Articles and Papers by Anthony Minnema
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies , 2020
In 1266, the kingdom of Murcia lost its status as a semi-independent
protectorate of Castile afte... more In 1266, the kingdom of Murcia lost its status as a semi-independent
protectorate of Castile after the Mudejar Rebellion. This failure
created two Muslim vassal states under the Banū Hūd in Murcia
and the Banū Hudayr at Crevillente. As these Muslim lords
continued in the service of the kings of Castile and Aragon, their
records in royal registers testify to an increasing dependence on
Christian squires as their administrators. The Banū Hūd and the
Banū Hudayr entrusted these Christian agents to manage their
affairs and interact with Christian and Muslim courts, especially in
relaying sensitive information to Aragon about the Granadan
frontier. Although the charters in the Cathedral of Murcia and the
Archive of the Crown of Aragon surrounding the employment of
these squires indicate that they received lands in Murcia for their
service to these failing Muslim houses, other records reveal that
the administrators served without further inducement or
compensation. Furthermore, several Christian administrators
performed their role in ways that allowed the small Muslim states
and their lords to endure into the fourteenth century. This study
of the reciprocal relationships between Muslim lord and Christian
administrator demonstrates how the task of preserving power in
post-conquest Murcia transcended religious boundaries.
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Al-Masaq, 2019
In 1145–1146, Sayf al-Dawla returned to al-Andalus to create an independent kingdom and return th... more In 1145–1146, Sayf al-Dawla returned to al-Andalus to create an independent kingdom and return the Banū Hūd of Zaragoza to prominence. His task was a difficult one, not least because he’d spent a decade serving the Christian king Alfonso VII. After a year of campaigning, Sayf al-Dawla secured a base of support in Murcia. However, he died shortly after his coronation in a battle with Christian allies who were allegedly sent by Alfonso to help him. In addition to providing an explanation for the battle and his death, the article examines how Sayf al-Dawla promoted the legitimacy of his state through his coinage, adherence to Andalusī traditions, and a network of fellow exiles. It interprets the Zaragozan tā’ifa as a moveable faction rather than a fixed geographical entity and connects Sayf al-Dawla’s kingdom to later movements to demonstrate how his actions preserved the Banū Hūd’s prestige in Andalusī imaginations.
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Condemnations in the thirteenth century forbad the teaching of many Aristotelian
doctrines at uni... more Condemnations in the thirteenth century forbad the teaching of many Aristotelian
doctrines at universities and heightened suspicion around the works of Aristotle
and Arabic philosophers that had been translated into Latin. Yet for all the
effort to curtail the teaching and discussion of these doctrines, condemnations of
Aristotelian philosophy were largely silent about how scholars should treat these errors
when they encountered them in the manuscripts they read. This study looks at
a group of concerned readers who echoed the spirit of the condemnations in several
manuscripts that contained works of Aristotelian philosophy, specifically the Latin
translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣ id al-falāsifa. These readers left a variety of warnings
in the margins of this translation, highlighting the errors for future readers to
discover. The goal of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the arguments
marked by these annotators and the errors listed in the condemnations in order to
understand these readers’ responses. This study demonstrates that readers shared the
concerns of thirteenth-century condemnations, particularly surrounding the theory
of emanation, and voiced them alongside theologically-dangerous passages of the
Latin al-Ghazali, yet did not rely exclusively upon the condemnations to come to
these conclusions. These annotators did not prevent readers from engaging with the
text and its errors, but instead they marked their manuscripts as a dialogue between
the text, ideological conformity, and readers present and future.
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Of the more than two-hundred articles of the Parisian Condemnation of 1277, one contains an arres... more Of the more than two-hundred articles of the Parisian Condemnation of 1277, one contains an arresting reference to a camel that is killed by a magician by means of sight alone through the power of the Evil Eye. While it is difficult to identify the sources of many doctrines in the edict with certainty, this article can be matched positively to a discussion of the soul’s power of impression in the Latin translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣid al-falāsifa. The concept of impression was condemned on account of its association with the Agent Intellect and the theory of emanation, but many philosophers preserved the illustrative example of the camel even when refuting the attendant argument. Unbeknownst to the Latin world, however, this statement about a camel does not originate with al-Ghazali, but with the Prophet Muhammad. This study traces the origin of the article in the Condemnation of 1277 back through Arabic and Persian worlds and examines its reception in the Latin intellectual tradition from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. It also demonstrates that, despite condemnation’s influence and notoriety, its interpretation of this passage in al-Ghazali was not the dominant one in the Latin intellectual tradition. The majority of scholars instead interpreted this passage as al-Ghazali originally intended as an expression of speculative metaphysics, not magic.
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Traditio 69 (2014): 153-215, 2014
The Latin translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was one of the works through which scho... more The Latin translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was one of the works through which scholastic authors became familiar with the Arabic tradition of Aristotelian philosophy after its translation in the middle of the twelfth century. However, while historians have examined in great detail the impact of Avicenna and Averroes on the Latin intellectual tradition, the place of this translation of al-Ghazali, known commonly as the Summa theoricae philosophiae, remains unclear. This study enumerates and describes the Latin audience of al-Ghazali by building on Manuel Alonso’s research with a new bibliography of the known readers of the Summa theoricae philosophiae. It also treats Latin scholars’ perception of the figure of al-Ghazali, or Algazel in Latin, since their understanding in no way resembles the Ash’arite jurist, Sufi mystic, and circumspect philosopher known in the Muslim world. Latin scholars most commonly viewed him only as an uncritical follower of Avicenna and Aristotle, but they also described him in other ways during the Middle Ages. In addition to tracing the rise, decline, and recovery of Algazel and the Summa theoricae philosophiae in Latin Christendom over a period of four centuries, this study examines the development of Algazel’s identity as he shifts from a useful Arab to a dangerous heretic in the minds of Latin scholars.
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Reviews by Anthony Minnema
The Mediterranean Seminar Review, 2021
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The Medieval Review, 2019
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Medieval Encounters, 2019
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Medieval Encounters, 2017
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Essays and Op-Eds by Anthony Minnema
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Call for Papers by Anthony Minnema
"Words across a Corrupting Sea: New Directions in the Study of Translation in the Medieval Medite... more "Words across a Corrupting Sea: New Directions in the Study of Translation in the Medieval Mediterranean"
Sponsored by the Spain and North Africa Project
The translations that occurred in the medieval Mediterranean crossed a wide range of boundaries and frontiers. Texts and ideas not only changed from language to another, but also crossed political, cultural, and social borders to find new audiences. Works crossed confessional lines when Christians, Muslims, and Jews worked in teams of translators. Treatises written for Middle Eastern courts find much humbler readers as Arab mirrors for princes appear in French monasteries and North African falconry texts find their way to Italian husbandmen. Jewish scholars translating practical manuals for charting the stars receive royal patronage from the Castilian court. This panel seeks to highlight new ways that scholars are examining Mediterranean translations, translation movements, and their readers. The concept of the Mediterranean here is meant to be understood broadly and we hope the session will have a wide range of languages represented in order to promote discussion of this field and its future, particularly as the European refugee crisis raises questions about the perceived historical differences between "Western" and "Eastern" cultures and ways of thinking. If you wish to submit a paper, please send a brief abstract to Anthony Minnema (anthony.minnema@valpo.edu) with your name, title of proposed paper, institutional affiliation, and email address by 28 September 2015.
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Edited Journal Issues (as Executive Editor) by Anthony Minnema
Medieval Encounters, 2019
Contents: "Prophetic Resistance to Islam in Ninth-Century Córdoba:
Pa... more Medieval Encounters, 2019
Contents: "Prophetic Resistance to Islam in Ninth-Century Córdoba:
Paulus Alvarus and the Indiculus Luminosus" (Andrew Sorber); "Of Archers and Lions: The Capital of the Islamic Rider in the Cloister of Girona Cathedral" (Inés Monteira Arias); "Jews and Muslims in the Works of John of Naples" (Kirsty Schut); "Between Latin Theology and Arabic Kalām: Samson’s Apologeticus contra perfidos (864 CE) and Ḥafṣ b. Albar al-Qūṭīs Extant Works (fl. Late Ninth/Early Tenth Centuries)" (Jason Busic); "De Toledo a Córdoba: Tathlīth al-Waḥdāniyyah (‘La Trinidad de la Unidad’). Fragmentos teológicos de un judeoconverso arabizado, by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Pedro Mantas-España" (review by Anthony Minnema).
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Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies by Anthony Minnema
Includes the following articles:
Rethinking the minimi of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Isla... more Includes the following articles:
Rethinking the minimi of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands in late antiquity by Ruth Pliego
Quintana place-names as evidence of the Islamic conquest of Iberia by David Peterson
Territories and kingdom in the central Duero basin: the case of Dueñas (tenth–twelfth centuries) by Daniel Justo Sánchez & Iñaki Martín Viso
“Neither age nor sex sparing”: the Alvor massacre 1189, an anomaly in the Portuguese Reconquista? by Jonathan Wilson
Riots, reluctance, and reformers: the church in the Kingdom of Castile and the IV Lateran Council by Kyle C. Lincoln
Squire to the Moor King: Christian administrators for Muslim magnates in late medieval Murcia by Anthony Minnema
Glassmaking in medieval technical literature in the Iberian Peninsula by David J. Govantes-Edwards , Javier López Rider & Chloë Duckworth
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Thesis Chapters by Anthony Minnema
This dissertation examines how Arabic works found an audience in medieval Europe and became a par... more This dissertation examines how Arabic works found an audience in medieval Europe and became a part of the Latin canon of philosophy. It focuses on a Latin translation of an Arabic philosophical work, Maqasid al-falasifa, by the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, known as Algazel in Latin. This work became popular because it served as a primer for Arab philosophy and helped Latins understand a tradition that had built upon Greek scholarship for centuries. To find the translation’s audience, this project looks at two sets of evidence. It studies the works of Latin scholars who drew from Algazel’s arguments and illustrates that the translation’s influence was more extensive than historians have previously thought. It also examines copies of the translation in forty manuscripts and broadens the Latin audience of Arab philosophy beyond what historians typically study—the university—to include the anonymous scribes and readers who comprise the often-voiceless majority of medieval literate society. These codices yield details about Algazel’s readers, their interests and concerns, which cannot be gathered from other sources. Scholars spared little expense with these manuscripts since several are quite ornate or contain gold leaf. Many copies possess wide margins where scholars interacted with the text by writing notes, diagrams, pointing hands, warnings, and the occasional doodle. Scribes integrated the work into the established canon by placing Algazel in manuscripts with Christian philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas. The manuscripts also contain marginalia left by generations of readers, which give insight into how scholars read the text and what passages grabbed their attention. The notes indicate that a few readers agreed with ecclesiastical authorities who condemned Algazel’s work since some scholars wrote warnings in the margins alongside passages that they considered dangerous. Thus, Latins paradoxically expended great effort to understand Arab philosophers while simultaneously condemning ideas in the translations as errors. This study expands our understanding of the European interaction with the Arab tradition by examining reading practices with evidence drawn from the readers themselves. It demonstrates that Europeans read translated Arabic works alongside long-standing authorities and treated Arab authors as valuable members of the Latin canon.
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Articles and Papers by Anthony Minnema
protectorate of Castile after the Mudejar Rebellion. This failure
created two Muslim vassal states under the Banū Hūd in Murcia
and the Banū Hudayr at Crevillente. As these Muslim lords
continued in the service of the kings of Castile and Aragon, their
records in royal registers testify to an increasing dependence on
Christian squires as their administrators. The Banū Hūd and the
Banū Hudayr entrusted these Christian agents to manage their
affairs and interact with Christian and Muslim courts, especially in
relaying sensitive information to Aragon about the Granadan
frontier. Although the charters in the Cathedral of Murcia and the
Archive of the Crown of Aragon surrounding the employment of
these squires indicate that they received lands in Murcia for their
service to these failing Muslim houses, other records reveal that
the administrators served without further inducement or
compensation. Furthermore, several Christian administrators
performed their role in ways that allowed the small Muslim states
and their lords to endure into the fourteenth century. This study
of the reciprocal relationships between Muslim lord and Christian
administrator demonstrates how the task of preserving power in
post-conquest Murcia transcended religious boundaries.
doctrines at universities and heightened suspicion around the works of Aristotle
and Arabic philosophers that had been translated into Latin. Yet for all the
effort to curtail the teaching and discussion of these doctrines, condemnations of
Aristotelian philosophy were largely silent about how scholars should treat these errors
when they encountered them in the manuscripts they read. This study looks at
a group of concerned readers who echoed the spirit of the condemnations in several
manuscripts that contained works of Aristotelian philosophy, specifically the Latin
translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣ id al-falāsifa. These readers left a variety of warnings
in the margins of this translation, highlighting the errors for future readers to
discover. The goal of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the arguments
marked by these annotators and the errors listed in the condemnations in order to
understand these readers’ responses. This study demonstrates that readers shared the
concerns of thirteenth-century condemnations, particularly surrounding the theory
of emanation, and voiced them alongside theologically-dangerous passages of the
Latin al-Ghazali, yet did not rely exclusively upon the condemnations to come to
these conclusions. These annotators did not prevent readers from engaging with the
text and its errors, but instead they marked their manuscripts as a dialogue between
the text, ideological conformity, and readers present and future.
Reviews by Anthony Minnema
Essays and Op-Eds by Anthony Minnema
Call for Papers by Anthony Minnema
Sponsored by the Spain and North Africa Project
The translations that occurred in the medieval Mediterranean crossed a wide range of boundaries and frontiers. Texts and ideas not only changed from language to another, but also crossed political, cultural, and social borders to find new audiences. Works crossed confessional lines when Christians, Muslims, and Jews worked in teams of translators. Treatises written for Middle Eastern courts find much humbler readers as Arab mirrors for princes appear in French monasteries and North African falconry texts find their way to Italian husbandmen. Jewish scholars translating practical manuals for charting the stars receive royal patronage from the Castilian court. This panel seeks to highlight new ways that scholars are examining Mediterranean translations, translation movements, and their readers. The concept of the Mediterranean here is meant to be understood broadly and we hope the session will have a wide range of languages represented in order to promote discussion of this field and its future, particularly as the European refugee crisis raises questions about the perceived historical differences between "Western" and "Eastern" cultures and ways of thinking. If you wish to submit a paper, please send a brief abstract to Anthony Minnema (anthony.minnema@valpo.edu) with your name, title of proposed paper, institutional affiliation, and email address by 28 September 2015.
Edited Journal Issues (as Executive Editor) by Anthony Minnema
Contents: "Prophetic Resistance to Islam in Ninth-Century Córdoba:
Paulus Alvarus and the Indiculus Luminosus" (Andrew Sorber); "Of Archers and Lions: The Capital of the Islamic Rider in the Cloister of Girona Cathedral" (Inés Monteira Arias); "Jews and Muslims in the Works of John of Naples" (Kirsty Schut); "Between Latin Theology and Arabic Kalām: Samson’s Apologeticus contra perfidos (864 CE) and Ḥafṣ b. Albar al-Qūṭīs Extant Works (fl. Late Ninth/Early Tenth Centuries)" (Jason Busic); "De Toledo a Córdoba: Tathlīth al-Waḥdāniyyah (‘La Trinidad de la Unidad’). Fragmentos teológicos de un judeoconverso arabizado, by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Pedro Mantas-España" (review by Anthony Minnema).
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies by Anthony Minnema
Rethinking the minimi of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands in late antiquity by Ruth Pliego
Quintana place-names as evidence of the Islamic conquest of Iberia by David Peterson
Territories and kingdom in the central Duero basin: the case of Dueñas (tenth–twelfth centuries) by Daniel Justo Sánchez & Iñaki Martín Viso
“Neither age nor sex sparing”: the Alvor massacre 1189, an anomaly in the Portuguese Reconquista? by Jonathan Wilson
Riots, reluctance, and reformers: the church in the Kingdom of Castile and the IV Lateran Council by Kyle C. Lincoln
Squire to the Moor King: Christian administrators for Muslim magnates in late medieval Murcia by Anthony Minnema
Glassmaking in medieval technical literature in the Iberian Peninsula by David J. Govantes-Edwards , Javier López Rider & Chloë Duckworth
Thesis Chapters by Anthony Minnema
protectorate of Castile after the Mudejar Rebellion. This failure
created two Muslim vassal states under the Banū Hūd in Murcia
and the Banū Hudayr at Crevillente. As these Muslim lords
continued in the service of the kings of Castile and Aragon, their
records in royal registers testify to an increasing dependence on
Christian squires as their administrators. The Banū Hūd and the
Banū Hudayr entrusted these Christian agents to manage their
affairs and interact with Christian and Muslim courts, especially in
relaying sensitive information to Aragon about the Granadan
frontier. Although the charters in the Cathedral of Murcia and the
Archive of the Crown of Aragon surrounding the employment of
these squires indicate that they received lands in Murcia for their
service to these failing Muslim houses, other records reveal that
the administrators served without further inducement or
compensation. Furthermore, several Christian administrators
performed their role in ways that allowed the small Muslim states
and their lords to endure into the fourteenth century. This study
of the reciprocal relationships between Muslim lord and Christian
administrator demonstrates how the task of preserving power in
post-conquest Murcia transcended religious boundaries.
doctrines at universities and heightened suspicion around the works of Aristotle
and Arabic philosophers that had been translated into Latin. Yet for all the
effort to curtail the teaching and discussion of these doctrines, condemnations of
Aristotelian philosophy were largely silent about how scholars should treat these errors
when they encountered them in the manuscripts they read. This study looks at
a group of concerned readers who echoed the spirit of the condemnations in several
manuscripts that contained works of Aristotelian philosophy, specifically the Latin
translation of al-Ghazali’s Maqāṣ id al-falāsifa. These readers left a variety of warnings
in the margins of this translation, highlighting the errors for future readers to
discover. The goal of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the arguments
marked by these annotators and the errors listed in the condemnations in order to
understand these readers’ responses. This study demonstrates that readers shared the
concerns of thirteenth-century condemnations, particularly surrounding the theory
of emanation, and voiced them alongside theologically-dangerous passages of the
Latin al-Ghazali, yet did not rely exclusively upon the condemnations to come to
these conclusions. These annotators did not prevent readers from engaging with the
text and its errors, but instead they marked their manuscripts as a dialogue between
the text, ideological conformity, and readers present and future.
Sponsored by the Spain and North Africa Project
The translations that occurred in the medieval Mediterranean crossed a wide range of boundaries and frontiers. Texts and ideas not only changed from language to another, but also crossed political, cultural, and social borders to find new audiences. Works crossed confessional lines when Christians, Muslims, and Jews worked in teams of translators. Treatises written for Middle Eastern courts find much humbler readers as Arab mirrors for princes appear in French monasteries and North African falconry texts find their way to Italian husbandmen. Jewish scholars translating practical manuals for charting the stars receive royal patronage from the Castilian court. This panel seeks to highlight new ways that scholars are examining Mediterranean translations, translation movements, and their readers. The concept of the Mediterranean here is meant to be understood broadly and we hope the session will have a wide range of languages represented in order to promote discussion of this field and its future, particularly as the European refugee crisis raises questions about the perceived historical differences between "Western" and "Eastern" cultures and ways of thinking. If you wish to submit a paper, please send a brief abstract to Anthony Minnema (anthony.minnema@valpo.edu) with your name, title of proposed paper, institutional affiliation, and email address by 28 September 2015.
Contents: "Prophetic Resistance to Islam in Ninth-Century Córdoba:
Paulus Alvarus and the Indiculus Luminosus" (Andrew Sorber); "Of Archers and Lions: The Capital of the Islamic Rider in the Cloister of Girona Cathedral" (Inés Monteira Arias); "Jews and Muslims in the Works of John of Naples" (Kirsty Schut); "Between Latin Theology and Arabic Kalām: Samson’s Apologeticus contra perfidos (864 CE) and Ḥafṣ b. Albar al-Qūṭīs Extant Works (fl. Late Ninth/Early Tenth Centuries)" (Jason Busic); "De Toledo a Córdoba: Tathlīth al-Waḥdāniyyah (‘La Trinidad de la Unidad’). Fragmentos teológicos de un judeoconverso arabizado, by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Pedro Mantas-España" (review by Anthony Minnema).
Rethinking the minimi of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands in late antiquity by Ruth Pliego
Quintana place-names as evidence of the Islamic conquest of Iberia by David Peterson
Territories and kingdom in the central Duero basin: the case of Dueñas (tenth–twelfth centuries) by Daniel Justo Sánchez & Iñaki Martín Viso
“Neither age nor sex sparing”: the Alvor massacre 1189, an anomaly in the Portuguese Reconquista? by Jonathan Wilson
Riots, reluctance, and reformers: the church in the Kingdom of Castile and the IV Lateran Council by Kyle C. Lincoln
Squire to the Moor King: Christian administrators for Muslim magnates in late medieval Murcia by Anthony Minnema
Glassmaking in medieval technical literature in the Iberian Peninsula by David J. Govantes-Edwards , Javier López Rider & Chloë Duckworth