Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Studies in the History of Christian Thought)

The Mediterranean and Western-European sphere in the Ancient, Medieval and Early-Modern Periods was a world of complex and deeply rooted religious Pluralism – Jews, various sects of Christians, Muslims, and pagans all lived side by side and interacted regularly. The essays in this volume explore what happened when Christians read the Bible faced with the challenges posed by this religious pluralism. Topics covered include early Christianity’s use of the Bible under persecution, Arab-Christian Biblical study within the Islamic World, Jewish-Christian scholarly interaction in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, and the role of late-medieval vernacular editions of the Bible in paving the way for the Reformation.

Contributors include: Thomas E. Burman, Andrew Gow, Sidney H. Griffith, Thomas J. Heffernan, Frans van Liere, E. Ann Matter, Bernard McGinn, Constant J. Mews, Michael A. Signer, Lesley Smith, and Anne Marie Wolf.

Thomas J. Heffernan, Ph.D. (1977, University of Cambridge), is Kenneth Curry Professor of the Humanities at the University of Tennessee. He has published widely in the field of hagiography, medieval religious literature, and is currently completing a critical edition of the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Some of his other books are: Sacred Biography (Oxford University Press, 1988) and The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (2nd Edition; Western Michigan University, 2005).
Thomas E. Burman, Ph.D. (1991, University of Toronto), is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200 (Brill, 1994) and, most recently, of Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 from the University of Pennsylvania Press.