Due to my endless appetite of acquiring knowledge about the Reconquista, I happened to stumble across The Library of Iberian Resources Online (LIBRO) by the University of Central Arkansas. This awesome site gives us access to a decent collection of scholarly works about the Reconquista, completely free of charge. I think what makes this site invaluable, is the fact it give us access to out-of-print university press works, that otherwise we wouldn’t gotten a chance to read.
Some of the books, are provided via PDF, while others are completely online. If you happened to own a Kindle, I seemed to get a better formatting book experience by merging the PDFs into one, then convert to a Word doc, and finally use Calibre to covert the Word doc to a Mobi file. I’m currently about a 1/3 on the book The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia by Robert Ignatius Burns, and the book looks and reads like a normal book on my Kindle. (The book is fantastic thus far!)
It is refreshing to see English scholarly works regarding the Reconquista, since most of reading I’ve been doing lately has been completely in Spanish, which I don’t mind. But given how awesome the history of the Reconquista is, I feel that large segment of the English speaking world doesn’t know the intricate details about this important point in history. Mainly because of lack of access to works like the ones provided in this site. What seems to me interesting that of all places, Arkansas a state with little to no Hispanic culture or history. Yet they’re given the world access to learn more about the awesome history of medieval Spain.