Islam and Papal Power in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Afterlives of a Popular Polemic
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-47267-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 220 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

Reihe: Studies in Medieval Religions and Cultures

Islam and Papal Power in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe traces the influential history of another book: Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Contra legem Sarracenorum. Around 1301, a Dominican missionary named Riccoldo da Montecroce wrote a treatise on the Qur’an, arguing against the validity of the Muslim faith. Over the next two hundred years, Europeans read, copied, translated, and circulated Riccoldo’s work more than any other text on Islam. This study overviews and contextualizes that popularity in order to analyze Christian understandings of Islam in early modern Europe.

Analysing the thirty-four surviving manuscript copies, this book studies the way the text was transcribed, the notes that readers made in the margins, and the contexts in which it was copied. Critically, this book also puts the transmission analysis into the broader context of major European historical developments. This context reveals that Contra legem became a tool for Europeans who linked fear of the Ottoman Empire to instability within the Church. Specifically, readers used Riccoldo’s descriptions of the dangers of the Qur’an to conflate the Ottoman Empire with a broader Islamic threat to Christian society. Such positioning helped readers to substantiate the divine authority of the western Church – and especially the papacy – as a bulwark against this threat.

This book will be of interest to scholars working on interreligious dialogue and Christian-Muslim relations in medieval and early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. It will appeal to historians of religion, scholars of late medieval and early modern thought, and students of pre- and early modern history at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Waggoner Karchner, Kate

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Mittelalterliche, neuzeitliche Archäologie (Europa)
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christentum/Christliche Theologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: How an Italian Monk Came to Write a Bestselling Book on the Qur’an

1. Viral Vitriol: Reading and Reproducing an Anti-Islamic Polemic

2. Authority and Authenticity in the Making of an Early Modern Bestseller

3. Papal Power: Using Islam to Maintain Control of the Catholic Church

4. The Sword and the Pen: European Responses to the Rise of the Ottomans

5. Philosophy, Philology, and Polemic during the Renaissance

Afterword. Legacies from Martin Luther to 9/11

Appendix A. Contra legem Manuscript Corpus: Descriptions and Observations

Appendix B. Contents of the Contra legem Manuscript Corpus

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Kate Waggoner Karchner is an independent scholar living and working in Ohio. Waggoner Karchner earned her PhD in History with a certificate in Medieval Studies from the University of Michigan in 2019. While there, Waggoner Karchner focused on medieval and early modern European history with an emphasis on religious history and Christian-Muslim relations. Waggoner Karchner’s past publications include “Two New Manuscript Copies of Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Contra legem Sarracenorum” (2019) and “Deciphering the Qur’an in late medieval Europe: Riccoldo da Montecroce, Nicholas of Cusa, and the text-centred development of interreligious dialogue” (2020).