Polemical Encounters

This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups.From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers. Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.

“Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers have fundamentally advanced our understanding of and the debate around the meaning of medieval polemic. This collection of essays is original and impressive, and it will undoubtedly inspire a new generation of scholars.”—Hussein Fancy, author of The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon , “Mercedes García-Arenal, Gerard Wiegers, and their brilliant collaborators have once again joined voices to provide us with a work of polyphonic scholarship. Polemical Encounters is a volume uniquely suited to revealing the intimate agon of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the premodern world.”—David Nirenberg, author of Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, “This fascinating and valuable collection of essays takes us deep into the medieval and early modern worlds of interfaith relations. Experts across a range of subfields ask fresh and original questions about the nature of the polemical enterprise. From Mozarabic communities in the twelfth century to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth, we are introduced to a variety of polyglot polemicists who fashioned new styles of discourse from changing geographic and demographic realities both in Iberia and beyond. The basic but profound conclusion of this wide-ranging volume is that the more Christians, Muslims, and Jews challenged each other polemically, the more polyvalent, fractured, and open to reform their own religious hierarchies became.”—Alex Novikoff, author of The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, “This volume contributes to an important, ongoing revision of Iberian cultural and religious history in the late medieval and early modern periods. It challenges a conventional approach to Iberian polemical exchange that has emphasized theological argument among recognized authorities in clearly defined Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. This volume, in contrast, highlights polemical exchange in an Iberian context of shifting identities, cross-confessional borrowing, and wide situational variation.”—Miriam Bodian, author of Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam, “This multiauthored volume brings detailed philological and historical research to bear on the unusually complex spiritual, cultural, and linguistic relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians during Spain’s troubled and incomplete transition from medieval diversity to early modern uniformity. Readers from a wide range of scholarly disciplines will be rewarded with novel perspectives on the remarkable textual evidence that emerged from this conflictive yet productive encounter.”—James S. Amelang, author of Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

Mercedes García-Arenal is Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Madrid and the author of several books, including Messianism and Puritanical Reform: Mahdis of the Muslim West and Ahmad al-Mansur: The Beginnings of Modern Morroco, and coauthor, with Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, of The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism.Gerard Wiegers is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado: Yça of Segovia (fl. 1450), His Antecedents and Successors; coauthor, with Mercedes García-Arenal, of A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe; and coeditor, with García-Arenal, of The Expulsion of the Moriscos of Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora.