Scholarly Communities and the Outlook for Pan-Iberian History

Since the nineteenth century, the history of Iberia has been mostly conceived as the sum of two separate national histories: those of Spain and Portugal. In spite of this dominating perspective, authors such as Oliveira Martins or Victor Balaguer wrote about common historical processes left aside by the essentialist and teleological arguments of the two national histories. By focusing, instead, on other analytical dimensions, either on the whole of the Iberia Peninsula or on sub-national entities, some historians have built transversal arguments that probe the limits of national and imperial narrative frames. This paper explores three areas in the twentieth-century historiography of medieval Iberia – linguistic history, frontier studies, and environmental history -  and it identifies scholarly communities marked by the circulation and reception of specific historical arguments which can be claimed as part of an intellectual tradition of pan-Iberian history.