“This collection will be welcomed by anyone working on the interactions of the Muslim and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages—and the more casual reader will be struck by the persistence of stereotypes on both sides of the divide.”—Medium Aevum LXXIX
“The essays explore what, from the ninth to the fourteenth century, Western Christian clerks and kings, monks and abbots, friars and bishops, and scholars and poets wrote about Muslims and Islam. . . . Tolan’s book is among the best in the field.” —Journal of Religion
“Considers such examples as portrayals of Muhammad in 13th-century Spain, Saladin in the medieval European imagination, and Saracen philosophers who secretly deride Islam. . . . Tolan is an engaging writer, accessible to the general as well as the scholarly reader.”—Book News
“Tolan has a talent for unraveling often tangled threads and subplots in a complex and intriguing story.”—Religion and the Arts
“Tolan has gathered together hard-to-find individual studies, thematically grouped to present a certain counterpoint of themes, actors, and interests that interweave throughout. Every chapter is illuminating. The study is insightful, nuanced, and magnificently lucid.”—Geraldine Heng, University of Texas
John V. Tolan is professor of history at the University of Nantes.
