This ambitious volume evaluates how medieval and early modern Christian, Jewish, and Muslim preachers forged religious and gender identities within and across cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean, particularly the Iberian peninsula. Scholars have often analyzed sermons as forms of mass communication that traversed cultures. However, if “models of communal self-identity are constructed in opposition to real or imagined others” (2) was the aim of most preaching and polemic the conversion of the “other”—or the illumination of the faithful? This uncertainty is compounded by the relative dearth of studies on Jewish and Muslim preaching and polemic and a scholarly focus on Christian sermons from Paris and Italy rather than Iberia (3–6).
To remedy these lacunae, Oriol Catalán examines two little-known Catalan Franciscan preachers and the intersection of anti-Jewish sermons with literature, artwork, and law (123). For Catalán, conversos preachers, apocalyptic thought, and the translation of portions of the Talmud into Latin transformed the tone and aim of anti-Jewish polemical works and sermons, which fostered anti-Jewish actions (137). Other contributors treat well-known individuals whose sermons have been under-examined. Carolina Losada concludes that the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Vincent de Ferrer's sermons served as a “complex communication device of social homogenization” (190) after pogroms had virtually expunged Jewish communities from the city of Valencia. Similarly, Amélie De las Heras argues that, while Martin of León drew heavily on Isidore of Seville's Contra Iudeos for his anti-Jewish sermons, his homilies were not intended to convert local Jews but to define “the faith and communal identity of the canons regular of San Isidoro of León” (170). Anti-Jewish rhetoric was not always accompanied by intolerance or violence; the hermeneutical Jew played a central role in Christian reforming polemic (12).
Preachers nonetheless contributed significantly to the formation of a “uniform Latin Christian cultural identity . . . . forged in opposition to negative mirror images projected onto the Jewish and Muslim enemy other” (7). This could occur despite the absence of regular contact with either community or because close proximity meant that religious polemical works were adapted into sermons intended for the public (10–11). For example, Jonathan Adams describes the polemical employment of the figures of “absent present” Jews and Muslims in artwork and East Norse sermons as tools for evoking emotion and shaming sinful Christians, countering doubts on specific doctrines, and illustrating desired or condemned behaviors (96, 103–104). Ram Ben-Shalom explores the ambivalent response of Jewish communities to Christian polemic and preaching. He focuses on Isaac Nathan of Arles’ Fortifying Faith, a hybrid text modelled on Christian schemata of vices and virtues, which employed exempla criticizing Christian hypocrisy or praising Christian virtue to call Jewish audiences to certain beliefs and practices (beware false Messiahs!). As a wealthy bourgeois, Isaac Nathan was concerned by the anti-usury sermons of the friars (who espoused mendicant poverty) and their attempts to convert Jews; he therefore attacked them as false prophets and hypocrites (209–211).
Isaac Nathan's work also illustrates communication between geographically separated Jewish communities living as minorities in a Christian majority culture, just as recent scholarship has examined issues of communal identity for conversos and Moriscos (6). Olivier Brisville-Fertin examines the ways in which Mudejar and Morisco communities reaffirmed and adapted their cultures and identities through various forms of preaching as their status shifted from that of free Muslims to forced converts to Christianity. He finds evidence for the influence of Christian communities and languages on the preaching of Iberian Muslims and provides a catalogue and descriptions of the major types of some known surviving sermons (77–84). Similarly, Ferrero Hernández discusses an unedited disputation between the Franciscan friar Pedro de Alcántara and the Muslim (Morisco?) scholar Abdalá Oropesa. Perhaps composed in Sagena (Morocco), the disputation may have been intended to prevent the conversion of Christian captives to Islam, but also moves between exhortation and polemic with arguments crafted to attract and convert opponents (8, 15).
The situation in Egypt is explored by Linda Gale Jones who investigates the fabrication of a tale about the conversion of Christian monks to Islam, attributed to Andalusi Sufis, to lend support to the image of voluntary conversion to Islam at a moment when Christian-Muslim relations were in crisis. Her article reveals transcultural connections between Sufism in Egypt, the Magreb, and the Andalus, spread by charismatic émigré preachers, and rivalry and accommodation between Islamic and Coptic hagiographical and homiletic traditions. Similar to Christian Iberian rulers’ ambivalence towards conversos, Mamluk rulers pressured Coptic and Jewish communities to convert but also suspected them of proselytization and/or apostasy (289). Sufis fostered anti-Christian sentiment and violence in preaching (as Christian friars did with Jewish communities) to call for deeper piety through conversion to Sufism (14–15) and to deliberately counter the anti-Muslim practices of Christian rulers in al-Andalus (289–290).
While these articles broaden the traditional scholarly focus on Christian anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish polemic and/or crusade appeals, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby fruitfully probes the relationship between John of Capestrano's anti-Ottoman crusading appeals, his anti-Jewish sermons (which instigated violence), and the visual imagery used to represent John's preaching (14). Xavier Renedo Puig compares three variants of a harangue delivered to Corts of Barcelona in 1228 by James I in support of the crusade against Mallorca. The version in James’ Llibre dels Fets (and the speeches attributed to the bishop of Barcelona and the archbishop of Tarragona), dictated decades later, emulate characteristics of preaching and invoke crusading and messianic motifs, whereas the accounts of Bernat Desclot and Pere de Castellnou present James’ address more accurately as a political speech (13–14, 229, 233).
Perhaps the least cohesive part of the volume is that which challenges the normativity of “Christian and masculine identities” (7) by examining the construction of gender in sermons (this vast topic has become the theme for the IMSSS symposium in 2022). Jussi Hanksa and Kataljala-Peltomaa investigate how, in a sermon delivered to Orvietan nuns, Eudes de Châteauroux employed gendered metaphors, specifically, the travails of childbirth, to construct a female religious identity based on “affective religious rhetoric” rather than chastity and/or virginity (42). Similarly, Damien Ruiz discusses how Hugh of Digne adapted his penitential message, adopting a more intellectual register for elite male audiences and a more direct approach based on the personal examples of himself and his pious sister Douceline to persuade many women to adopt forms of religious life (52–54, 66).
By assembling an international team of scholars, the editors have convincingly illustrated how preaching defined interfaith relations and religious identities and facilitated transculturation. Despite their differences, monotheistic religions shared common texts, genres, and techniques (Aristotelian rhetoric, Friday sermons, illustrative tales, exegesis). They also demonstrate that Jewish and Muslim preaching ought to be central to the field of sermon studies and that sermons must always be considered in relation to other genres (7–8).
