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Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean

Online ISBN:
9780823266821
Print ISBN:
9780823264629
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean

Ryan Szpiech (ed.)
Ryan Szpiech
(ed.)

Associate Professor

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Published:
1 May 2015
Online ISBN:
9780823266821
Print ISBN:
9780823264629
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Exegesis and scriptural commentary is at the heart of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Evolving in all three Abrahamic traditions as a multifaceted practice—at once social, devotional, intellectual, creative, and educational—it constituted an essential aspect of expression and belief. 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 fault-lines of inter-confessional disputation and polemical conflict. This collection of thirteen essays explores the nature of medieval exegesis during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages (roughly from the 11th to the 15th Centuries) as a discourse of cross-cultural and inter-religious conflict in all three traditions, paying particular attention to the exegetical production of scholars in the Western and Southern Mediterranean. It includes essays on medieval textual commentary from a number of perspectives, including Islamic-Christian relations, medieval Dominican intellectual culture, Jewish-Christian polemics and disputations, as well as a number of thematic chapters on the role of gender metaphors and gendered language in polemical and exegetical commentaries. Together, these thirteen chapters by leading experts shed new light on medieval scriptural commentary and on inter-religious encounters and conflicts.

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