Pirenne's isolationist views of the medieval Mediterranean have long been surpassed thanks to the work of scholars like Braudel and Goitein. However, the link between the Mediterranean and the societies of the Iberian Peninsula and their complex relations of exchange and mutual dependency are still debated among specialists. Even today, it is hard to fully understand or conceptualize a Mediterranean Iberia, given the cultural, political, and religious contradictions of its medieval polities. This often forces the debate into discussions where the tropes of insularity and uniqueness abound or limits it into two neatly, yet impossibly perfect, groups: Christian Iberia and al-Andalus—outcomes that, as R. Brann warns, share a common root in the notion of Iberian exceptionalism.

This monograph is an important and welcome contribution to this debate. Wacks sets out intending to read “Iberian literature as a Mediterranean cultural practice . . . shaped by the geography and culture of the region” (6). The book's purpose is to study crusade fiction and how it was adapted, transformed, and reimagined by five writers. Each one of them was the author of a unique cultural artifact intended to explain the geopolitical and historical processes happening in their cultures, while, at the same time, reflecting the “longer stor[ies] of migration, trade, and conquest” linking the Peninsula with the Mediterranean (8).

Chapter 1 studies Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani (ca. 1234), the only extant Iberian Arabic chivalric romance and an unusual case of adaptation into Andalusi letters of the European tradition of crusade and Arthurian fiction. Chapter 2 studies the Book of the Knight Zifar (ca. 1330), a chivalric romance often hailed as one of the first Castilian works of fiction. Wacks proposes that the book is both the result of Andalusi culture and also reacts to it by reaffirming the military conquest of an imagined East. Chapter 3 focuses on Ramon Llull's Blanquerna, a late thirteenth-century Catalan hagiographical chivalric fiction that addresses the role that conversion plays in crusading military conquest. Chapter 4 is devoted to Flores and Blancaflor, a pseudohistorical romance about the marriage of a fictional Muslim king of Almería and a Christian woman that effectively rewrites the Iberian past, proposing an alternative explanation for the Christianization of the Peninsula. Finally, chapter 5 centers on Tirant the White Knight (1464), a late crusading chivalric novel that appeared when most of the Iberian Peninsula had been unified under Christian rule and the crusading efforts started to dwindle, but in the years of the renewed threat of the Ottoman invasion of the Mediterranean, with the eponymous hero fighting the Turks to defend Byzantium.

To avoid repeating the encomiastic (and well-deserved) commentaries already made about the merits of the book, I want to address some of its problematic aspects. In chapter 2, Wacks studies the Zifar, whose prologue he considers an allegory “of the assimilation of Andalusi learning as the spoils of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus . . . the repurposing of Andalusi learning for Christian Iberia” (60). He proposes a connection between this introduction, in which an archdeacon of Toledo describes his enterprise of the repatriation of the body of Toledo's Cardinal Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel from Rome and the hero's voyage in the story, a crusade-like enterprise to restore his family's honor.

Wacks sees in Zifar's adventures a “metaphor for the translation of Andalusi learning to Castile-Leon” (64), as the story is said to be translated from caldeo (Arabic) and has an Eastern setting. He entertains the possibility that some Arthurian motifs in the story, unique to the story, are a type of spolia, coming not from the Iberian translations of French romances but rather from their presence in Ziyad.

This part of the analysis and its provisional conclusions, to which Wacks later returns and which he implicitly accepts, is overall, I think, the weakest point of the book. While Zifar's Andalusi link is worth exploring in detail, some of the author's assertions are not as persuasive as the more careful considerations he showed some years ago when studying the influential role of the Arabic maqāma in the development of Romance Iberian frametales.

The hypothesis of Ziyad's influence, based on shared Arthurian themes present in Iberia only in these works, does not allow for a more likely explanation: that they originate in a work from the lost Arthurian tradition of Romance Iberian texts that date back to the twelfth century, a tradition of several hundred witnesses.

Wacks concludes that Zifar's function as crusade fiction is a double operation. On the one hand, the assimilation of Andalusi culture asserts Castilian domination of al-Andalus by creating a chivalric fiction that appeals to the broader spirit of crusading culture in Latin Christendom. On the other hand, it links the book's genesis to the cultural prestige of the Mozarabic intellectuals of the See of Toledo, who saw their cultural legacy weakened after a century of French domination and constant papal interference. In this way, the return of the body of Pérez Gudiel in the prologue is another type of spolia, the return of a Mozarabic relic.

Notwithstanding the refreshing reading, the author omits some important details about the cultural context of the production of Zifar that paint a more complicated picture. Its creation—and that of much Castilian literature of the early fourteenth century—was the result of the cultural program developed in tandem by King Sancho IV of Castile and a group of Toledan intellectuals. This movement, continued by Queen Maria de Molina during the two decades after the king's death, imprinted works like Zifar with a distinct orthodoxy that contested Alfonso X's more deviant philosophical and natural inquiries. In the political arena, these works also served as propaganda to contain the ramifications of Alfonso X's complicated succession and Sancho's rebellion: the new king's unrecognized marriage to his cousin, the issue of the papal recognition of their heirs, and the constant revolts of the discontent nobility. Zifar's deep doctrinal component has been linked to the production of Escorial ms. h-I-13, a miscellaneous semi-hagiographic codex containing Castilian translations of the lives of Mary Magdalene, Martha of Bethany, and Mary of Egypt, as well as the passions of Catherine of Alexandria and Eustace. It also has an understudied connection with the reforms to secular education brought about by the Council of Valladolid (1322). Although these events and influences do not contradict Wacks's conclusions, his argument could have been further nuanced by taking this religious, political, and cultural context into account.