Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse edited by Jerold C. Frakes (review)

This volume, composed of seven essays with an epilogue, responds to the current interest in expressions of the decentered and liminal. The essays range, geographically, from the Celtic northwest of Europe to the Balkans and Armenia. The chronological scope is from the eleventh century to, in the final essay, today. Texts in German, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Armenian, and Serbo-Croatian are considered, often at the local level; the theoretical approaches of the authors are diverse.

The second essay in this collection, “Celts Seen as Muslims and Muslims Seen by Celts in Medieval Literature,” by Matthieu Boyd, describes the marginalized and often exoticized Celts (themselves sometimes labeled Saracens) as dependent on the views of Muslims expressed in and translated from French, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English texts. In this Celtic derivative literature, Saracens, foreigners, pagans, and others, including legendary and Biblical figures, are conflated and dehumanized. The more independent Celtic texts describe monstrous, sometimes black men and integrate the Muslim and the pagan with the giants of Celtic wondertales. Finally, Celtic contacts with Muslims through trade, slavery, and crusading were ongoing, and Muslims, at first conflated with Jews, appear in some Welsh literature in the context of the crusade, often without, however, the animus apparent in the original texts.

Christopher Taylor, in an essay on “Prester John, Christian Enclosure and the Spatial Transmission of Islamic Alterity in the Twelfth-century West,” focuses on the 1140s and efforts, through Robert Ketton’s Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete(his translation of the Qur’an with commentary) and circulating descriptions of the legendary kingdom of Prester John, to situate Christendom in confrontation with a more robust understanding of Islam that these texts attempt to enclose spacially and ideologically. Ketton crafted a theologically framed Qur’an, coded as heresy but treated as scriptural, highly paraphrased and glossed and accompanied by polemics, wherein the text controls the message. In so doing, it helped “cement Christian values” (p. 44) by defining the margins of Christendom at a time when the authority and stability of Christianity was felt to be in flux. Taylor then offers a convincing argument for associating the Prester John legend with Edessa, with Nestorianism, and with Islam as Christian heresy. He sees the portrayal of Prester John as itself entangled with exotic and heretical elements, with Islamic aspects absorbed into an ostensibly Christian kingdom. Both texts, he suggests, seek to define Christianity through explicating and surrounding its deviation; both efforts seek to enclose an Islam understood as heretical in the face of an expanding salvific Christendom with universalizing possibilities.

In “Mapping the Muslims: Images of Islam in Middle High German Literature of the Thirteenth Century,” David Tinsley addresses figures of the Moor and Muslim by asking whether the image of the Muslim Other as devilish, heathen, cowardly, and treacherous as portrayed in the Rolandsliedpervades other medieval German cultural productions. His analysis of Rudolf von Ems’s Weltchronik, the Ebstorf mappamundi, and the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Stricker suggests no consistent patterns—from absence in the Ebstorf mappamundi, presence as a growing power producing suffering (in the Weltchronik), to the contradictory messages of Wolfram’s Willehalmthat either only Christians can be saved or that God saves the heathen for we were all heathen once, to the Stricker’s tale of the triumphs of black pagans (through women teaching heresy) over a morally failing and politically falling Christian kingdom. Tinsley attributes this diversity of word and image to a recognition that these authors “were living on the margins of a fallen world” (p. 92). While recognizing the damning tropes and dehumanizing caricatures that were often associated with Muslims, Tinsley also suggests that locality bred diversity, and that many of these authors were more focused on the failings of Christians than concerned with demonizing the Islamic Other. The inclusion of this essay within the volume is particularly interesting as the editor signals, in a...