I can still remember the excitement that I felt when I first discovered Studies in Church History as a postgraduate student. The particular volume was W. J. Sheils's The Church and healing (no. xix), a revelation of a distant past by some of the greats unfolding what I had previously thought was my own ‘fringe’ fascination. To discover a new idea is great: to discover that the idea lives in a great tradition is … well, divine! It was with like excitement that I received this volume through the mail -- the production values respect the tradition, and deliver a book which is weighty, polished, deserving of attention. Wolffe's introduction is helpful: even in the context of a range of essays which seems almost uncontrollable, he tightly focuses on the key issue, which is the fact that pluralism is central not only to understanding Christianity in the present, globalised age, but during its prior ‘expansions’ and indigenisations. One of the strengths of a text like this is that it introduces siloed historians and the broader public to literatures that they otherwise would not have known. This is accentuated by the emphasis on shorter papers, and more of them.

The contrasting views as one reads from paper to paper are thus delightful and instructive. Guy G. Strousma's ‘From Qumran to Qur'an’ is a helicopter view of how Christianity negotiated the major cultural changes of the ancient world. It probably tries to do too much, revealing its origins as a ‘framing’ keynote address. Like the essay by James Palmer on the ‘Otherness of non-Christians in the early Middle Ages’, the scholarship is splendid, but the personal positions are a little too apparent after the compression process is taken into account. After ‘galloping’ across such broad geographical and temporal domains, the careful, focused work of Hayes (‘Justin's Christian philosophy’) and Patey (‘Asserting differences in plurality’) jogs the reader to thought. Why is it that Palmer seems fixed on blaming the victims (for example, the ‘martyrs’ of Córdoba) and relativising Christianity in its context, while essentialising Islam and other religious comparators? Patey's emphasis on the semiotics of ‘the body’ is a particularly helpful corrective, demonstrating the core function of ‘witness’ in Christian faith and illustrating the ideological bent in broader scholarship. What are the scholarly equations which (as Tom Holland has recently noted with regard to his early fascination with the Roman Empire) make oppression, social marking, and cultural genocide acceptable among the emirs of Córdoba but not, for example, during the Crusades or under the Third Reich?Footnote ¹ Christians, educated or not, have – from the first century through to anti-Fascist testimony to Martin Luther King Jr to the present – ‘taken it upon themselves’ to oppose the repression of conscience. Amanda Porter's helpful essay on multi-directional ‘encounters in the ruins’ under the Mongol expansion is a particularly delicate interpretation of the tensions between bottom up, top down and contextual engagements with the other. Such is the value of comparative studies like this: we are forced to think about our own reckonings, our intransigent embeddedness in the present. It also helps us appreciate how long is the arm of Edward Gibbon, and how much historians still need encouragement to critique stereotyping and reductionism through a nuanced appropriation of theory.

This collection contains a succession of brisk challenges to one's general knowledge. George of Trebizond's flights of fancy about the conversion of Mehmed the Conqueror, the state-sponsored ‘religious diplomacy’ of Gennadios ii, the Turcken puechlein and the connection between Turkish invasion and the fanning of German xenophobia during the rise of Protestant nationalism: all of these are helpful insights into how Europe responds to the tension between religious diversity and external pressure. This highlights, however, the limitations of the collection's focus. ‘Christianity and religious plurality’ largely focuses on Christian responses, rather than (as is the case in Girling's exceptional piece) on true reciprocity. This tends to downplay the fact that, for Christian communities in the path of (say) Ottoman expansion after the fall of Rhodes (leading to the catastrophic depopulation of Otranto) or the apocalyptic invasion of the Mongols, there was good reason to fear physical or cultural annihilation. (As the old joke goes, just because one is paranoid, does not necessarily mean that someone is not out to get you.) The tendency to overplay ‘the myth of religious violence’, in some chapters, and ‘the myth of Islamic tolerance’ in others (where the reader is encouraged to think how Europe could have avoided centuries of war by simply submitting to the Sublime Porte), however, is countered by the range of the chapters. Different authorial perspectives tend to balance one another out. Are marginal pluralist Christian approaches in the Middle Ages ‘potential resources’ for the way that Christians in the present can engage with Islam? Perhaps, but it is not as if more contemporary Christians have not in other ways traversed similar territory. The function of these chapters as road signs to forgotten exchanges is a useful one, but hardly needed to justify the collection. Their interest alone is sufficient and, frankly, there is something of an over-reach in suggesting that non-specialists turn to Gennadios ii or Henry Stubbe as a source for civic engagements with Islam, particularly since the latter was quite happy to bowdlerise Christian doctrine to achieve his ends.

Islam, as Wolffe notes (pp. 233–4), probably also gets more than its fair share of treatment in a collection of this size. The concerns of governments and publishers since 9/11 (reflected in funding opportunities, and playing to the concerns of historians to attract grants and reinvigorate history as a ‘relevant’ discipline) have developed nuanced, transdisciplinary approaches to Islam in ways which have not been so evident for other traditions. Wolffe and Jacob's chapters on Anglican approaches to the diverse London Jewish communities, therefore, are helpful (not least because the source treatments are substantial), and Stuart Mews and John Maiden remind us of how essential engagement with South Asian religions has been, both for Christian pluralism and for the history of the modern world. While there could be better balance, then, this is an excellent contribution to a significant series and to the discipline as a whole, with plenty of sparkle for the inquisitive and thoughtful.