Islamic gardens, with their waterways and beds of plants and trees, are generally regarded as an earthly reflection of paradise. D. Fairchild Ruggles offers a different interpretation, contending that the palace garden was primarily an environmental, economic and political construct. She discusses three aspects of medieval Islamic Spain: the landscape and agricultural transformation documented in Arabic scientific literature, the formation of the garden and its symbolism from the eighth through to the 15th centuries, and the role of the gaze and the frame in the spatial structures through with sovereignty was constituted. Although the repertory of architectural and garden forms was largely unchanged from the 10th to the 15th centuries, Ruggles explains that their meaning changed dramatically. The royal palace gardens of Cordoba expressed a political ideology that placed the king above and at the centre of the garden, and metaphorically, of his kingdom. This conception of the world began to falter in later centuries, but patrons clung to the forms and motifs of the golden age. Instead of creating new forms, artists at the Alhambra in Granada reworked and refined familiar vocabulary and materials. The vistas fixed by windows and pavilions referred not to the actual relationship of the king to his domain, but rather to the memory of a once-expanding territory.
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"Ruggles's always clear narrative interweaves all the fundamental threads of the historical and political events necessary to fully appreciate the cultural bases of everything that had to do with that dramatic transformation of the Iberian landscape. She seems as at home talking about the changing yields of crop harvests as about the variations in the concepts of paradise as a garden across different cultures." --Maria Rosa Menocal, Yale University, The Medieval Review
From the Author
D. Fairchild Ruggles is Associate Professor in Landscape History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the editor of Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (SUNY, forthcoming).
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
serious scholarship accessible to the layperson,
By Mary Ann Daland (Somerville, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (Paperback)
I own the hardcover version of this book. This is a fascinating topic. The writing in this book is beautiful: rich, concise, informed.
This book is serious scholarship, but much of it is accessible to the interested layperson. I highly recommend this book.
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