Few books by medieval scholars can be said to help inaugurate a new genre of historical writing. This one can. Debating Truth is a collaborative volume that belongs to a new “graphic history” series launched in 2014 by Oxford University Press. It aims to present important historical events in an accessible and visually creative format, a hybrid genre blending the comic book narrative and the traditional source reader. The event at the center of this story is a public debate that took place in the presence of the King James I of Aragon in the summer of 1263 between a leading rabbi of the day, Moses Nachmanides, and his Christian adversary Friar Paul Christiani, a convert from Judaism. The personalities and texts associated with this episode are relatively well known to students of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Indeed, attention was first drawn to the encounter by pioneers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the early 1860s, and the episode continues to attract the perspectives of scholars working in the various subfields of Jewish history, Church history, Catalonian history, and now Mediterranean history and interfaith encounters. Among the more notable features of this disputation is that, through converts such as Friar Paul, Christian polemicists now attacked Jews using their own rabbinic sources as proof texts.

There are five parts to the book. Part 1 is the illustrated graphic history itself, also divided into five subsections. This is principally the work of Liz Clarke, who has illustrated other (equally appealing) volumes in the series. The narrative follows very closely the sequence of events as they are recounted in the historical documents. In fact, some of the direct speech in the captions are verbatim quotations from Caputo's translation of the Hebrew text that follows. This works especially well since, as Caputo reminds us, the Hebrew account often alludes to the dialogic give-and-take of the encounter.

Part 2 consists of ten primary sources in translation. The lengthiest and most important of these is Nachmanides's “Hebrew Account of the Barcelona Disputation” (document 1). Unlike the Christian Latin account (document 2), which is short and perfunctory, the Hebrew version goes into considerable detail about the order of the events and who said what. It is largely from the Hebrew account that we can grasp a better sense of the topics that were covered, the arguments that were given, and the reactions of the king and the other attendees. Caputo's fluid rendition of this document is augmented by the inclusion of letters and other documents relating to the broader context of thirteenth-century Jewish-Christian relations: various letters by James of Aragon addressing such topics as Jewish attendance at Christian sermons (documents 3, 5, 6), the burning of the books by Moses Maimonides (document 4), and the tribunal investigating the charges that Nachmanides had blasphemed Christianity (document 7); a letter from Pope Clement IV to James I encouraging further limitations on Jews (document 8); a letter from Jerusalem by Nachmanides to his son (document 9); and the canons from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 restricting Jewish life (document 10).

Part 3 consists of four contextual essays covering in broad brushstrokes the ongoing efforts of Christians to retake Muslim lands, the life and times of King James I (1213–1276), the status of Jewry in medieval Spain, and the importance of disputation as a tool of confrontation and argumentation in medieval society. These essays help to place the Barcelona Disputation at the critical intersection of several distinct developments in the medieval world. Part 4 offers two angles on the topic of “Historiography.” The first is a straightforward summary of what scholars have said about the Barcelona Disputation over the years. The second and far more fascinating angle concerns the making of the graphic novel itself. Here the authors take the reader into their collaborative workshop by exposing the issues that needed to be confronted for the overall goals of the book to work: problems of portrayal (should Nachmanides be bearded or not, and should Friar Paul be ugly or handsome?) and the ethics of narrative (whose version of the disputation should be privileged, or how much fiction should be allowed to fill in the historical gaps?). It is to their great merit that the authors have addressed these stylistic and substantive questions so forthrightly, regardless of whether they have resolved them to the satisfaction of all. Among other things, this section is a useful reminder of the myriad pitfalls that accompany any visual and narrative reconstruction of the past.

The volume is handsomely produced and attractively priced, no doubt with the hope that it might be adopted in undergraduate courses. To that end, part 5 consists of resources for additional research (study questions, a bibliography, and a glossary). Debating Truth makes an excellent and original contribution to the medievalist's pedagogical toolkit. Informative, creative, and helpfully provocative, the volume succeeds admirably in that most elusive of academic ambitions: it makes history come alive.