"With the concept and reality of the network, Jean Dangler charts a course for rethinking scholarly approaches to the study of early Iberia. What emerges from this suggestive book is a dazzling and fluid inter-connectedness of Christian, Islamic, and African peoples and ideas. Edging toward Iberia reveals Iberias we scarcely knew existed, until now." -- Josiah Blackmore, Harvard University "Edging toward Iberia is nothing short of a provocation. It calls on scholars of medieval Iberia to radically rethink their most basic categories, their founding principles of periodicity and geographical delimitation. Dangler, however, goes far beyond a mere questioning of the appropriateness of terminologies and periodizations - she provides an erudite history of these and their effects on scholarship, and challenges her readers with a complex theoretical framework to reorganize an entire discipline. This is a most original and rousing book." -- Simone Pinet, Cornell University "Edging toward Iberia is a major contribution to the field of Iberian studies. Jean Dangler deconstructs the basic assumptions of much research in the field and provides a wealth of new critical tools. It is a theoretical manifesto for the field that has the potential to catalyse much innovative research." -- David Wacks, University of Oregon

Nonmodern Iberia was a fluid space of shifting political kingdoms and culturally diverse communities. Scholars have long used a series of obsolete investigative frameworks such as the Reconquista, along with modern ideas of nation-states, periodization, and geography that are inadequate to the study of Iberia’s complex heterogeneity.

In Edging Toward Iberia Jean Dangler argues that new tools and frameworks for research are needed. She proposes a combination of network theory by Manuel Castells and World-Systems Analysis as devised by Immanuel Wallerstein to show how network and system principles can be employed to conceptualize and analyze nonmodern Iberia in more comprehensive ways. Network principles are applied to the well-known themes of medieval trade and travel, along with the socioeconomic conditions of feudalism, slavery, and poverty to demonstrate how questions of power and temporal-historical change may be addressed through system tenets. Edging Toward Iberia challenges current historical and literary research methods and brings a fresh perspective on the examination of politics, identity, and culture.

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"Dangler’s book is animated by a thorough familiarity with a vast secondary literature. She has exhaustively mined the work of others in the field…Her reading of the secondary literature is always nuanced, generous, and polite…Dangler’s book is excellent reminder that we must approach the history of pre-modern Iberia with great caution….Let us, as Dangler proposes, see the past as the people who lived in it and wrote about it did."