Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference

Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference

Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean

Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have a common belief in the sanctity of a core holy scripture, and commentary on scripture (exegesis) was at the heart of all three traditions in the Middle Ages. At the same time, because it dealt with issues such as the nature of the canon, the limits of acceptable interpretation, and the meaning of salvation history from the perspective of faith, exegesis was elaborated in the Middle Ages along the faultlines of interconfessional disputation and polemical conflict. This collection of thirteen essays by world-renowned scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam explores the nature of exegesis during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages as a discourse of cross-cultural and interreligious conflict, paying particular attention to the commentaries of scholars in the western and southern Mediterranean from Iberia and Italy to Morocco and Egypt.

Unlike other comparative studies of religion, this collection is not a chronological history or an encyclopedic guide. Instead, it presents essays in four conceptual clusters (“Writing on the Borders of Islam,” “Jewish-Christian Conflict,” “The Intellectual Activity of the Dominican Order,” and “Gender”) that explore medieval exegesis as a vehicle for the expression of communal or religious identity, one that reflects shared or competing notions of sacred history and sacred text. This timely book will appeal to scholars and lay readers alike and will be essential reading for students of comparative religion, historians charting the history of religious conflict in the medieval Mediterranean, and all those interested in the intersection of Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim beliefs and practices.

  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note on Transliteration and References
  • Introduction
  • I: Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam
    • 1 The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus
    • 2 Ibn al-Mahrūmah’s Notes on Ibn Kammūnah’s Examination of the Three Religions: The Issue of the Abrogation of Mosaic Law
    • 3 Al-Biqā'ī Seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic Relationship with the Bible
  • II: Dominicans and Their Disputations
    • 4 Two Dominicans, a Lost Manuscript, and Medieval Christian Thought on Islam
    • 5 The Anti-Muslim Discourse of Alfonso Buenhombre
    • 6 Reconstructing Medieval Jewish–Christian Disputations
  • III: Authority and Scripture between Jewish and Christian Readers
    • 7 Reconstructing Thirteenth-Century Jewish–Christian Polemic:From Paris 1240 to Barcelona 1263 and Back Again
    • 8 A Christianized Sephardic Critique of Rashi’s Peshat in Pablo de Santa María’s Additiones ad Postillam Nicolai de Lyra
    • 9 Jewish and Christian Interpretations in Arragel’s Biblical Glosses
  • IV: Exegesis and Gender: Vocabularies of Difference
    • 10 Between Epic Entertainment and Polemical Exegesis: Jesus as Antihero in Toledot Yeshu
    • 11 Sons of God, Daughters of Man, and the Formation of Human Society in Nahmanides’s Exegesis
    • 12 Late Medieval Readings of the Strange Woman in Proverbs
    • 13 Exegesis as Autobiography: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • List of Contributors
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • W
    • Y
    • Z

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