Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 366-368

Book Review

This book collects information on the rings found in or originating from the Iberian Peninsula that are linked 
to the three religious communities (Jewish, 
Christian, and Muslim) that lived there 
from 711 to 1611. This was, of course, the 
period of Islamic presence in the Iberian 
Peninsula down to the expulsion of the 
Moriscos. 

Following the study (pp. 1–92), the 
catalog (pp. 93–320)—which features 
data about where and how the rings 
were found, their present locations, their 
material features, their epigraphy (if any), 
and the relevant academic literature, 
a l o n g  w i t h  i m a g e s — i s  d i v i d e d  i n t o 
three main sections. These are devoted, 
respectively, to rings found in Islamic, 
Jewish, and Christian contexts. The rings 
listed are made overwhelmingly of silver 
with a few of gold, which raises a number 
of questions that the author discusses  

(p. 51): Were there no gold rings? Were 
gold rings reused, and would such reuse 
explain their disappearance? Did the 
gold rings preserved belong to women 
or to Jews, given that Muslim men were 
forbidden to use them? Rings made of 
other materials (black jet, glass, ivory, 
or bone) are dealt with in the following 
sections. The catalog ends with sections 
on other circular objects that were not 
used as rings, anomalous cases, a group 
of Basque-Navarrese rings that present 
peculiar features, and cases on which there 
is incomplete information. One index lists 
the rings’ places of origin and another the 
places where they are now preserved. 

The author is Ana Labarta, professor 
of Arabic  and  I s lam ic  s t u d ies  at  t he 
University of Valencia and a scholar 
known for her research on subjects as 
varied as astrology, magic, chancery 
letters, seals, Arabic place-names, food,  

Ana Labarta (with Carmen Barceló). Anillos de la 
Península Ibérica, 711–1611 (Valencia: Editorial 
Angeles Carrillo Baeza, 2017), 324 pp. ISBN 978-84-

9464-375-0. Price: €85.00 (cloth).

Maribel Fierro 
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 

(Madrid, Spain)

(maribel.fierro@cchs.csic.es)

© 2021 Maribel Fierro. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021)

367  •  Maribel Fierro

and clothing. Together with Carmen Barceló  
(her collaborator in this book), she has also 
worked on the Arabic poetry written in 
the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, and on the Arabic 
texts produced by the Muslim minority 
in Valencia from 1401 to 1608. The two 
s c h o l a r s  h a v e  p r o d u c e d  f a s c i n a t i n g 
books on these topics,1 all of which were 
published, like the bulk of Labarta’s solo 
research, in Spanish. This means that the 
books’ circulation has not matched their 
scholarly importance.

Labarta’s interest in rings started in 
2013, when she was asked to read the 
A r a b i c  e p i g r a p h y  i n s c r i b e d  o n  e i g h t 
carnelians, some held in rings, found in 
graves from caliphal Cordoba. To gain 
a broader perspective, she looked for 
previous studies on rings and found that 
rings have seldom been included in studies 
devoted to metals. Indeed, the extant 
bibliography was scarce, scattered, and 
fragmentary. This monograph, therefore, 
i s  a  m o s t  w e l c o m e  a d d i t i o n  t o  o u r 
knowledge of the material culture of the 
three religious communities that lived in 
the Iberian Peninsula.

Labarta begins her study by reviewing 
what we know about the pre-Islamic 
situation, paying attention to Roman and 
Visigothic rings. I learned from this section 
that there is no evidence for the presence 
of people who dressed in Visigothic style—
and used Visigothic rings—in the southern 
regions of the Iberian Peninsula (the 
Betica). The Islamic conquest introduced 
noticeable formal and other changes  
 

1.  Carmen Barceló Torres and Ana Labarta, Cancionero morisco: Poesía árabe de los siglos XV y XVI (Valencia: 
Editorial Angeles Carrillo Baeza, 2016); Carmen Barceló Torres and Ana Labarta, Archivos moriscos: Textos 
árabes de la minoría islámica valenciana 1401–1608 (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2009).

(p. 53). The earliest dated rings are all made 
of silver and are inscribed with Arabic 
legends in negative, which indicates their 
use as seals (p. 54). The Almohad period 
appears also to have prompted changes 
(p. 55). The medieval religious, legal, 
and cultural norms related to the use of 
rings—whatever such norms there were—
are dealt with in an illuminating section 
that highlights the Mālikī dislike of men’s 
using gold or iron rings; as mentioned, this 
prohibition is to be related to the almost 
complete prevalence of silver rings found 
in Islamic contexts (p. 51). A few rings have 
even been recovered from Muslim graves. 
For example, a Muslim woman buried 
in caliphal Cordoba had two rings with 
gemstones on her hands and another gem 
in her mouth, all of them inscribed with the 
complete Islamic profession of faith. Such 
cases, as noted by Labarta, are exceptional, 
and we have to date no explanation for 
them, given the general Islamic insistence 
on burying the dead without any grave 
g o o d s .  E s p e c i a l l y  t h o u g h t - p r o v o k i n g 
are rings found in burials that seem to 
challenge religious boundaries, such as one 
in which the corpse had a ring with a cross 
in one hand and in the other a ring with 
the Arabic inscription “There is no god 
but God.” Equally interesting is the fact 
that rings associated with Jewish contexts 
are dated between 1350 and 1492, which 
suggests that before 1350 the rings used by 
Jews were indistinguishable from others  
(p. 32). The inscriptions in Arabic used in 
the early Islamic period include the Quranic 
expression ḥasbī Allāh (“God is enough  
 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021)

Ana Labarta’s Anillos de la Península Ibérica  •  368

f o r  m e ” ) ,  p r e s e n t  o n  r i n g s  f o u n d  i n 
funerary contexts. The same formula 
reappears later, in Almoravid times, but 
on coins.2 Sometimes the inscriptions also 
include names, information that enriches 
our knowledge of Iberian onomastics; 
one of the fascinating contributions of 
Labarta’s study concerns a ring found in 
Ecija on which a member of the Berber 
Banū Tājīt—well attested in chronicles—
is mentioned (p. 125). Labarta also pays 
attention to the moulds used for casting 
the rings, some of which have appeared 
in archaeological excavations, and to 
f o r g e r i e s .  A  u s e f u l  a p p e n d i x  o n  t h e 
inscriptions used, according to literary 
sources, by Andalusi rulers and others on 
their seals is also included.

L a b a r t a  s o u n d s  c a u t i o n a r y  n o t e s 
r e g a r d i n g  t h e  i n t e r p r e t a t i o n  o f  t h e 
materials she has collected, such as the (in 
fact extremely limited) extent to which 
modern North African jewellery continues 
Andalusi practices (p. 58). She is also not 
shy in stating the limits of her knowledge 
as regards, for example, the reasons for 
the choice of certain gemstones (p. 61).

2.  Miguel Vega Martín and Salvador Peña Martín, “Allah hasbi, lema coránico (IX:129) en una moneda meriní 
hallada en Granada,” Miscelánea de Estudios Arabes y Hebraicos: Sección Arabe-Islam 51 (2002): 327–38.

Labarta’s study is concise but rich in 
insights and also in questions for which 
there are no easy answers. It also includes 
much more than just her research on rings. 
When dealing with the issue of how to 
explain the presence of objects in Muslim 
graves, she points out that we similarly 
have no explanation for the presence 
of corpses buried in non-Islamic bodily 
positions in Muslim cemeteries (p. 31). One 
can only hope that this comment is a signal 
that she may be considering preparing 
a monograph on Islamic burial practices 
in the Iberian Peninsula. Al-Andalus is a 
region of the Islamic world for which we 
have studies on a considerable variety of 
topics, but there are still lacunae that need 
to be filled through the type of rigorous 
and innovative scholarship at which 
Labarta excels and that allows for well-
grounded and significant advances in our 
understanding of the religious and cultural 
l a n d s c a p e  o f  m e d i e v a l  I b e r i a .  W h e n 
reading any study by Labarta, one can be 
sure that most of what one encounters is 
new evidence, something that is often as 
rare as medieval Iberian gold rings.