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Introduction The snows had been heavy in the Alps during the winter of 1215–16. That at least was what Jacques de Vitry thought as he prepared to ford a swollen river in the north of Italy in April 1216. Jacques was on his way to Rome, his mule loaded with two chests of personal effects, in particular books, in order to be ordained bishop of Acre, de facto capital of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem since the loss of the holy city to Saladin in 1187. Jacques, closely associated with the movements of intellectual and spiritual renewal in Flanders and Paris, was renowned as an ardent reformer and brilliant preacher; he had preached the crusade against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc and against the Muslims in order to recapture Jerusalem. Tireless advocate of ecclesiastical reform, enthralling orator, zealous proponent of crusade, he was a natural choice for the bishopric of Acre. Yet he had a formidable adversary —the devil. As Jacques explained in a letter to friends in Paris and Flanders: As I entered Lombardy, the devil cast into a river my arms, that is to say my books, with which I had undertaken to combat him, along with other things necessary for my sustenance. He pulled them down into the deep and tempestuous torrents. Because of the melting snow, the river was unusually violent; it had swept away bridges and large stones. It carried off one of my chests, full of books. The other chest, in which the finger of my [spiritual] mother Marie d’Oignies rested, held up my mule and prevented him from sinking. Against all odds, my mule, with the chest, arrived safely on the opposite bank. The other chest was miraculously found downstream, held back by the roots  / Introduction of some trees. What was particularly miraculous was that, although the water darkened the pages of my books a bit, all of them remained perfectly legible.1 Jacques sees himself as a soldier of Christ, fighting with spiritual and intellectual weapons against the great Enemy, the devil, and all his minions, be they Cathar heretics, Muslims, or bad Christians. It is only natural that the devil should attack him and seek to disarm him. Jacques could count on the aid of God and his saints—in this instance, in particular of Marie d’Oignies, the Beguine whom Jacques had served as confessor until her death in 1213 and whose Life Jacques subsequently wrote. Jacques carried her finger with him as a relic ever after; in the Holy Land, he would wear it, housed in a silver casket, on a chain around his neck.2 Here he credits it with saving him and his mule, buoying up the chest in which it rested and guiding the mule safely to the far bank of the river. In this spiritual combat with the devil, Jacques’s arms are his books. He deploys them in order to preach the crusade, to dispute with heretics in Milan or Acre, and to attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity. Jacques is also a forger of arms—author of letters, sermons, and chronicles. He is not the only medieval author to describe books and knowledge in military metaphors. Petrus Alfonsi, in his Dialogue against the Jews (1110), affirms to his Jewish adversary, “I desire greatly to slay you with your own sword”—the “sword” being the Torah, with which he hopes to prove the falsity of Judaism .3 In the same vein, Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce, in his Against the Law of the Saracens (c. 1300), affirms that he can use the Qur’ân to confound the “perfidious law of the Saracens,” just as David slew Goliath with the latter’s own sword.4 Such imagery is not limited to interreligious polemics : Peter Abelard describes his rivalry with Parisian master William of Champeaux as a siege, and Bernard of Clairvaux presents his own confrontation with Abelard as that of a pious David against an intellectual Goliath.5 The very titles of medieval religious polemics, by Christians or by Muslims, evoke military struggle: the Pugio fidei (Dagger of the Faith) by Ramon Martí (1278), the Maqâmi’ al-Sulbân fî-l-radd ‘alâ ‘abadat al-awthân (Bludgeons for the Suppression of Crosses in the Refutation of the Idolaters) by the Muslim alKhazraj î (late 12th century), The Sharpened Sword: A Response to the Coran, by the Damascene Christian al-Mu’taman Ibn al-’Assâl,6 Al-Sârim al-maslûl ‘al...

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