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.
About the Author: 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.
