Book Description

This volume explores the sermons and activities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim preachers who shaped ideas about religious and gendered identities and alterity throughout the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Preachers of all three traditions played a decisive role in defining the religious identities of their communities, often in response to negative images projected onto religious others. The studies cover a broad spectrum of premodern Europe and the Mediterranean and address the ways that preaching reflects transcultural contacts as well as social, intellectual, and hermeneutical encounters among diverse societies and religious communities. The essays are divided into three themes. Part One, 'Religious and Gendered Identities and Alterities, ' examines how religious identity is inflected by the presence or the 'absent presence' of religious others and interrogates how gender informs religious identity, piety, and alterity. The chapters in Part Two, 'Hermeneutical Identities, Alterities, and Transcultural Relations in Christian and Jewish Preaching', offer contrasting interpretations of the impact of anti-Judaism in Christian preaching and analyse Jewish responses to Christian polemic. Part Three, 'Muslim and Christian Orators and Inter-faith Encounters, ' explores these encounters from the dual perspectives of Crusade and military conflict and interreligious dialogue, disputation, and proselytization. The volume positions itself at the intellectual crossroads between comparative medieval sermons studies and transcultural Mediterranean and European studies. Its treatment of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim preaching, together with its emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula, will broaden and deepen the scope of medieval sermon studie