EMISCS99

The fruit of a sustained and close collaboration between historians, linguists and jurists working on the Christian, Muslim and Jewish societies of the Middle Ages, this book explores the theme of religious coexistence (and the problems it poses) from a resolutely comparative perspective. The authors concentrate on a key aspect of this coexistence: the legal status attributed to Jews and Muslims in Christendom and to dhimmīs in Islamic lands. What are the similarities and differences, from the point of view of the law, between the indigenous religious minority and the foreigner? What specific treatments and procedures in the courtroom were reserved for plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses belonging to religious minorities? What role did the law play in the segregation of religious groups? In limiting, combating, or on the contrary justifying violence against them? Through these questions, and through the innovative comparative method applied to them, this book offers a fresh new synthesis to these questions and a spur to new research.

This volume contributes to current discussions of the place of relics in devotional life, politics, and identity-formation, by illustrating both the power which relics were thought to emanate as well as the historical continuity in the significance assigned to that power. Relics had the power to ‘touch’ believers not only as material objects, but also through different media that made their presence tangible and valuable. Local variants in relic-veneration demonstrate how relics were exploited, often with great skill, in different religious and political contexts. The volume covers both a wide historical and geographical span, from Late Antiquity to the early modern period, and from northern, central, and southern Europe.

The book focuses on textual, iconographical, archaeological, and architectural sources. The contributors explore how an efficient manipulation of the liturgy, narrative texts, iconographic traditions, and architectural settings were used to construct the meaningfulness of relics and how linguistic style and precision were critically important in creating a context for veneration. The methodology adopted in the book combines studies of material culture and close reading of textual evidence in order to offer a new multidisciplinary purchase on the study of relic cults.

Thomas Aquinas is still most widely known for his works in systematic theology (Summa theologiae) and as a commentator of Aristotle. Recent decades, however, have seen a revived interest in Aquinas as a biblical scholar. The essays gathered in this volume explore the richness of his biblical commentaries by analyzing the hermeneutical tools employed in his reading of Scripture and investigating the contemporary relevance of his biblical exegesis. Its goal is to familiarize the contemporary reader with an indispensable dimension of his scholarly activity: as a master in Sacred Scripture (magister in sacra pagina) Aquinas taught theology as a form of speculative reading of the revealed Word of God and hence the reading of the various books of the Bible constituted the axis of his scriptural didactics. Altogether, the nineteen contributions in the volume offers an up-to-date analysis of Aquinas’s contribution to medieval biblical exegesis and points to ways in which it can enrich contemporary debates on the relation between exegesis and systematic theology.

Contributors: Christopher Baglow, Timothy F. Bellamah, Lluís Clavell, Gilbert Dahan, Leo J. Elders, Jeremy Holmes, Daniel Keating, Matthew Levering, Enrique Martínez, Miroslaw Mróz, Mauricio Narváez, Marco Passarotti, Matthew J. Ramage, Elisabeth Reinhardt, Margherita Maria Rossi, Piotr Roszak, Olivier-Thomas Venard, Jörgen Vijgen, Robert J. Woźniak.