Like wheat

My mother’s dissertation was published as one of the first ebooks from Columbia University Press. It is called Like Wheat to the Miller: Community, Convivencia, and the Construction of Morisco Identity in Sixteenth-Century Aragon. A recent review in the American Historical Review has this to say:

The title of Mary Halavais’s impressive first book refers to a protest that the city of Teruel made to the Inquisition in 1484. Deciding that they would not submit to inquisitors who had just arrived with plans to begin an investigation of their citizens, the town council sought to explain their opposition. “The Holy Father and the King Our Lord are millers,” the council stated, “and their ministers are those who bring the wheat to the mill, and the city is the grain to be milled, and there is good reason for the grain to know whether it will be milled, or threshed, or what will be done with it” (ch. 1, epigraph)….

Halavais skillfully organizes ten well-written chapters to support this argument… Challenging common assumptions about diversity and community, Halavais provides an important piece of the larger puzzle of how diverse people lived together and what changed their relationships in the early modern period. She and the Gutenberg-e project of Columbia University Press deserve congratulations for publishing such a fine contribution to historical scholarship.

Nice going, Mom! I’m going to have to get cracking if I want to keep up :).