Penn State University Press Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond (Iberian Encounter and Exchange, 475-1755): 2

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. Review "Polemical Encounters makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of how some medieval and early modern Iberians attempted to construct and maintain their own religious boundaries in spite of a messy lived experience that belied this imagined clarity." --Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Journal of Modern History "An interesting book that presents a broad perspective on religious diversity while analysing the processes triggered by religious controversy." --Juan Hernández Franco, Journal of Ecclesiastical History "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 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 medieva