Religious controversy is like a distorting mirror, reflecting a recognizable but grotesque image of the figure which gazes into it.1 Through apologetics, religions offer a positive view of themselves; through controversy, they condemn other religions for having strayed from the truth. Because Christianity and Islam draw on the same scriptural tradition, both religions have, since their earliest encounters in the seventh century CE, defined themselves through controversy with each other.2
Although these controversies centred on belief and doctrine, the political encounters between Islam and Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods meant that theological polemics could not be divorced from ideas about cultural and social difference. Muslim empires conquered large swathes of Christian territory in their early expansion from the Arabian Peninsula, reaching as far as the Iberian Peninsula. From the eleventh century, it would be Latin Christians in Iberia, Sicily, and the Levant who advanced at the expense of the territories governed by Muslims. Centuries later, with the Ottoman Empire, much of south-east Europe would live under the aegis of Islam until the nineteenth and even into the twentieth centuries. Over time, these regions became spaces where members of different religious communities encountered each other, sometimes in warfare, but often in the more everyday setting of the street, market, and field. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean was a place where ties were forged between the Christian and Islamic worlds through trade, privateering, slavery, pilgrimage, family ties and emigration, undermining clear boundaries between religions and cultures. Religious polemics can be understood, then, as an anxious reaction to the intimate proximity between Islam and Christianity in Europe: polemicists, whether Christian or Muslim, were often less concerned with converting opponents than with shoring up the
As a genre, polemics rely on established discussion points that have changed little over the centuries. Muslim apologists argued that Christians have departed from the true message of God revealed to them through the prophet ‘Isā/Jesus: only the Qurʾān, the true and unaltered word of God, has kept the divine message intact. Some early commentators accepted the veracity of the Bible, claiming only that contemporary Christians had misinterpreted it;4 but with time, many polemicists would prefer to argue that Christian Scripture itself had been falsified in order to hide the future coming of Muhammad as the end of divine revelation.5 Muslims revere Jesus as a Prophet, but reject the claim that he was divine and that he died on the cross to be resurrected.6 According to Muslim polemicists, calling Jesus the son of God is a form of polytheism, which contradicts the principle of divine unity (tawhīd) at the heart of the Muslim faith (Qurʾān 4:169–71). In contrast to the rational simplicity of Islam, Christianity would often be portrayed as an irrational and corrupt sect, with inventions such as the priesthood,7 a special caste of men who falsely claim to act as intermediaries between God and mankind.8
For their part, Christian apologists also accused Islam of being an irrational religion, claiming that Muslims sought converts through violence because they could not convince them through debate. Christian polemics portrayed Islam in diverse but interconnected ways: as pagan idolatry, as a Christian heresy, or as a return to Mosaic law with its supposed emphasis on the letter of scripture,
These controversial points began to develop from the first real contacts between Christianity and Islam and remained generally consistent until the twentieth century. In this way, the genre of anti-Islamic or anti-Christian religious controversy soon exhausted its originality. But while polemics, as a kind of learned discourse among religious authorities, relied on a rigid set of tropes, many of those polemical images spread through broader culture in more creative ways.11 Through sermons, literature, traditional oral poetry, art, and legend, Christians and Muslims in Europe absorbed a diverse set of narrative frameworks for making sense of the other faith and its adherents. We might think of the scene in Don Quixote when the Florentine nobleman Lotario, struggling to reason with his friend Anselmo, accuses his companion of being in a ‘Moorish’ state of mind: “For they cannot be made to understand the error of their sect with commentaries from Holy Scripture, or arguments that depend on the rational understanding.”12 The fictional Lotario, like Cervantes’s real readers, did not need to be a theologian for the stereotype of the stubborn, irrational Muslim to have filtered into his consciousness. An important impact of these narratives was that even when European Christians and Muslims became familiar with each other’s beliefs, customs, and values, greater knowledge did not always result in greater understanding; rather, that knowledge was often refracted through the prism of received narratives and stereotypes in a manner that reinforced each community’s sense of superiority. In particular, for communities in a position of political weakness, knowledge of the other
In the Iberian Peninsula, these dynamics began to appear in the first centuries of Islamic rule. Islam tolerates the presence of monotheistic communities that possess a revealed book (ahl al-kitāb): although Islamic thought maintains that the Qurʾān has superseded these traditions, it acknowledges and respects their shared prophetic and scriptural heritage. In this sense, the ‘people of the book’ have a codified place within Islamic society. They can live in the Islamic realm (Dār al-Islām) while preserving their religion, their rites, and their customs as long as they recognize the Islamic ruler, pay the due tax (dhimma), and do not proselytize among Muslims. When Arab and Berber clients of the Umayyad dynasty conquered Iberia in 711, the Christian and Jewish subjects of the former Visigothic kingdom were incorporated into the new polity as dhimmī-s, and while some Christians fled to Asturias in the north, many either accepted their subordinate status or embraced the new religion. By the following century, the Christian theologian Paul Alvarus would complain that the Christian youth of his generation had been seduced by Arabic poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric, composing letters in elegant Arabic while they ignored Christian literature in Latin.14 It was this situation of cultural intimacy – in which Christians and Muslims read each other’s poetry, Christian bishops enjoyed seats of honour at the Umayyad court, and a growing number of Christians were converting to Islam – that inspired Alvarus to condemn Islam as a violent and carnal religion founded by an Antichrist. Alvarus and his companions, the ‘Martyrs of Cordoba’ who sought out polemical fights with Muslims in the deliberate hope of being executed by the authorities, were confronting not just their Muslim rulers but also their Christian coreligionists who had let the allure of Arabic culture erode their identities as Christians.15
For European Christians, there was no comparable institution guaranteeing the protection of religious minorities. Augustine’s doctrine of the Jews as “living letters of the law”, who should be tolerated because they preserved the Hebrew Scriptures despite failing to understand them, offered in many regions a precedent for the tenuous existence of segregated Jewish communities, but no similar doctrine spoke to the status of Muslims.16 But as the Christian
But by the thirteenth century, this status quo was being challenged by messianic ‘dreams of conversion’, with new religious orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans looking to the mass conversion of Muslims and Jews as a sign of the coming End of Time. For theologians like the Catalan Franciscan Ramon Llull, polemic was no longer a defensive wall against Islam’s political and cultural dominance, but a battering ram that might open the gates to a new age of Christian hegemony. Llull allegedly learned Arabic from a Muslim slave and travelled to North Africa to missionize, convinced that through careful study of Islamic texts, he could win converts through reason.23 A generation later, the Valencian Dominican Vincent Ferrer would stir up popular outrage with fiery sermons on the moral contamination that came from close contact with non-Christians, provoking anti-Jewish riots in 1391 in which tens of thousands of Spanish Jews converted to save their lives.24 As growing numbers of Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity, the kings of Castile took harsh measures to prevent those who remained in these communities from ‘contaminating’ their old coreligionists: the 1412 Ordenamiento of Valladolid segregated Muslims and Jews in walled neighbourhoods and heavily limited their interactions with Christians. These messianic trends in Mediterranean Europe became even more pronounced in the mid-fifteenth century, when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the ancient seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, and began to expand into Greece and the Balkans. The Ottoman threat provoked twinned dreams of crusade and conversion in Latin Christendom: even as Pope Pius II tried to rally Christian rulers to retake Constantinople, he was drafting a polemical letter to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, arguing for
When the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ Isabella and Ferdinand conquered Granada in 1492, they signed Capitulations with King Muhammad XII (Boabdil) similar to the Mudejar pacts of the previous 400 years: the new rulers would respect the religious autonomy of their Granadan Muslim subjects, allow them to judge cases through their own legal system, and would not pressure them to convert. But within a decade, the arrival in Granada of the missionizing bishops Hernando de Talavera and especially Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros signalled that times were changing. Isabella and Ferdinand, who had forced the peninsular Jews to convert or emigrate in 1492, were building a unified Catholic kingdom with ever less room for religious pluralism, as emphasized in the saying un rey, un ley, una fe: one ruler, one law, and one faith. While Talavera advocated a gradual approach to conversion mainly, although not exclusively, through the use of Arabic cultural features and Arabic language,27 Cisneros was soon exercising more direct pressure against the Granadan elites, especially the children of the elches (Arabic ‘ulūj) or converts to Islam, over whom he believed that canon law gave him rights. In 1501, the Muslims in Granada revolted against these violations of the rights guaranteed in the Capitulations. In response, the Catholic Monarchs voided the Capitulations altogether, condemning Muslims, like the Spanish Jews a decade earlier, to convert to Christianity or emigrate, though in practice the harsh restrictions on emigration meant that most Muslims had little choice but to accept conversion. Although King Ferdinand claimed, in response to protests from the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt, that the Granadan Muslims had only been forced to convert because of their rebellion, the edict was soon followed by a general conversion of the Mudejars of Castile. In 1525, many Aragonese Muslims would be forcibly baptized in the Valencian anti-nobility revolts known as the Germanías, spurring the newly
This moment marked the end of officially recognized Islam in Spain: all Muslims, with the exception of slaves and captives, had been converted to Christianity. But a great many of the converts, called Cristianos nuevos de Moro or later just Moriscos, continued to practice Islam in secret, justifying their outward adoption of Christianity as a necessary act of dissimulation (taqiyya) in the face of a violent threat.29 As a result, the polemical hostility between faith communities only grew sharper as the century went on, as Christian missionaries tried to pressure the Moriscos into a more authentic conversion, while Morisco religious leaders erected whatever barriers they could between their communities and the Old Christian majority. For the Moriscos, texts like Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ’s Kitāb ash-Shifā’, a prophetic biography which attributed miracles to Muhammad, were a valuable defence against Christian efforts to denigrate their faith.30 Meanwhile, a new genre of anti-Islamic polemical literature, the Antialcoranes, took up Ramon Llull’s mantle by engaging directly with the Qurʾān and ḥadīth in an attempt to establish the logical superiority of Christianity.31
One of the most successful examples of Antialcoran literature at the start of the sixteenth century was, in fact, a work by a Muslim convert to Christianity. Juan Andrés, presumably a former faqīh in the city of Xàtiva who converted to Christianity in 1487, was recruited to help evangelize the Moriscos in Granada and Aragon. In 1515 he wrote Confusión o confutación de la secta mahomética y del Alcorán (Confusion or Confutation of the Muhammadan Sect and of the Qurʾān) which enjoyed enormous success and was translated into several European languages. The Muslim background of Juan Andrés was seen as a proof of his authority regarding Islamic doctrine and traces of his book can be found in
But as the sixteenth century wore on, the mass forced conversions introduced new anxieties about religious sincerity into Spanish society, as ‘Old Christians’ realized that an outward profession of faith did not necessarily correspond to authentic inner belief. If the growing reaction against the Spanish Jewish converts or conversos and Moriscos in the sixteenth century was partly rooted in real suspicion, we can also understand it as a backlash against increased social mobility, with many Old Christians nobles and townsmen resenting that the descendants of once-subjugated Jews and Muslims could compete with them for privileges and possessions.35 One consequence of this anxiety was the spread of blood purity statutes, which restricted conversos and Moriscos from accessing titles, offices, and education, leading some historians to identify sixteenth-century Spain as a lynchpin moment in the racialization of religious identity.36 The Spanish Crown also put greater pressure on the Moriscos to assimilate to Spanish Catholic culture. In a council held at the Royal Chapel of Granada in 1526, Charles I decreed that the Moriscos must abandon the Arabic language, alongside their traditional clothing, dances,
One well-known challenge to the Crown’s heavy-handed policy came from Francisco Nuñez Muley, a Morisco of noble Nasrid origin who had guided his community through the many upheavals of the century, serving Cardinal Hernando Talavera as a youth and later negotiating with Charles I to postpone the ban on Morisco culture. In his Memorial to the Granadan Chancery, Nuñez Muley, who presented himself as a devout Catholic, argued that Arabic language and culture were unrelated to Islam. After all, he observed, Eastern Christians in Jerusalem used Arabic and wore clothing much closer to the North African style than the Castilian: how, then, could Philip II claim that one had to speak Spanish and dress in the Castilian style to be a Christian?38 Nuñez Muley pointed out that the fear of Arabic culture had become caught up in the obsession with lineage and blood purity: while both Old Christians and Moriscos in Granada enjoyed public baths, only Moriscos were targeted for bathing by the Inquisitors, who assumed they were using the bathhouse to perform secret ablutions.39 Far from encouraging the Moriscos to assimilate, this discrimination widened the gap between Old Christians and converts: the Moriscos were well aware that abandoning their veils and dances would not stop their new rulers from taxing them heavily, confiscating their lands and property, and jailing them for the slightest infraction. Like the Mozarab Paul Alvarus, we might think of Nuñez Muley as an apologist, not for a religion
While Nuñez Muley wrote as a Christian Morisco seeking integration with the Old Christian elite, many Morisco communities maintained, with the help of religious leaders (faqīh pl. fuqahā’, sp. faquí, alfaquí), their adherence to Islamic doctrine and ritual practice.42 For these Moriscos, anti-Christian polemics were a way to maintain communal boundaries against the threat of assimilation. In Aragon, Castile, and especially Valencia – a community which retained Arabic throughout the sixteenth century – Moriscos copied older polemical anti-Christian works. In Valencia, these texts were usually preserved in Arabic; but in Aragon, where most Mudejars and Moriscos had adopted Castilian or Aragonese in their everyday lives, polemical texts were translated into Romance but transcribed with Arabic characters, a practice called aljamiado. Through the production of aljamiado texts, Spanish-speaking Morisco communities fought to maintain a distinct Islamic identity.43
In Granada, the controversy took on more sophisticated overtones with the Lead Books of Sacromonte.44 Faced with the impossibility of open polemical writing, the Morisco elite drew on an intellectual tool in vogue among Christian humanists of the sixteenth century: the forgery of an ancient authority. The Lead Books, which were inscribed on sheets of metal in antiquated Arabic script and buried on a hill outside Granada, are presented as the work of seven
North Africa is another space in which religious controversy and conversions played a fundamental role both in the configuration of a particular society and in the defining features of identities between Christianity and Islam. When the Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609–14, most of them ended up in North Africa, both in Sa’dī Morocco and in the Ottoman regencies of Algiers and Tunisia. There the Moriscos, who had faced over a century of pressure to assimilate to Spanish Christianity, faced the challenge of adapting to a culture with which many felt only distant affinity. The passage of time since the general conversions had made many of them staunch Christians, though some were indifferent towards their faith, while many others had remained within Islam, about which they had varying degrees of knowledge.
But even among those who considered themselves Muslim, many literate Moriscos had absorbed the cultural trends of the Spanish Golden Age. In exile, these Morisco writers turned to their native language, Spanish, to refute Christianity in a language their fellow Moriscos could understand.46 The extensive use of Spanish for polemical purposes was the case of the Morisco from Toledo, Ibrāhīm Ṭaybilī / Juan Pérez, to whom various works written in Testour
Other Moriscos, conversely, used Arabic to maintain their polemical anti-Christian discourse. This was the case of the aforementioned Aḥmad al-Ḥajari, a Morisco from Hornachos in Extremadura who had been in contact with the Sacromonte Lead Books and who went to Morocco before the general expulsion.49 There he served Sultan Muley Zaydān and travelled as his agent to Europe, where he held polemical discussions with European scholars such as Thomas Erpenius or Etienne Hubert, with whom he also collaborated on linguistic issues. The narrative of his journey, contained in his Kitāb nāṣir al-dīn ‘alā l-qawm al-kāfirīn, showed the growing interest of northern Europeans in religious polemic, not only with Muslims but also with Jews and Catholic Christians. One influential text both in Europe and among the Moriscos in exile was the Apology against the Articles of the Christian Faith (ca. 1610), written in Spanish by the Castilian Morisco Muhammad Alguazir while he was residing in Marrakesh at the court of Muley Zaydān. This polemical text was
A special case regarding the circulation of Islamic anti-Christian polemics in Europe is the Gospel of Barnabas, a text that presents the life and message of Jesus from an Islamic perspective which is preserved in two manuscripts, one in Italian and another in Spanish. This text circulated in Orientalist and anti-Trinitarian circles in Amsterdam and England in the eighteenth century, but its first mention can be found in the polemical literature written by the Moriscos in Tunisia in the mid-seventeenth century. Its original and controversial message that Muhammad is the messiah promised by Jewish and Christian laws is only shared with another Morisco writer from exile, Juan Alonso Aragones, who wrote his controversial work in Tetuan.51 Likewise, the British consul in Tunis Joseph Morgan bought some Morisco manuscripts during his stay and translated them once back in London, introducing into the English language the Islamic biography of Muhammad through the History of the Prophetic Light which starts with Adam and concludes with the Prophet of Islam. Morgan translated into English prose the versification made by the Aragonese Morisco Muhammad Rabadan of the well-known Kitāb al-anwār, attributed to a semi-legendary al-Bakrī.52
In contrast to the Iberian Peninsula, where the history of Muslim presence can be clearly dated back to 711, the origins of the earliest Muslim communities in south-east Europe are vague. What is not disputed is that they predate the Ottoman conquest of the region.53 In any case, these early Muslim communities (such as those in medieval Hungary as reported by Abu Ḥamid al-Gharnaṭī, d. 1170) vanished from historical records before the Ottoman conquests, which ushered in a period of profound transformation that would bestow upon the Balkans a distinctive place in the imagination of modern Europe.54 The several centuries of Ottoman rule created conditions for the establishment of a
Ottoman conquest of the small Christian states in the Balkans took place in stages, the high point of westward expansion being the first Siege of Vienna in 1529.55 After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and starting with the Eastern Orthodox Christians in the reign of Mehmed II, the Ottomans initiated the community-based organization of various non-Muslim denominations which exercised a degree of autonomy in their internal affairs in exchange for the payment of poll tax.56 The leniency shown towards the ‘people of the book’ appears to have facilitated the conquests. However, Ottoman domination did not always amount to direct rule, as was the case with the maritime city republic of Dubrovnik and the principalities of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia who became Ottoman vassals. The Ottoman Empire was religiously, ethnically, and linguistically a highly diverse polity and its European territories included Muslims, Christians of different denominations, and Jews, especially after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.57 While the largest Christian confession was Eastern Orthodox, there were also Catholics and various Protestant groups. Social networks of Ottoman subjects were not shaped
Originally, the Serbian Orthodox Church became autocephalous in 1219 thanks to St. Sava (cca. 1175–1236), the son of the founder of the medieval Serbian state and its ruling Nemanjić dynasty who was also the church’s first metropolitan. Drawing on Byzantine polemical traditions, St. Sava wrote in Church Slavonic a work popularly known as Krmčija (Serbian: rudder) or Zakonopravilo (the Serbian for Nomokanon). Zakonopravilo regulates various aspects of ecclesiastical and civil affairs and it still remains the official canonical code in the Serbian Orthodox Church. It is a collection of rules regulating various church and civic matters containing polemical passages on Islam.58 Although it may not be the earliest polemical text in Church Slavonic (John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge was already available in Church Slavonic in the tenth century), the manuscript book, which St. Sava himself described as “God-inspired,”59 is probably historically the most important work with polemical content in use in the Serbian Orthodox church. Significantly, it was also used among the
This was not the only text with polemical content in circulation among Orthodox Christians living on the borders of the great confessional empires, as evidenced by the presence of another text, this time in the Slavic vernacular and in Latin script that was copied in Serb Orthodox monasteries in Bosnia and Croatia.63 The significance of the text entitled On Muhammad the False Prophet, stems from the fact that it was written in the Slavic vernacular which must have facilitated the diffusion of its key ideas and concepts.
A remarkable tradition of writing literary and religious works in the Slavic vernacular developed among the Bosnian Franciscans whose presence in Bosnia dates back to the fourteenth century, when they first established their mission with the task of converting the allegedly heretical followers of the Bosnian Church. When Mehmed the Conqueror captured Bosnia in 1463, the head of the Bosnian Franciscans met the sultan who issued him with a letter guaranteeing security and protection for him and his brethren (ahdname).64
Apart from ministering to the spiritual needs of Catholics, Franciscans faced the potential challenge of forestalling conversion to Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and – following the Council of Trent (1545–1653) – to Protestantism. Although their wider influence would somewhat decline with the diminishment of Ottoman possessions in the northern and western Balkans – especially after the War of Candia (1645–69) against Venice and against the Holy League (1683–99) – Bosnian Franciscans continued to play an active role in Bosnia itself, as seen in their chronicles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries written mainly in the vernacular in Bosnian Cyrillic, and partially in Latin and Italian. Although not theological in content, the chronicles are certainly hostile in their depiction of Muslims, who are always referred to as ‘Turks’. This is illustrated by one chronicle which includes a chronology of important historical events and notes that “King Ferdinand expelled the Turks from Spain”.67 The chronicles reflect a concern for maintaining communal boundaries particularly in the face of the possible conversion to Islam or ‘turning Turk’, a choice which, according to these texts, was made by certain
On the Muslim side, one way in which Muslims addressed Christianity polemically was through texts which interpreted Christian sources through the prism of the Qurʾān. An example of this approach in Ottoman Bosnia can be found in the form of a short seventeenth-century text written in the Slavic vernacular in Arabic script.70 It follows the tradition of one of the earliest polemical Muslim engagements with Christianity in Muslim literature, Ibn Isḥāq’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī, where John 15:26–27 is interpreted as the foretold Paraclete.71 As with On Muhammad the False Prophet composed in the Eastern Orthodox milieu, this text testifies to the fact that theological arguments were sometimes written in the vernacular language of the South Slavs, a practice much like the aljamiado of the Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain.72
In premodern south-east Europe these polemical texts appear among the Slavic-speaking Christians and Muslims who sometimes show an interest in the scripture of the religious other as noted, for example, by the English diplomat and historian Paul Rycaut (1629–1700). In his famous account of the Ottoman Empire he writes about Muslim soldiers on the borders of Hungary and Bosnia who read Christian scriptures in the Slavic vernacular.73 The
A major source for understanding Muslim-Christian debates in the premodern period comes in the form of first person narratives of conversion, which sometimes have polemical content.76 One such narrative was penned by Mehmed b. Abdullah, a former student of Eastern Orthodox theology.77 Written in Ottoman Turkish, Mehmed’s account shows a person deeply steeped in Christian theological learning, with occasionally interpolated passages in Greek (in Arabic script), Arabic, Persian, and even Latin. During his quest for the true religion, unsatisfied with the answers he received from Christian scholars in the Ottoman Empire, he travels to Rome to meet Catholic theologians in the hope of dispelling his doubts about the veracity of Christianity. After seeking answers from an old monk who lamented the Christian community’s
Echoing some of the anxieties and debates in the Iberian Peninsula after the Reconquista, polemical texts in south-eastern Europe were often concerned less with doctrine than with the cultural dimensions of religious identity. Following the loss of large territories to the Habsburg armies in the wake of the disastrous second Siege of Vienna in 1683, the Muslims of the region of Slavonia had to either leave their homeland or convert. While the majority opted for migration, the two centuries of Ottoman rule and Muslim presence in the area where they used to live had left a strong mark on the local Christians. The Catholic writer Matija Antun Relković (1732–98) wrote his most important work Satir ili Divji čovik (Satir or the Wild Man) in which he attacks what he considers to be the undesirable habits of ‘Turkish’ culture still found among the local Christians. He criticizes local Christians for not sending their children to school and for being overly given to ‘Turkish’ ways and habits, most notably idleness, a particular form of courtship, and playing kolo – a form of folk dance found in eastern and south-eastern Europe where dancers all hold hands together.79
Concern about cultural practices could also cause rifts among members of the same religious community. Thus we find that the reform measures launched from the imperial centre in early nineteenth-century Bosnia resulted in tensions and even violent clashes between the supporters of the sultan’s reforms and their opponents (one of whom disparagingly referred to the so-called nizâm-i cedîd, i.e. “the new order”, as nizâm-i Yezîd, i.e. “the order of Yazid”, the Umayyad caliph responsible for the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn at Karbala). The resulting political fissures were symbolically represented in cultural categories when the mufti of Sarajevo refused to condone the promotion of the fez as the new official Muslim headgear on the grounds that it represented an innovation in religion and imitation of non-Muslims.80
In both the Iberian and Ottoman spheres of influence, the examples discussed so far reveal that polemical narratives between Islam and Christianity tended to arise from circumstances of social and cultural proximity, when the boundaries between religious communities became blurred. The case
For both early modern observers and modern scholars, the motivation behind these conversions is a source of uncertainty. The problem was especially acute in the case of the Moriscos (and their counterparts, the Spanish Jewish converts or conversos); the Spanish authorities, aware that their policies of mass forced conversion could do little to affect the Pauline form of
For the historian, the concept of (in)sincerity can be a tempting but dangerous tool, since it applies a binary measure to the diverse range of acts that could accompany a change of religion: a change of name and dress, migration to a new land, acceptance of a creed and/or slow acculturation into a new system of belief. Ultimately, narratives about conversion tend to reveal less about the subjective experiences of converts than the social implications of their conversion, in particular the implications for their new faith in relation to the community they had left behind. In this sense, conversions were always polemical because they represented a real-life test of the arguments put forth in theological treatises: by winning converts, a religion demonstrated the truth and superiority of its belief system and way of life compared to those of its rival.
Works Cited
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This article has been written under the frames of the Research Project CIAICO/2023/266. El Mediterráneo de la edad moderna (ss. XVI–XVIII) entre cristiandad e islam. PI: Luis F. Bernabé Pons.
J. A. M. Snoek (comp.), “Religious Polemics in Context: An Annotated Bibliography”, in Religious Polemics in Context, eds. Theo Hettema and Christine Kooi (Leiden, 2005), 507–88.
See Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, “Introduction”, in Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, eds. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (University Park, 2019), 2–3. On the issue of confessionalization in the Ottoman Empire, see Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, 2011), esp. the introduction, 1–25.
Shari Lowin, “Revision and Alteration,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, ed. by Jane Dammen McAuliffe, IV, P-Sh, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 451. For a similar view but more specifically about Jewish scriptures see: Camilla P. Adang “Torah”, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, V, Si-Z, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2006), 304, 306–307.
Ignazio di Matteo, “Il Tahrif od alterazione della Bibbia secondo i musulmani”, Bessarione 38 (1922), 64–111, 223–60.
Miguel de Epalza, Jésus otage: Juifs, chrétiens et musulmans en Espagne (VIIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris, 1987).
Qurʾān 5:82 expresses some sympathy with ‘priests and monks’ as they are not arrogant, and are closer to Islam than Judaism. However, as Muslims became progressively aware of the role of Christian priests as mediators between the human being and the divinity, Islamic polemic started to include priests in its attacks; Ḥaṿah Lazarus-Yafeh, “Some Neglected Aspects of Medieval Muslim Polemics against Christianity”, HarvarTheological Review 89, no. 1 (1996), 61–84.
Ali Bouamama, La littérature polémique musulmane contre le christianisme depuis ses origines jusqu’au XIIIe siècle (Alger, 1998); Jacques Waardenburg, ed., Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (Oxford, 1999).
Suzanne Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca NY, 2012), 200–247.On the long history of this dichotomy between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ in Christian thought, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013).
See Suzanne Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450, Ithaca NY, 2012, 112–154 and 200–247.
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960); John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002).
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York, 2003), p. 277. Emilio Sola, “Cervantes y el Islam. Sin la luz de la fe”, El español en el mundo: Anuario del Instituto Cervantes (2004), 13–38.
Mònica Colominas Aparicio, The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia (Leiden, 2018).
Tolan, Saracens, p. 86.
Kati Ihnat, “The Martyrs of Córdoba: Debates around a Curious Case of Medieval Martyrdom”, History Compass 18, no. 1 (2020). DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12603.
On the Augustinian doctrine toward Jews in Christendom, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999). In medieval Europe, legal protections for Jewish minority communities were also based on Roman law: see Nora Berend, Youna Masset, Capucine Nemo-Pekelman & John Tolan, eds, Medieval Minorities: Law and Multiconfessional Societies in the Middle Ages (Turnhoult, 2017).
Bárbara Boloix Gallardo, ed., A Companion to Islamic Granada (Leiden, 2021).
Gerard Wiegers, Yça Gidelli, (fl. 1450), His Antecedents and Successors: A Historical Study of Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado (Leiden, 1994).
Leonard P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250–1500 (Chicago, 1992); Ana Echevarría, Caballeros en la frontera: la guardia morisca de los reyes de Castilla (1410–1467) (Madrid, 2006).
Jocelyn Hendrickson, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 2021).
For Sicily, see Abdelmagid Turki, «Consultation juridique d’al-Imām al-Māzarī sur le cas des musulmans vivant en Sicile sous l’autorité des Normands,» Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 50, 2 (1984), 691–704. For Muslims living under Mongol rule, Denise Aigle, “The Mongol Invasions of Bilād Al-Shām by Ghāzān Khān and Ibn Taymīyah’s Three “Anti-Mongol” Fatwas,” Mamlūk Studies Review 11.2 (2007), 89–120; Edith X. Chen “An Unbeliever Can Rule Dār al-Islām: Ḥanafī Law in the Wake of the Mongol Invasion,”, Islamic Law and Society, 30 (2023), 442–475.
Devin Stewart, “The identity of «the Muftī of Oran», Abū l-‘Abbās Aḥmad b. Abī Jum‘ah al-Maghrāwī al-Wahrānī (d. 917/1511). Al-Qanṭara, 27, 2 (2006), 265–301; María del Mar Rosa-Rodríguez, “Simulation and Dissimulation: Religious Hybridity in a Morisco Fatwa”, Medieval Encounters, 16 (2010) 143–180.
Ryan Szpiech, “Prisons and Polemics: Captivity, Confinement, and Medieval Interreligious Encounter”, in Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, eds. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (University Park, 2019), 271–304.
Linda Jones, “Sermo ad conversos, christianos et sarracenos: Polemical and Rethorical Strategies in the Sermons of Vincent Ferrer to Mixed Audiences of Christians and Muslims”, in Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, eds. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (University Park, 2019), 71–102.
Nancy Bisaha, “Pius II’s Letter to Sultan Mehmed II: A Reexamination”, Crusades 1 (2002), 183–200.
Mercedes García-Arenal, “Granada as a New Jerusalem: The Conversion of a City”, in Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, ed. Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky, Wietse de Boer, and Ilaria Pavan (Leiden, 2014), 15–43.
Isabella Iannuzzi, El Poder de la Palabra en el siglo XV: Fray Hernando de Talavera (Valladolid, 2009).
Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer Eyan, eds., Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Spain and Beyond (Leiden, 2020). On the theological debate held in Spain about forced baptisms and their validity, Isabelle Poutrin, Convertir les Musulmans: Espagne, 1491–1609 (Paris, 2012); Seth Kimmel, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (Chicago, 2015).
See the monographic volume on taqiyya in Al-Qanṭara 34, 2 (2014), coordinated by Mercedes García-Arenal.
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “El Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ en la literatura aljamiado-morisca”, Sharq al-Andalus 14–15 (1997–98), 201–18; Consuelo López-Morillas, Textos aljamiados sobre la vida de Mahoma: el profeta de los moriscos (Madrid, 1994).
Miguel Ángel de Bunes, “El enfrentamiento con el islam en el Siglo de Oro: los Antialcoranes”, Edad de Oro, 8 (1989), 41–58.
Ryan Szpiech, “Preaching Paul to the Moriscos: The Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán (1515) by ‘Juan Andrés’”, La Corónica 41, no. 1 (2012), 317–43.
Mercedes García-Arenal, “The Double Polemic of Martín de Figuerola’s Lumbre de fe contra el Alcorán”, in Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, eds. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (University Park, 2019), 155–78.
María Jesús Framiñán, “Manuales para el adoctrinamiento de neoconversos en el siglo XVI”, Criticón 93 (2005), 25–37.
Louis Cardaillac, Morisques et chrétiens: un affrontement polémique, 1492–1640 (Paris, 1977); idem, “Un aspecto de las relaciones entre moriscos y cristianos: polémica y ‘taqiyya’”, Actas del Coloquio Internacional sobre Literatura Aljamiada y Morisca (Madrid, 1978), 107–22.
See David Nirenberg, “Race and Religion,” in A Cultural History of Race in the Medieval Age (800–1350), ed. T. Hahn, (New York, 2021), 67–80. On the notion of conversion to Islam as an act of betrayal of one’s Slavic “race” as developed in some major works of Montenegrin and Serbian literature from the 19th century onwards, see: Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996), 45–50.
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “The Last Muslim Inhabitants of a Newly-Christianized Granada: Mudejars and Moriscos”, in A Companion to Islamic Granada, ed. Bárbara Boloix Gallardo (Leiden, 2021), 242–44.
Kenneth Garrad, “The Original Memorial of Don Francisco Nuñez Muley”, Atlante 2 (1954), 211; Francisco Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. and trans. Vincent Barletta (Chicago, 2007).
“This theory [that it is possible to practice Muslim ceremonies and rites in the bath] cannot be substantiated in any way, nor does it reflect any sort of sound judgment, for both Old Christian and New Christian men use the baths.” Garrad, “The Original Memorial”, p. 217; Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia, p. 82.
See Constable, Olivia Remie. To Live like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Edited by Robin J. E. Vose. Philadelphia, 2018, 1–14.
Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada, ed. Javier Castillo Fernández (Granada, 2015).
Kathryn A. Miller, Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain (New York, 2008).
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “Los manuscritos aljamiados como textos islámicos”, in Memoria de los Moriscos: Escritos y relatos de una diáspora cultural, ed. Alfredo Mateos Paramio and Juan Carlos Villaverde Amieva (Madrid, 2010), 27–44.
Manuel Barrios Aguilera and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds., Los Plomos del Sacromonte: Invención y tesoro (València, 2006); Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism (Leiden, 2013).
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “The Lead Books of Granada and the Gospel of Barnabas. Beyond the Limits of taḥrīf”, in The Character of Christian-Muslim Encounter: Essays in Honour of David Thomas, eds. Douglas Pratt, Jon Hoover, John Davies, and John A. Chesworth (Leiden, 2015), 207–24.
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “De aljamía lejana: la literatura de los moriscos en el exilio”, in Aljamías: In Memoriam Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes y Iacob M. Hassán, eds. Ignacio Ceballos Viro and Raquel Suárez García (Gijón, 2004), 105–30.
Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “Ibrāhīm Ṭaybilī”, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 10, Ottoman and Safavid Empires (1600–1700), ed. David Thomas and John Chesworth (Leiden, 2017), 255–64.
Zhiri, Oumelbanine. “The Task of the Morisco Translator in the Early Modern Maghrib”, Expressions maghrébines 15, no. 1 (2016), 11–27.
Aḥmad Ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī (d. after 1640), Kitāb nāṣir al-dīn ʿalā’l-qawm al-kāfirīn (The Supporter of Religion against the Infidels), eds. P. S. Van Koningsveld, Q. Al-Samarrai, and G. A. Wiegers, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 2015).
Gerard Wiegers, “The Andalusī Heritage in the Maghrib: The Polemical Work of Muhammad Alguazir (fl. 1610)”, in Poetry, Politics and Polemics: Cultural Transfer between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, eds. Otto Zwartjes, Geert Jan van Gelder, and C. M. de Moor (Amsterdam, 1997), 107–32.
Luigi Cirillo and Michel Frémaux, ed. and trans., Évangile de Barnabé (Paris, 1977); Luis F. Bernabé Pons, El texto morisco del Evangelio de Bernabé (Granada, 1998); Gerard Wiegers, “Muḥammad as the Messiah: A Comparison of the Polemical Works of Juan Alonso with the Gospel of Barnabas”, Bibliotheca Orientalis 52, no. 3/4 (1995), 245–92.
Nabil Matar, “Jos.[eph] Morgan and Mohamed Rabadan: The First Muslim Biography of the Prophet Muhammad in English”, Journal of Islamic Studies 30, no. 2 (2019), 151–75.
Norris, H. T., Islam in the Balkans: Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab World (London, 1994), 10–31.
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
Oliver Jens Schmitt, “The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans and Its Historical Arenas: On the Relationship between Regional and Supraregional History”, in Proceedings of the Session held at the 12th International Congress of South-East European Studies, Bucharest, 2–6 September, 2019, ed. Oliver Jens Schmitt, 9–36. https://iog.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/i_iog/ueber_uns/personen_dokumente/Schmitt_Onlinepublikationen/Schmitt__The_Ottoman_Conquest_of_the_BalkansRESEE__003_.pdf (accessed 14 April 2023).
For a critical overview of the historiography on interreligious relations in the Ottoman Balkans in the early modern period and the conceptual shifts in assessing the extent and limits of religious freedom, tolerance, and coexistence for Ottoman subjects, especially for non-Muslim subjects of the empire, including the concept of millet and its evolution over time, see: Eleni Gara, “Conceptualizing Interreligious Relations in the Ottoman Empire: The Early Modern Centuries”, in The Wealth of Diversity: Interreligious and Inter-confessional Contacts in Central and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Era, Acta Poloniae Historica, 116 (Warsaw, 2017), 57–92. More specifically on the issue of the so-called millet system, the author refers to the works of Maurits H. van den Boogert, Vjeran Kursar, and Michael Ursinus.
New approaches to the study of the history of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire are briefly outlined in the paper presenting the contents of a workshop held in Oxford in 2017: John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “Towards a New History of Christians and Jews in Ottoman Society 3–5 July 2017, University of Oxford”, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4, no. 2 (2017), 419–23.
There are at least two critical editions of Zakonopravilo both published bilingually in Church Slavonic and in modern Serbian language and including essays in English: Законоправило Светога Саве на српскословенском и српском језику / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava in the Serbian-slavonic and Serbian language, 1 (Манастир Жича, 2004). The relevant passages on Islam are contained in the second volume: Миодраг М. Петровић, Законоправило Светога Саве на српскословенском и српском језику, 2 / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava in the Serbian-slavonic and Serbian language (Београд, 2020) with the relevant sections on Islam on pp. 330–341 and 405–414. These two volumes are based on the earliest extant manuscript, copied in 1262 and now kept at the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. Another edition with translation is: Законоправило Светог Саве: превод сарајевског преписа, превели Станка Стјепановић и Слободан Продић (Добрунска Ријека: Дабар, 2019), with the pertinent sections on Islam on pp. 382–385 and 408–411. It is based on the Sarajevo manuscript of the work, thought to have been copied not later than 1371 and today kept at the Old Church in Sarajevo. There is also the translation of the first volume alone, without the sections on Islam, but with a useful preface and introduction in English: Законоправило Светога Саве, 1 / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava, 1, приредили и превели Миодраг М. Петровић и Љубица Штављанин-Ђорђевић (Историјски институт, Београд, 2005).
Миодраг М. Петровић, „Preface,”Законоправило Светога Саве на српскословенском и српском језику / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava in the Serbian-slavonic and Serbian language, 1 (Манастир Жича, 2004), XXXI, XXXII.
Ibid., XXXII–XXXIII.
Миодраг М. Петровић, Законоправило Светога Саве на српскословенском и српском језику, 2 / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava in the Serbian-slavonic and Serbian language (Београд, 2020), 405–414; Законоправило Светог Саве: превод Сарајевског преписа, 408–411.
“Relevant Journeys of Saint Sava between the Years 1191 and 1235,” Законоправило Светога Саве на српскословенском и српском језику / Zakonopravilo of Saint Sava in the Serbian-slavonic and Serbian language, 1 (Манастир Жича, 2004), 779–782.
Josip Vrandečić, “Muhamedlia: A Theological Treatise on Islam in the Mostar Manuscript”, Forum Bosnae 46 (2008), 210–22.
The ahdname kept today in the Franciscan monastery in Fojnica, central Bosnia, is a copy of the original. For the English translation of the document see: Ivan Lovrenović, Bosnia: A Cultural History (London, 2001), p. 95. See also: Vjeran Kursar, “Ambiguous Subjects and Uneasy Neighbors: Bosnian Franciscans’ Attitudes toward the Ottoman State, ‘Turks’ and Vlachs”, in Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility and Distrust in Premodern Ottoman Lands, eds. Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem Çıpa, and Helga Anetshofer (Boston, 2018), 148–86 (149–54).
István György Toth, “Between Islam and Catholicism: Bosnian Franciscan Missionaries in Turkish Hungary, 1584–1716”, The Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 3 (2003), 409–33. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, “Catholic Missionary Activity in the Northern Balkans in the Seventeenth Century”, in The Frontiers of Mission: Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism, eds. Alison Forrestal and Seán Alexander Smith (Leiden, 2016), 136–58.
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, “Catholic Missionary Activity”, 144–45; István György Toth, “Between Islam and Catholicism”, 423, 431.
Nikola Lašvanin, Ljetopis, ed. Ignacije Gavran (Sarajevo, 2003), p. 109.
The chronicles often present the desire to marry a Muslim woman as the motive behind conversion: Kursar, “Ambiguous Subjects and Uneasy Neighbors”; also Toth, “Between Islam and Catholicism”, 426–29. On the seemingly rational motives for converting to Islam among Catholic women in Ottoman Hungary which had a sizeable South Slavic population composed of Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians see: Gabriella Erdélyi, “Turning Turk as Rational Decision in the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier Zone”, Hungarian Historical Review 4, no. 2 (2015), 314–45.
Kursar, “Ambiguous Subjects and Uneasy Neighbors”, p. 170.
Lejla Nakaš, “Sveti duh Paraklet u bosanskom apokrifnom tekstu: prijepis arebicom iz 17. stoljeća” (Holy Spirit Paraclete in a Bosnian Apocryphal Text: A Copy in the arebica from the 17th Century), Forum Bosnae 56 (2012), 129–48.
Sean W. Anthony, “Muḥammad, Menaḥem, and the Paraclete: New Light on Ibn Isḥāq’s (d. 150–767) Arabic Version of John 15:23. 1”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79, no. 2 (2016), 255–78.
Tijana Krstić draws attention to a very early Ottoman text which appears to be a manual on how to debate with Christians on the basis of the argument that the biblical Paraclete is a reference to Muhammad, Krstić, Contested Conversions, p. 71.
Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), 129–31 (book 2, chapter 12). For a critical asessment of the passage in question see: Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: a Short History (London: Macmillan), 61–63.
Asim Zubčević, “Bosnian Muslim Written Culture as Reflected in Traditional Oral Poetry and Folklore”, Forum Bosnae 81–82 (2018), 196.
The most prominent example of this tradition is probably Filip Grabovac (1697–1749) and his Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika iliričkoga aliti rvackoga. For more on him and other Croatian writers with ‘Turkish’ themes see: Davor Dučić, Sultanova djeca: predodžbe Turaka u hrvatskoj književnosti ranog novovjekovlja (Children of the Sultan: Images of the Turks in Early Modern Croatian Literature) (Zadar, 2004). For the English summary of this important study see: “Summary”, 245–53. For the Ottoman-Venetian relations in Dalmatia see: Josip Vrandečić, “Venetian-Ottoman Borderland in Dalmatia”, in The Routledge of Balkan and Southeast European History, eds. John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer (London, 2020), 26–34.
Krstić, Contested Conversions.
Ibid., 110–13.
Ibid., p. 111.
Davor Dučić, Sultanova djeca: predodžbe Turaka u hrvatskoj književnosti ranog novovjekovlja, 182.
Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks and the Challenges of Modernity: Late Ottoman and Hapsburg [sic!] Times (Sarajevo, 1999), p. 44. See also: Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, “Alternative Muslim Modernities: Bosnian Intellectuals in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 4 (2017), 912–43.
Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 18.
Jocelyne Dakhlia, “Musulmans en France et Grande-Bretagne à l’époque moderne : exemplaires et invisibles”, in Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 1, Une intégration invisible, eds. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent (Paris, 2011), 231–416.
Míkel de Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda (‘Abdallāh al-Taryumān) y su polémica islamo-cristiana: edición, traducción y estudio de la Tuḥfa (Madrid, 1994); Tijana Krstić, “Reading Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al-Tarjumān’s Tuḥfa (1420) in the Ottoman Empire: Muslim-Christian Polemics and Intertextuality in the Age of ‘Confessionalization’”, Al-Qanṭara 36, no. 2 (2015), 341–401.
Rafael Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, “De casta de moriscos. Relatos autobiográficos: invención, verosimilitud, intencionalidad”, in Normes, marges et confins: hommage au professeur Raphaël Carrasco, eds. Anita Gonzalez-Raymond, Miguel Jiménez Monteserín, and Fabrice Quero (Montpellier, 2018), 412–28.