The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian culture Jarrilynn D. Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale The Arts of Intimacy is the compelling and surprising story of Iberia's medieval cities - Cordoba, Seville, and above all Toledo - from the 11th through the 14th centuries, a watershed in the making of a world recognizably our own. This lavishly illustrated book presents a dynamic vision of medieval Castilian culture and the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions that intertwined to create it. The study of the arts, architecture, and literature of nascent Castile reveals what church synods and political charters have been careful to hide: that profound interaction takes place beneath the shroud of political rivalry and religious difference, and that Castilian Christian culture is forged in the many intimacies of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In the end, The Arts of Intimacy reveals the extent to which Castilian identity is deeply rooted in the experience of confrontation, interaction, and at times union with Hebrew and Arabic cultures during the first centuries of its creation. […] Jerrilynn D. Dodds is distinguished professor and senior faculty advisor to the provost at the City College of the City University of New York. She is author of the prize-winning Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain and numerous books and catalogs concerning cultural interaction in Spain, Bosnia, and the United States, including NY Masjid: The Mosque of New York and AL-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, which she edited for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maria Rosa Menocal is director of the Whitney Humanities Center, and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She has written The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio and Shards of Love: Exile and the origins of the Lyric, and coedited a volume in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature Series, The Literature of Al-Andalus. Her most recent book, The Ornament of the World, has been translated into seven languages. Abigail Krasner Balbale is a candidate for the Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University, where she focuses on the cultural history of medieval Iberia.