king/patron and his carefully selected circle of boon companions (Arabic nadīm, pl. nudamā). The primary activities engaged in by this small public--drinking, contemplating beauty, and the improvisation and recitation of poetry--constitute a royal majlis (soiree). The poetry, recorded in anthologies by contemporaries who were themselves nudamā, is presented in the format of a "majlis anecdote:" an idyllic paradise is metaphorically described in both rhymed prose and poetry, and serves as the scene in which the gathering takes place. The anecdotes also prescribe the activities proper to a majlis, stipulating proper gestures and dis...

Bringing together the critical tools of art history, literature and historiography, this collections offers a series of new approaches to the study of the painted ceilings in the Hall of Justice of the Alhambra.

This chapter offers an interpretation of the Palace of the Lions as a building that both provided the setting for and embodied the principal elements of Nasrid dynastic self-representation in all of its religious, political, cultural, literary, and intellectual components. Several recent studies of other key medieval Islamic buildings and their contexts have offered illuminating readings of these monuments within the cultural framework intended by patrons for very specific publics. The chapter adopts similar methodologies and argues that Nasrid literary culture was deeply and principally interested in issues of allegory, mimesis, and representation. It suggests that the Palace of the Lions, in its combined architectural, spatial, horticultural, ornamental, and textual elements, constitutes a representation of a Paradise-garden cosmos composed of a group of four smaller gardens, which exist in allegorical relationship both to one another and to the larger, cosmological concept. Keywords: allegory; medieval Islamic buildings; mimesis; Nasrid literary culture; Palace of the Lions; Paradise-garden cosmos