In this brief volume, Scott Bruce argues that hagiographical texts influenced medieval readers outside their immediate devotional context, even shaping Christian apologetics with Islam. He uses accounts in Cluniac literature of the tenth-century abduction of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny by Muslim slavers as an entrée into two complementary discussions to demonstrate the influence of hagiography. The discussion in the first half of the book treats the Muslim community of Fraxinetum that existed in Provence for more than a century and the competing accounts of the abbot's seizure. Bruce contends that the treatment of this episode, particularly in the diverse depictions of Muslims, signifies that Cluniac authors lacked a unified vision of Islam in the early eleventh century. The one constant in their reporting was the promotion of Maiolus, who, in one hagiographical tradition, attempts to convert his captors to Christianity through rational arguments. After an interlude that summarizes eleventh-century Cluniac engagement with Islam, a second discussion resumes in the twelfth century with Peter the Venerable. Bruce argues that Peter's polemical works represent the formulation of a “Muslim policy at Cluny” and that the abbot took inspiration from Maiolus when he decided to write his refutation of Islam.

The first half of this book demonstrates the progressively larger place that Maiolus came to occupy in the Cluniac imagination. Bruce reveals how early Cluniac scholars mention Maiolus's role as a preacher as well as his miracles. However, Abbot Odilo commissioned two versions of Maiolus's biography to combat competing claims on Maiolus's posterity by monasteries at Pavia, where Maiolus performed miracles and another vita had been written. Both biographies commissioned by Odilo retained and highlighted the captivity and ransom of the abbot, with the addition of key details about his preaching. These later versions also changed the depiction of the Muslim audience from mere barbarians to adherents of a religion whose prophet Maiolus could refute through rational arguments. In this way, later generations of Cluniac monks had several resources at hand that depicted Maiolus as apologist and Muslims as an audience that would be receptive to rational argumentation. The cult of Maiolus grew under the abbacy of Hugh and later Peter, and became integral of the framework of Cluniac identity.

In the second half of the book, Bruce focuses on the works of Abbot Peter to establish how the careful cultivation of Maiolus's image influenced Cluniac scholarship. While Peter commissioned his own biography of Maiolus, the example of his predecessor appealed especially to Peter later in his abbacy, after the failure of the Second Crusade. Despite Peter's commissioning of the Qur'an and other Islamic theological texts while traveling in Spain in 1142–1143, the abbot hoped that the work of refuting Islam would be taken up by another, namely, Bernard of Clairvaux. Twelve years later, after Bernard's death and the Second Crusade, Peter resolved to take up this task personally. In doing so, however, Peter deviated from the usual polemical style that marks his earlier works against heretics and Jews. He instead drew upon his own Cluniac tradition, specifically the model of Maiolus, and addressed his refutation to Muslims directly, hoping to convince them as Maiolus did, through reasoned arguments and out of pastoral concern. Peter's pastoral approach and the example of Maiolus ultimately failed to find resonance with later Cluniac and Christian authors in general, which Bruce illustrates in an appendix. It consists of a fifteenth-century poem, written by Martin of Lausanne, that appears before a copy of Peter's translation of the Qur'an, which condemns the text to burning.

Bruce makes two contributions in addition to his thesis regarding the influence of hagiography. Despite increasing scholarship on Muslims in Latin Christendom, the community at Fraxinetum has largely escaped notice. Bruce's first chapter remedies this oversight by providing an excellent resource for historians of Christian-Muslim relations in the early Middle Ages, as it situates Fraxinetum and its entrepreneurial Muslim slavers within the wider political and economic world of the ninth- and tenth-century Mediterranean. The second half of the book represents a new interpretation of Peter's refutation of Islam, as well as the abbot's supposed tolerance. Responding to Iogna-Prat and popular visions of the abbot, Bruce argues that scholars assume a unity in Peter's polemics and force cohesion upon his writings, despite the differing tenor and methodology in these works. Bruce's contextualization of Peter's polemics is a necessary correction to the image of Peter as a precursor to modern notions of toleration. However, if other scholars’ depictions of Peter are too prescient, Bruce's interpretation of Peter's action is perhaps too reactive as twelfth-century events shape, if not dictate, the well-read and well-travelled abbot's decisions. Bruce demonstrates that Peter and his apologetics are likely to continue to be a subject of debate that scholars can, and should, approach from a wide variety of sources.

This brief study ultimately opens many doors to future scholarship on Cluniac hagiography after Maiolus. In the interlude, Bruce tantalizingly hints at reports of Hugh's vita of this abbot's own attempt to convert a Muslim (68), but does not delve fully into this account or its reception. Furthermore, there is no mention of how Cluniac hagiographers treated Peter's polemical works or interest in Islam in his vita. To be fair, an investigation into these later vitae necessarily shifts the study's stated focus beyond La Garde-Freinet and Maiolus, but it would accomplish the larger goal of tracing the development of a Muslim policy at Cluny. One hopes that Bruce and other scholars of Cluny might be prevailed upon to continue this discussion in further studies.