This week, we will hear from Thomas Burman, Professor of History and former Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He will presenting a chapter in the works from a book in-progress, tentatively entitled Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí (fl. 1250-84).
Abstract from Thomas Burman:
This is a draft of the third chapter of my book project, tentatively titled Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí (fl. 1250-84). The previous two chapters will have shown the following: That Martí was entirely dependent on the Arab-Christian culture of the Islamicate Mediterranean when he refuted Islam in his On the Sect of Muhammad (ch. 1) and that that brief treatise and his other supposedly anti-Islamic work, Explanation of the Apostles' Creed, were in no sense adequate responses to the lengthy and learned attack on Christianity by Ahmad ibn Umar al-Qurtubi (d. 1258), an Andalusi intellectual who wrote earlier in Martí's life (ch. 2). This chapter then argues that when Martí turned to refuting Judaism in his third, lengthy work, the Halter of the Jews, he turned entirely away from the learned culture of the Islamicate world, and did so almost entirely within a tradition of European Jewish-Christian disputation but in a way that also had resonance much more widely in Latin-Christian intellectual culture. Martí here, then, has moved well beyond the Mediterranean. The fourth and final chapter will complicate all that I've argued in the first three chapters by showing that when he argued for the Trinity in his final immense work, the Dagger of Faith, he was both very much within the Mediterranean in the basic structure of his argument but has merged it with strongly Latin-European ideas from the north: In and beyond the Mediterranean both.
Bio from Thomas Burman:
Professor Burman's research and teaching focus on the intellectual and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean world. He is author of Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200 and Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560, and co-author with Brian Catlos and Mark Meyerson of The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650. Currently he is completing a book entitled Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí (fl. 1250-84).
Originally published at medieval.nd.edu.