Saracens; Islam in the Medieval European Imagination

Tolan, John V.

ISBN 10: 0231123337 / ISBN 13: 9780231123334

Published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2002

xxiii, 372p., original stiff printed wrappers. Seller Inventory # 051270

Synopsis:

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words. In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.

About the Author: John V. Tolan is Maitre de Conferences en histoire medievale, Department d'histoire, Universite de Nantes. He is the author of Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers and editor of Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Collection of Essays.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Saracens; Islam in the Medieval European ...
Publisher: Columbia University Press, New York
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Soft cover