Polemical Encounters

Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond

Mercedes García-Arenal, Gerard Wiegers, Mercedes García-Arenal, Gerard Wiegers

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780271081212
• eBook ISBN: 9780271082998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• COVER front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “When I Argue with Them in Hebrew and Aramaic”: Tathlīth al-waḥdānīyah, Ramon Martí, and Proofs of Jesus’s Messiahship
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Qurʾānic Quotations in Latin: Translation, Tradition, and Fiction in Polemical Literature
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: The Mudejar Polemic Taʾyī d al-Milla and Conversion Between Islam and Judaism in the Christian Territories of the Ierian Peninsula
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: “Sermo ad conversos, christianos et sarracenos”: Polemical and Rhetorical Strategies in the Sermons of Vincent Ferrer to Mixed Audiences of Christians and Muslims
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Jewish Anti- Christian Polemics in Light of Mass Conversion to Christianity
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Theology of the Laws and Anti-Judaizing Polemics in Hernando de Tala vera’s Católica impugnación
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Chapter 7: The Double Polemic of Martín de Figuerola’s Lumbre de fe contra el Alcorán
• Notes to Chapter 7
• Chapter 8: Art of Conversion?: The Visual Policies of the Jesuits, Dominicans, and Mercedarians in Valencia
• Notes to Chapter 8
• Chapter 9: Marcos Dobelio’s Polemics against the Authenticity of the Granadan Lead Books in Light of the Original Arabic Sources
• Notes to Chapter 9
• Chapter 10: Prisons and Polemics: Captivity, Confinement, and Medieval Interreligious Encounter
• Notes to Chapter 10
• Chapter 11: The Libre de bons amonestaments by ʿAbd Allāh al-Tarjumān: A Guidebook for Old and New Christians
• Notes to Chapter 11
• Chapter 12: Poetics and Polemics: Ibrahim Taybili’s Anti-Christian Polemical Treatise in Verse
• Notes to Chapter 12
• Chapter 13: Torah Alone: Protestantism as Model and Target of Sephardi Religious Polemics in the Early Modern Netherlands
• Notes to Chapter 13
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index