This extensive bibliographic essay underpins the entire Tarragona Vortex study by focusing on this arena as one of the most contested frontiers in Western history, comparable to Jerusalem in the East, for broad issues of Romanization, Westernization, Islamization, and Christianization.  Its book length chapters treat (1) diverse historiographies from local and Spanish to comparative Mediterranean and Crusade History, and especially Ethno-historiography and the explanatory concept of frontiers; (2) the phenomena of religion conversion and reform, and the conditioning agents of Islām and Latin Christianity in practice and adversity; (3) religious universalism and violence, especially religious war; (4) the Crusade and Reconquest paradigms and century-long debate; (5) the environment on land and sea, and setting for this History. Although these themes are explored to include due reconsideration but avoid major digressions in its telling about Tarragona and the Tarraconensis, they underly so much of Late-Antique and Medieval historical research that this discussion pertains to the whole field of historical, cultural, and religious studies.

This multi-volume lifelong work features a millennium of history in a major frontier for the Romans, Visigoths, Muslims, and Latin Christians in North-East Iberia and Southern France from Late-Antiquity  through the Middle Ages, i.e., the 3rd to 13th c.,  that defined the political geography of the West – Southern Europe, the Western Mediterranean, and Spain. Focusing on Tarragona and its province of the Tarraconensis that became the Crown of Aragó-Catalunya, separate volumes in the series, each entitled as an individual book, treat (1) Historiography, key constructs, and reconsiderations about Religion; (2) foundational Roman Tarraco; (3) Hispano-Visigothic Tarracona; (4) Berber Tarrakūnah where the expansion of African Islām was stopped; (5) Terrachona and the restoration of Christendom; and (6) Tarragona as an epilogue, critical apparatus, and an extensive bibliography.

All the six volumes will be published by the end of 2024.

LAWRENCE J. MCCRANK, BA, MA, MLS, PhD.

Professor and Dean Emeritus

Now retired after a 40-year career as a professor and dean / university librarian, your author has written 18 books, bibliographies, and 70 scholarly articles, and thus has been recognized in bibliometric studies as one of America’s most published academic librarians. His contributions are in two fields: (1) the Information Sciences and Library / Archives profession for Heritage studies (especially in Archives, Documentation, Curatorship and Library Special Collections, Codicology and Analytical Bibliography) and academic library administration, with a pioneering interest in computer applications from informatics to modern information systems (including one of the first books totally electronically published before widespread digitization); and (2) Medieval and Early Modern History (History of Archives, Libraries, Codicology and Analytical Bibliography, monastic history especially the Cistercians; Church History; and History of the American West). He is a Fellow of SAA (Society of American Archivists) and RSAT (Reial Societat Arqueológico Tarraconensis). After a start at the University of Kansas under a team of outstanding medievalists and as a student of the late Hispanist and AHA bibliographer, Spain’s knighted  Charles J. Bishko, at the University of Virginia where he earned his PhD (1974), he focused on Tarragona as an emblematic city and northeastern Spain’s federated Catalan and Aragonese regions and Occitania in southern France.