Religious Polemic and Intellectual History of the Mozarabs: c. 1050-1200.

• Author: Constable, Olivia Remie

This volume represents a valuable addition to an underrepresented field of medieval Iberian history. As the author states in his introduction, "unlike the Mudejars and Spanish Jews, who have been the subjects of very extensive study in our times, the Mozarabs of the twelfth century and later are in some respects 'a forgotten community' as far as modern scholarship is concerned" (p. 2). This lacuna owes less to modern forgetfulness than to the rarity and extreme difficulty of texts documenting the life and beliefs of Arabic-speaking Christians in medieval Spain. Very little is known about this community, and there exists almost no information on the Mozarabs in the period between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, Even the name of the community is problematic for - as Burman points out (pp. 7-9) - it is debatable whether Arabic-speaking Christians should be collectively referred to as "Mozarabs." Burman adopts the term, for the sake of simplicity, but his discussion emphasizes the variety and "permeable boundaries" (p. 28) of the Mozarabic community in the later middle ages.

Only a few Mozarabic texts (all works of Christian polemic) survive from the twelfth century, and these have been studied in the past by M.-Th. d'Alverny, N. Daniel, and others. However, the strictly religious character of these writings has precluded much analysis beyond their overt content. How can a scholar use polemical texts to glean information about the society and intellectual milieu which produced these works? This is the question which Burman tackles in his book, and he provides a brilliant example of the way in which painstaking study, a deep knowledge of contemporary theological writings, multi-lingual expertise, and a different set of questions, can seduce new information out of unpromising sources.

Burman devotes the first half of his volume to a close analysis of a small handful of Mozarabic religious writings, all produced in the twelfth century by authors about whom we know almost nothing. An edition and facing English translation of the most important of these texts, the Liber denudationis sive ostensionis aut patefaciens, takes up the second half of the book. These texts were originally written in Arabic, although the Liber denudationis only survives in one execrable medieval Latin translation. Burman's thesis is that the Mozarab authors of these works were well versed in a number of theological traditions, and they drew their arguments from a wide...