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.
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.
[4] In 2002, Menocal published The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into 11 languages and later made into a documentary.
Menocal focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through examples, or "case studies"[5] political as well as cultural.
[7] A memorial notice at Yale suggested Menocal sought to undo how severe misrepresentations of the Middle Ages typically tended to be.