The Dominicans, Islam, and Christian Thought, 1220-1320

FAIN: FA-57377-13

Thomas E. Burman
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

While modern scholars have written a great deal about what Latin Christian intellectuals thought about Islam in the high Middle Ages, very little has been written about two key issues: 1] how do the patterns of thought that we see in the Latin-Christian treatises against Islam fit in with the broader tendencies of the scholastic project? and 2] how does Arab-Islamic civilization's deep influences on Latin culture more generally shape how Latin-Christian intellectuals saw Islam? This book project will answer these questions through a series of seven case studies of thirteenth-century scholars of the Order of Preachers, the quintessential scholastic religious order. These Dominican intellectuals range from the great encyclopedist, Vincent of Beauvais, to the canon lawyer, Raymond of Penyafort, and the philosopher-theologian, Thomas Aquinas, to the leading anti-Islamic polemicists of the day, Ramon Marti and Riccoldo da Monte di Croce.