Hélène Sirantoine

2024-2025

François Chevalier Fellow

The University of Sydney

Reconquête? Les guerres hispaniques opposant chrétiens et musulmans dans les chroniques universelles non-ibériques de l’Occident médiéval (VIIIe-XIIIe siècles)

Biography

Hélène Sirantoine is Senior Lecturer in medieval history at The University of Sydney. She was trained in France (Sorbonne, university of Bordeaux) and Spain (UCM, Casa de Velázquez) and, after a postdoctoral fellowship at the CESCM in Poitiers, she settled in Australia. To date her research has focused on the written culture of the kingdom of Castile-León up to the thirteenth century, with projects covering the use of written productions by institutional elites as tools of power and communication (historiography, hagiography, charters and cartularies, letters) and the vision and representation of the Islamic world from a Christian perspective. On such topics she published a monograph, Imperator Hispaniae: les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León, IX^e-XII^e siècles (Madrid, 2012), several (co)edited books, and a number of articles and book chapters. She is currently expanding her geographical scope of research, and among other projects she is preparing with Salvador Iranzo a new edition, Spanish translation and commentary of the mid-twelfth century chronicle by Caffaro of Genoa, Ystoria captionis Almarie et Tortuose.

Research project

This project focuses on the depiction of Christian-Muslim Iberian wars in non-Iberian medieval historiography. In doing so, it aims at making a novel intervention in the historiographical debate still surrounding the medieval ideology of ‘Reconquest’, this historical interpretation according to which northern Hispanic kingdoms were fulfilling a legitimate mission of Christian restoration when they sought to conquer the peninsular territories under Islamic domination. Scholarly discussions have been often focused on tracking this ideology – or its absence for that matter – in primary sources originating from Iberia, hence uncovering the self-perception that Spaniards had of their contemporaneous and past struggle with Islam. However, much remains to be learned from the vision projected by non-Iberian authors on the bellicose interactions opposing Christians to Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula over the medieval period. Thus, the project focuses on one specific historiographical genre from the medieval period: universal chronicles, a homogeneous corpus from which we can get a sense of how the so-called ‘Reconquest’ was perceived outside of Spain.

Selected publications

2024. “Raoul le Noir et la chute du royaume wisigothique de Tolède. Le surprenant récit de la conquête islamique de l’Espagne par un chroniqueur anglais de la fin du XII^e siècle”, Cahiers de Civilisation médiévale, 266, pp. 295-322. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/11v0o 

2023. When Being King Was Not Enough : Imperatores in Medieval Iberia (Ninth to Twelfth Century), in Corinne Leveleux-Teixeira and Fulvio Delle Donne (eds), Gli spazi del potere: strategie e attributi dell’imperialità - Les espaces de la puissance: stratégies et marqueurs de l’impérialité, Potenza, Basilicata University Press, pp. 157-179.

2023. “Cartularization and Genre Boundaries: Reflection on the Nondiplomatic Material of the Toledan Cartularies (End of the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century)”, Speculum. A Journal of Medieval Studies, 98/1, pp. 164-212. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/722625 

2021. “Baddo, ‘Daughter of Arthur, King of England’: Some Medieval Evidence of the Arthurian Filiation Attributed to a Sixth-Century Visigothic Queen”, Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 52/1, pp. 137-170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.130885 

2020. What’s in a Word? Naming ‘Muslims’ in Medieval Christian Iberia, in Chris Jones, Conor Kostick, and Klaus Oschema (eds), Making the Medieval Relevant: How Medievalists are Revolutionising the Present, Berlin, De Gruyter, pp. 225-238.