Мария Роза Менокал: Орта ғасыр тарихының көрнекті зерттеушісі

Cuban born American medieval historian (1953–2012)
María Rosa Menocal (April 9, 1953 – October 15, 2012) was a Cuban born scholar of medieval culture and history and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She later went on to win the Mellon and Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities for her work in medieval history.

Menocal earned a B. A., M. A., and Ph. D. in Romance Philology from the University of Pennsylvania, working under Samuel G. Armistead, himself a student of Américo Castro. Her 1979 dissertation was entitled "The Singers of Love: Al Andalus and the Origins of Troubadour Poetry." Before joining the Yale faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania.

María Rosa Menocal's 1987 book The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History challenged the assumption that medieval European culture developed without influence from Arabic and Hebrew literature. This challenge continued throughout her work, and had a lasting impact on the treatment of Arabic texts in medieval literary study. political as well as cultural. Menocal was director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center for several years and was the co editor of The Literature of Al Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series. She focused her research on literary traditions of the Middle Ages and the interaction of various religions and cultural groups of medieval Spain. A memorial notice at Yale suggested Menocal sought to undo how severe misrepresentations of the Middle Ages typically tended to be. She was the mentor of numerous scholars of medieval Iberia, including H. D. Miller, Maria Willstedt, Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Ryan Szpiech, Nadia Altschul, Abigail Balbale, Camilo Gómez Rivas, Hussein Fancy, Anita Savo, and the author Carolina Sanín. She was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2011 and inducted in March 2012. Menocal died of melanoma on October 15, 2012.