, Brepols, 2021 Hardback, 388 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:1 b/w, 7 maps b/w, Languages: English, Latin, French. ISBN 9782503587936.
Summary What is a minority? How did members of minority groups in the medieval Mediterranean world interact with contemporaries belonging to other groups? In what ways did those contacts affect their social positions and identities? The essays collected in this volume approach these questions from a variety of angles, examining polemic, social norms, economic exchange, linguistic transformations, and power dynamics. These essays recast the concept of minority - as a mutable condition rather than a fixed group designation - and explore previously-neglected collective and individual interactions between and among minorities around the medieval Mediterranean basin. Minorities are often defined as such because they were in some way excluded from access to resources or denied participation as a consequence of a group affiliation or facet of their identity. Yet, at times their distinctiveness also lay less in their exclusion than in particular ways of relating to spheres of power, whether political or moral, and in certain dissenting conceptions of the world. Through these contributions we shed light on both the continuities that such interactions displayed across intervals of space and time, and the changes that they underwent in particular locales and historical moments. TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Introduction - CLARA ALMAGRO VIDAL, JESSICA TEARNEY-PEARCE, AND LUKE YARBROUGH Minorities in Contact or Processes of Categorization - ANNLIESE NEF Women at the Crossroads of Muslim/non-Muslim Encounters: Conversion and Intermarriage in the Classical Islamic Period - URIEL SIMONSOHN Conversion and Religious Polemic between Jews and Christians in Egypt from the Fatimid through the Mamluk Periods - ALEXANDRA CUFFEL Jewish-Christian Theological Polemic as Reflected in Judaeo-Arabic Biblical Interpretations - ZVI STAMPFER Polemics between Religious Minorities: Christian Adversus Judaeos from the Early Abbasid Period - BARBARA ROGGEMA Latins and Levantine Christian Minorities after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Jacques de Vitry's Descriptions of Eastern Christians in the Kingdom of Jerusalem - JAN VANDEBURIE Lamenting Jerusalem: The Papacy, the Kings' Crusade, and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia - TAMAR M. BOYADJIAN 'And the Lord will raise a great emir in a land': Muslim Political Power Viewed by Coptic-Arabic Authors: A Case in the Arabic 'Apocalypse of Pseudo Athanasius II' - JUAN PEDRO MONFERRER SALA Keeping their Place: The Prohibition on Non-Muslim Scribes in Ahk?m ahl al-dhimma - ANTONIA BOSANQUET A Christian Official in the Mamluk State Speaks: Ibn al-Suq?'? on Minorities and Power - LUKE YARBROUGH Jews in Government Functions in al-Andalus during the Taifa Period: The Case of the Banu Nagrila of Granada - ALEJANDRO GARCIA SANJUAN More than Meets the Eye: Readings of Economic Interaction between a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian in Castile - CLARA ALMAGRO VIDAL A Reassessment of Frankish Settlement Patterns in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: 493-583/1099-1187 - BOGDAN C. SMARANDACHE Does Cohabitation produce Convivencia? Relationships between Jews and Muslims in Castilian Christian Towns - ANA ECHEVARRIA Muslims and Jews in Medieval Portugal: Interaction and Negotiation (14th-15th c.) - MARIA FILOMENA LOPES DE BARROS Conclusion - JOHN TOLAN Index