A Twelfth-Century Paradigm Shift?

Abstract

Recent scholarship has begun to revise many of the prevailing scholarly conceptions concerning the modes of interaction between Christians and Muslims in medieval Europe. Generally these revisions posit a change that arises following the First Crusade, developing and spreading in the course of the twelfth century. This tendency in the scholarship is salutary, and as the range of studies demonstrates, the deep corpus of evidence is complex and contradictory, growing out of detailed studies of local texts, traditions, and conditions in scores of sites around the continent and over the course of time. It will obviously take some time to come to terms with the full implications of these studies. This is particularly the case with respect to developments in discursive traditions, which move all but glacially. In order to contextualize the conclusions to be drawn from the present study, it will be necessary here to come to terms with this recent trend in scholarship.