The Minority & Minoritized Languages and Communities look at language use, contact, and loss among minority communities. We bring together scholars working on contemporary linguistic issues of minority languages and scholars working from a historical perspective to make lesser-known languages more accessible to non-specialists. The materials here address broad questions related to the language and the community/ies in which it is used such as including political processes, economic processes, and geographic and ethnoreligious borders, the basic features of the language, and propose questions for further study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and provide an introductory bibliography. We make each module freely available to any scholar in the Humanities. They can be used together as a single course or as stand-alone components to be used across disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, political science, history, religion, and philosophy to complement already existing courses.
The Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography
The General e Grand estoria (GGE), sponsored by King Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252-1248), stands out as the largest universal history written in Medieval Europe, a truly ecumenical work in the development of both biblical exegesis, and secular historiography. Our work positions the study of the GGE within the multicultural context of its production and re-evaluates the role of Judaism and Islam, as well as the Graeco-roman classical traditions, in early vernacular Castilian and European historical writing and fiction. We employ Digital Humanities tools to analyze the confluence of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim biblical interpretation in this text from Medieval Iberia. This enables us to create an edition and translation that reflects a more comprehensive understanding of its meaning as intended by its authors.