Foreign Knowledge and Shared Histories: Islam and Historical Thought in Medieval Latin Christendom
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Medieval Studies
First Advisor
Davis, Stephen
Abstract
Foreign Knowledge and Shared Histories: Islam and Historical Thought in Medieval Latin Christendom examines how Latin Christians from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries investigated, interpreted, and adapted histories written by or about Muslims. It demonstrates the impact these histories had on medieval Latin Christian historiographical thought and writing. I argue that Christian-Muslim intellectual exchanges impacted how Christians conceived, investigated, and wrote about both Muslim and Christian histories. This was the result of an often-overlooked area of research: the relationship between historical thought and investigation and constructions of Islamic alterity in the Middle Ages. This dissertation is thus, at its heart, about the relationship between historical consciousness and constructions of difference. My project is a study of medieval Christian methods of historical investigation and writing as well as the interreligious transfer of knowledge and medieval Christian perceptions of Islam more generally, and the importance of history as a means through which Christian writers understood and refuted Islam. The historical past served as a highly contested and polemicized space for sorting out religious and cultural claims and identities in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christians indeed cared greatly about Islamic history, whether because they viewed it as an appropriation of the Christian past which needed to be refuted, or because it constituted an integral element for understanding and reconstructing Christian history itself. I demonstrate the ways in which Christians sought to historically understand and contextualize Islam while establishing their own claims to an ever-expanding past which threatened to de-center and even obfuscate the historical role of Christianity itself. These claims were made through acts of translation, interpretation, and polemic. The stakes in understanding and accessing Islamic histories were nothing less than defining and defending Christianity’s own place within a divine historical scheme.
Recommended Citation
Peña, Alexander, "Foreign Knowledge and Shared Histories: Islam and Historical Thought in Medieval Latin Christendom" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 957.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/957
