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The Four Seas of Medieval Mediterranean Intellectual History

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Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean

Part of the book series: Mediterranean Perspectives ((MEPERS))

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Abstract

In this essay I argue that it is both feasible and desirable to undertake the intellectual history of the medieval Mediterranean, despite its many divisions of religion, language, and culture, especially if we follow the model presented by Olivia Remie Constable’s Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World. In minutely tracing the evolution, development, and spread of the funduq, she disclosed a Mediterranean of many dimensions—a sea of ready movement of practices and institutions, a sea of filtering frontiers where those practices and institutions were adopted and adapted, a sea of unity in which ideas and practices held in common made for receptivity to new ones from different parts of that sea, and a sea of constant difference-making, where despite widespread movement and deep-seated unity, individual cultures put their own unique stamp on whatever was borrowed. What is true for the funduq, I contend, is also true of the intellectual history of the Mediterranean. It was a sea of constant movement of ideas and technologies, which, in moving, changed in crucial ways at the filtering frontiers between, say, Greek-Christianity and Arab-Islam and between Arab-Islam and Latin-Christianity; undergirding and making possible all this movement and filtering was a sea of deep intellectual and religious unity, though that unity and the movement it allowed did not at all stop Mediterranean intellectuals from the work of difference making—taking what was borrowed and putting it to use for the particular purposes of their own religious culture, so that borrowing actually contributed to difference. Approached this way, medieval Mediterranean intellectual history is not only a subject rich in fruitful research questions, but, I suggest in the end, something that deserves to be recognized as a meaningful field of inquiry.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.

  2. 2.

    Constable, Housing the Stranger, 14.

  3. 3.

    Constable, Housing the Stranger, 171–75.

  4. 4.

    Constable, Housing the Stranger, 355.

  5. 5.

    Constable, Housing the Stranger, 355.

  6. 6.

    These are the words of my Ph.D. student, Catherine Perl, in a class blog post on Constable’s book from September of 2018.

  7. 7.

    Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013).

  8. 8.

    David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (London: Longmans, 1962; 2nd ed., D. E. Luscombe and C. N. L. Brookes, eds., London: Longman, 1988).

  9. 9.

    Published by E.J. Brill since 2013.

  10. 10.

    Nader al-Bizri, “Foreword” in Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: Sciences of the Soul and Intellect, Part III: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 39–41, ed. and trans. Carmela Baffioni and Ismail K. Poonawala (Oxford: Oxford University Press/The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017), xvi.

  11. 11.

    See, for example, Robert Brody, Sa’adyah Gaon, trans. Betsi Rozenberg (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 58–78.

  12. 12.

    Ann Giletti, “An Arsenal of Arguments: Arabic Philosophy at the Service of Christian Polemics in Ramon Martí’s Pugio fidei,” in Mapping Knowledge: Cross-Pollination in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Charles Burnett and Pedro Mantas-España (Córdoba: Córdoba Near Eastern Research Unit and London: The Warburg Institute, 2014), 153–65, at 156–58.

  13. 13.

    Scott E. Hendrix, How Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers: A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy, and Astrology (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 5–6.

  14. 14.

    George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 196–217.

  15. 15.

    For a brief overview of these developments, see David A. King, “Astrolabes and Quadrants,” in Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 57–61, but see also David A. King, “Astronomical Instruments between East and West,” in Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. Harry Kühnel [Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse, vol. 619, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 16] (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), 143–98, and Robert T. Gunther, The Astrolabes of the World, 2 vols. (London: The Holland Press, 1932).

  16. 16.

    For an excellent description of a typical astrolabe and its use, see J. D. North, “The Astrolabe,” Scientific American 230.1 (January 1974): 96–106.

  17. 17.

    See, for example, David B. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60–84, at 62–70.

  18. 18.

    John Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Abingdon, Oxford/New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).

  19. 19.

    Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 3.

  20. 20.

    John Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  22. 22.

    Anthony Kaldellis and Nicetas Siniossoglou, eds. Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  23. 23.

    Moshel Idel, “Kabbalah in Byzantium,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History, 524–41.

  24. 24.

    Marcus Plested, “Aquinas in Byzantium,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History, 542–56.

  25. 25.

    Anne Tihon, “Astronomy,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History, 183–98, at 192.

  26. 26.

    Dimitri Gutas, “The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy,” in Avicenna and his Heritage, ed. J. L. Janssens and D. de Smet (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 81–97.

  27. 27.

    Here see Frank Griffel, Al-Ghaza¯lī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), passim.

  28. 28.

    See Gutas, “The Heritage of Avicenna,” passim, and Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 338–39.

  29. 29.

    See Herman Teule, “The Transmission of Islamic Culture to the World of Syriac Christianity. Barhebraeus’ Translation of Avicenna’s Kitab al-Isharat wa l-tanbihat. First soundings,” in Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J. van Ginkel and H. Murre (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 167–84, and Herman Teule, “Barhebraeus,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 4, 1200–1350, ed. David Thomas et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012), 588–95.

  30. 30.

    Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 314–21.

  31. 31.

    See Dodds, “Martial and Spiritual at San Baudelio de Berlanga” in this volume (below).

  32. 32.

    Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1970); Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005); From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

  33. 33.

    Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbba¯sid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998).

  34. 34.

    Diana Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Baḥya ibn Paqu¯da’s Duties of the Heart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

  35. 35.

    Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides and His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  36. 36.

    Science in Context 14, no. 1/2 (2001): 249–88.

  37. 37.

    Burnett, “Coherence,” 257–59.

  38. 38.

    Burnett, “Coherence,” 259–61, 278.

  39. 39.

    Burnett, “Coherence,” 261.

  40. 40.

    Burnett, “Coherence,” 253.

  41. 41.

    Burnett, “Coherence,” 253–55.

  42. 42.

    Maribel Fierro, “Alfonso X ‘the Wise:’ the Last Almohad Caliph?” Medieval Encounters 15 (2009): 175–98, at 189, 190.

  43. 43.

    Thomas E. Burman, “Via impugnandi in the Age of Alfonso VIII: Iberian-Christian Kalām and a Latin Triad Revisited,” in Alfonso VIII and his Age: Government, Family, and War, ed. Miguel Gómez, Kyle C. Lincoln, and Damian Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 221–40.

  44. 44.

    Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 406, cf. 23.

  45. 45.

    Gustave von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 31. The first edition of this work appeared in 1946.

  46. 46.

    Brody, Sa’adyah Gaon, 32–33; cf. Saadyah ben Yusuf al-Fayyumi, Kita¯b al-amana¯t wa-al-iʿtiqada¯t, ed. S. Dandauer (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1880), 14, 126–27.

  47. 47.

    Miriam Goldstein, Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 54–55.

  48. 48.

    “Platonism from Maximus the Confessor to the Palaiologan Period,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History, 325–40, at 325.

  49. 49.

    Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 2–3.

  50. 50.

    M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), 304–16; cf. Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas vol. 1: The Person and His Work, rev. ed., trans. Robert Royal (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 150–53.

  51. 51.

    Mark N. Swanson, “Once Again on the 13th-Century Flowering of Copto-Arabic Literature: Introducing an Edition of Buṭrus al-Sadamantī’s Instructive Lives,” Coptica 17 (2018): 25–42. The translation is Swanson’s.

  52. 52.

    Donald S. Lopez and Peggy McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint (New York: Norton, 2014).

  53. 53.

    Lopez and McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha, 88–89, 170–71.

  54. 54.

    Sidney Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 124–25.

  55. 55.

    “Enoch philosophus qui lingua arabica cognominatur Edric, dixit filio suo: Timor domini sit negociacio tua, et ueniet tibi hierum sine labore.—Dixit alius philosophus: Qui timet deum, omnia timent eum; qui uero non timet deum, timet omnia.—Dixit alius philosophus: Qui timet deum, diligit deum; qui diligit deum, obedit deo.—Dixit Arabs in uersu suo: Inobediens es deo: simulas tamen te eum amare, et incredibile est; si enim uere amares, obedires ei. Nam qui amat, obedit.” Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis, ed. Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1911), 2.

  56. 56.

    Yoram Erder, “Idrīs,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, last accessed July 28, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQSIM_00208.

  57. 57.

    Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis, 1. It is striking that there are no references at all to specifically Christian beliefs in this work, other than brief references in the prologue and epilogue.

  58. 58.

    Though Jews, of course, were exceptional in this regard inasmuch as study of the Talmud required knowledge of both Hebrew and Aramaic, and Jews in the Muslim lands also used Arabic for scholarly, though generally non-religious, purposes.

  59. 59.

    See Janina M. Safran, “A Tunisian Jurist’s Perspective on Jiha¯d in the Age of the Fondaco” in this volume (below).

  60. 60.

    See Ana Echevarria, “The Perception of the Religious Other in Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium Fidei : A Tool for Inquisitors?” and Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, “A Global ‘Infection’ of Judaizing: Investigations of Portuguese New Jews and New Christians in the 1630s and 1640s” in this volume (below).

  61. 61.

    See the edition and Spanish translation of this work by M. de Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda (`Abdalla¯h al-Taryˆuma¯n) y su polémica islamo-cristiana (Madrid: Hyperión, 1994), 44.

  62. 62.

    Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Darko Senekovic, and Thomas Ziegler, “Modes of Variability: The Textual Transmission of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus,” in Petrus Alfonsi and his Dialogus: Background, Context, Reception, ed. Carmen Cardelle de Hartman and Philipp Roelli (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014), 227–48, at 227.

  63. 63.

    Echevarria, “Perception of the Religious Other.”

  64. 64.

    For bibliography on this seminal figure see Jon Hoover, “Ibn Taymiyya,” in Christian-Muslim Relations, 4: 824–78. See also Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed, eds., Ibn Taymiyya and His Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), where Ibn Taymiyya’s contemporary influence is downplayed.

  65. 65.

    Harvey J. Hames, “Reason and Faith: Inter-religious Polemic and Christian Identity in the Thirteenth Century,” Trumah: Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg 12 (2002): 267–84, at 284.

  66. 66.

    For bibliography on Martí, see the studies in G. K. Hasselhoff and A. Fidora, eds., Ramon Martí’s Pugio Fidei: Studies and Texts (Santa Coloma de Queralt: Obrador Edèndum SL, 2017) and my “Ramon Martí, the Potentia-Sapientia-Benignitas Triad, and Thirteenth-Century Christian Apologetic,” in Ex oriente lux: Translating Words, Scripts, and Styles in Medieval Mediterranean Society, ed. Charles Burnett and Pedro Mantas-España (Córdoba: Córdoba University Press, 2016), 217–33.

  67. 67.

    Ramon Martí, Capistrum Iudaeorum, ed. and trans. Adolfo Robles Sierra, 2 vols. (Würzburg: Corpus Islamo-Christianum, 1990).

  68. 68.

    Ramon Martí, Pugio fidei 3.3.4, Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1405, fol. 253r; cf. the early modern edition: Ramon Martí, Pugio fidei adversus Mauros et Iudaeos (Leipzig, 1687; Rpt. Farnborough, England: Gregg, 1967), 705. On this manuscript see that library’s on-line catalog at http://www.calames.abes.fr/pub/bsg.aspx#details?id=BSGB10365 [Last accessed July 28, 2020]. On Martí and his Dagger see most recently the essays in Hasselhoff and A. Fidora, Ramon Martí’s Pugio Fidei.

  69. 69.

    “Ionathan filius oziel qui tante auctoritate fuit et est apud hebreos quod nullus fuit ausus contradicet sibi in sua translatione chaldaica vbi nos habemus Dixit dominus domino meo etc. translutit sic Dixit dominus verbo suo” Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam on Ps. 110:1 (Frankfurt: M. Minerva, 1971, Reprint of the 1492 ed. published by J. Mentelin, Strasbourg), v. 3, fol. eeviiRA).

  70. 70.

    “et ideo psalmus iste ad literam loquitur de Christo.” Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, v. 3, fol. eeviiRA). See also Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58.

  71. 71.

    Ocker, Biblical Poetics, passim, esp. 31–48.

  72. 72.

    “satis innuitur quod a deo patre et filio equaliter procedit spiritus sanctus … ista spiritus processio ex naribus diuinis de spiritu dei deo intelligenda sit ad literam et non de alio aliquo.” Ramon Martí, Pugio fidei 3.1.10–11, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1405, fol. 157r; Leipzig ed., 545.

  73. 73.

    Jane McAuliffe’s otherwise extremely helpful discussion of the history of Qur’an exegesis in part one of her Qurʼa¯nic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) is an example of this long-dominant view.

  74. 74.

    Walid Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qurʼa¯n Commentary of al-Thaʻlabī (d. 427/1035) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004); idem, “Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsīr in Arabic: A History of the Book Approach,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 12 (2010): 6–40; idem, “Ibn Taymiyya and the Rise of Radical Hermeneutics: An Analysis of an Introduction to the Foundations of Qur’anic Exegesis” in Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, 123–62; idem, “Marginalia and Peripheries: A Tunisian Historian and the History of Qurʾanic Exegesis,” Numen 58, no. 2 (2011): 84–313; idem, “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥa¯shiyahs on al-Kashsha¯f,” Oriens 41 (2013): 217–59.

  75. 75.

    Norman Russell, “The Hesychast Controversy,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, 494–523, at 494.

  76. 76.

    Russell, “The Hesychast Controversy,” 507.

  77. 77.

    Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 23.

  78. 78.

    Anna Carlotta Dionisotti, “On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste,” in The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. Anna Carlotta Dionisotti, Anthony Grafton, and Jill Kraye (London: The Warburg Institute, 1988), 19–39.

  79. 79.

    Anne Tihon, Régine Leurquin, Claudy Scheuren, ed. and trans., Une version Byzantine du traité sur l’astrolabe du Pseudo-Messahalla (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Bruylant-Academia, 2001), 11 n6.

  80. 80.

    For recent bibliography on the latter, see Adam Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Medieval Institute, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Thomas E. Burman

  2. Department of History, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Thomas E. Burman

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  1. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Sarah Davis-Secord

  2. Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, USA

    Belen Vicens

  3. St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Robin Vose

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Burman, T.E. (2021). The Four Seas of Medieval Mediterranean Intellectual History. In: Davis-Secord, S., Vicens, B., Vose, R. (eds) Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83997-0_2

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