Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean: Essays in Memory of Olivia Remie Constable

by Sarah Davis-Secord (Editor), Belen Vicens (Editor), Robin Vose (Editor)

Overview

This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030839963
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/16/2021
Series:	Mediterranean Perspectives
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	379
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Davis-Secord is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico, US.

Belen Vicens is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Salisbury University, Maryland, US.

Robin Vose teaches medieval, Islamic and world history at St. Thomas University, Canada.

Table of Contents

1.Introduction, Robin Vose, Sarah Davis-Secord, and Belen Vicens.- Section I: Perceiving the Other.- 2. The Four Seas of Medieval Mediterranean Intellectual History, Thomas E. Burman.- 3. Coronidis Loco: On the Meaning of Elephants, from Baghdad to Aachen, Paul M. Cobb.- 4. Martial and Spiritual at San Baudelio de Berlanga, Jerrilynn D. Dodds.- 5. Seeing the Substance: Rhetorical Muslims and Christian Holy Objects in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Ryan Szpiech.- 6.The Perception of the Religious Other in Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium Fidei: A Tool for Inquisitors? Ana Echevarria .- Section II: Interfaith Relationships.- 7. A Global ‘Infection’ of Judaizing: Investigations of Portuguese New Jews and New Christians in the 1630s and 1640s, Gretchen Starr-LeBeau.- 8.Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Late Medieval Society: The Case of Ávila, Teofilo F. Ruiz.- 9. Sex, Lies, and Alleged Rape: Scandal and Corruption in Fourteenth-Century Mudéjar Lleida, Brian A. Catlos .- 10.A Tunisian Jurist’s Perspective on Jihād in the Age of the Fondaco, Janina M. Safran.- 11.The Significance of Morisco Feuding in the Kingdom of Valencia, Mark D. Meyerson.-12. An Incident at Damietta—1733, Molly Greene.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This volume brings together eleven innovative and important essays on the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean world from the ninth to eighteenth centuries. They form an eloquent homage to Olivia Remie Constable, whose work has inspired in her colleagues and students a rigorous attention to sources (their production, their contextualization, their vocabulary) and an appreciation of the intricacies of commercial, legal, and scholarly networks. The Mediterranean here appears as a region in constant movement, a zone of shifting and overlapping frontiers constantly redrawn through commerce, intellectual exchange, and conflict. It is a book that Remie Constable would have enjoyed reading.
John Tolan, Université de Nantes, and author of Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today.

Every essay in this volume will become required reading for anyone interested in how Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were formed and transformed bytheir encounters with each other on the waves and shores of the Mediterranean. Both the production of difference and the possibilities of pluralism are illuminated in its pages. This is a collection worthy of the great historian to whom it is dedicated.

David Nirenberg, University of Chicago, and author of Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today.

This jewel of a book is so much more than a scholarly homage to the intellectual legacy of Olivia Remie Constable. Focusing on interfaith relations and cross-cultural exchange, the case studies collected in the volume question the relevance of geographic, temporal, linguistic, and most importantly, disciplinary boundaries, making a compelling case for the continuing vitality of Mediterranean studies and its capacity to transform the entire field of medieval history. Maya Soifer Irish, Rice University, and author of Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence,and Change.