Olivia Remie Constable
Professor
Director, Medieval Institute
Field
Medieval history
Profile
Remie Constable received her B.A. from Yale University in 1983, in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, and her PhD from Princeton University in 1989, in Near Eastern Studies. After receiving her doctorate, she taught in the History Department at Columbia University for six years before coming to Notre Dame in 1995. Constable’s areas of interest concern the economic, social, and urban history of the medieval Mediterranean World, especially contacts between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in this region. In this area, she has published Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1994) which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America; Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2003). In 1992, while she was at Columbia University, Constable won the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Teaching Award for Junior Faculty. More recently, in 2006, she was awarded a Presidential Award from Notre Dame. For the past six years (2000-2006), she has served as director of graduate studies in the History Department. In 2006-7, Constable will be on leave, working on a new book project entitled Muslims in Medieval Europe.
Current Project
Constable's current project compares the situation of Muslims living in different regions of Spain, France, and Italy in the thirteenth century. This is an important period because in many ways it sees the creation and solidification of European attitudes towards Islam in the wake of the crusades in the Near East and territorial conquests in Spain. Using a variety of documentary, legal, economic and other sources, she plans to look at the variety of ways in which Christian rulers accommodated Muslim subjects in their realms.
Teaching Interests
Interactions between medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Mediterranean world; economic and social history; history of medieval cities and urban life; medieval Spain; perceptions of the middle ages in modern novels and film
Recent Publications
“Culture as the Meeting Ground of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Spain from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Century,” Chapter 9 in Religious Foundations of Western Civilization: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, (ed. Jacob Neusner) Abingdon Press, 2005, 305-347.
Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
"The Funduq and Fondaco in the Medieval Islamic World," Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies (Amman, Jordan) 3 (2001) 17-30.
New foreword and updated bibliography for Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (ed. R.S. Lopez and I.W. Raymond), Columbia University Press, New York, 2001.
Contact
Office: 715 Hesburgh Library
Phone: (574) 631-7591
Email: constable.1@nd.edu