Books by Anthony Minnema
In The Last Ta'ifa, Anthony H. Minnema shows how the Banu Hud, an Arab dynasty from Zaragoza, cre... more In The Last Ta'ifa, Anthony H. Minnema shows how the Banu Hud, an Arab dynasty from Zaragoza, created and recreated their vision of an autonomous city-state (ta'ifa) in ways that reveal changes to legitimating strategies in al-Andalus and across the Mediterranean. In 1110, the Banu Hud lost control of their emirate in the north of Iberia and entered exile, ending their century-long rule. But far from accepting their fate, the dynasty adapted by serving Christian kings, nurturing rebellions, and carving out a new state in Murcia to recover, maintain, and grow their power. By tracing the Banu Hud across chronicles, charters, and coinage, Minnema shows how dynastic leaders borrowed their rivals' claims and symbols and engaged in similar types of military campaigns and complex alliances in an effort to cultivate authority.
Drawing on Arabic, Latin, and vernacular sources, The Last Ta'ifa uses the history of the Banu Hud to connect the pursuit of legitimacy in al-Andalus to the politics of other emerging kingdoms and emirates. The actions of Hudid leaders, Minnema shows, echoed across the region as other kings, rebels, and adventurers employed parallel methods to gain power and resist the forces of centralization, highlighting the constructed nature of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reviews by Anthony Minnema
The Mediterranean Seminar Review, 2021
The methods of New Historicism remain underutilized in the study of the intellectual culture of t... more The methods of New Historicism remain underutilized in the study of the intellectual culture of the premodern Islamic world, especially in matters of Islamic theology and law. Our knowledge of the immediate context of many debates, as well as backgrounds of the disputants, continues to be superficial in many cases. We often view scholars as cyphers and eschew investigation into the influences behind their arguments. As a result, we reduce paradoxes within debates to competing visions of orthodoxy or project a duplicity upon whatever party appears to be flouting a perceived religious duty. The current study by Luke Yarbrough is an ambitious reconsideration of one such paradox, the proclivity of Muslim rulers to employ non-Muslims administrators, and signifies the promising work to be done in exploring the historical realities and thematic diversity that underlie these debates. He contends that, despite its ubiquity from the ninth to the seventeenth century and beyond, the scholarship decrying the hiring of non-Muslim officials is inconsistent in its argumentation. Moreover, Yarbrough finds that the scholarship behind the treatises were not merely proactive calls to uphold orthodoxy for its own sake. They were instead aspects of a more complicated political and social game wherein diatribes against the employment of dhimmis might signal anything from a response to recent events at court, to an attempt to strengthen a particular madhhab's status, or even an embittered effort to shore up a failing career. To illustrate the rules of this game, Yarbrough draws upon Bourdieu to describe this scholarship as a competition to acquire, control, or regain various types of real and symbolic resources. He argues that these contests were rarely about the employment of non-Muslims, but instead they point to competing understandings of governance between scholars and rulers.
The Medieval Review, 2019
Like so many graduate students looking for a research topic on medieval interfaith relations, I r... more Like so many graduate students looking for a research topic on medieval interfaith relations, I remember being fascinated with the person of Ramon Martí and his imposing Pugio fidei adversus Mauros y Judaeos, which appeared to raise a potentially endless supply of research questions. His background, education, and command of so many languages depicted such a fascinating figure, and his enigmatic work offered so many possible approaches to the text, its context, and the Dominican author's intentions for the work. However, also like so many students, I remember having my hopes frustrated because the massive work was only available in the cumbersome seventeenth-century edition. The lack of an edition, combined with the sheer size of the work, made beginning research on Martí a daunting proposition. The current volume described here is a "pilot study" (9) of a muchneeded edition of thePugio fidei that will be published later. It consists of nine articles that demonstrate the many ways in which Martí and his work can be studied and offers intriguing observations that will lead to many future projects.
Medieval Encounters, 2019
Medieval Encounters, 2017
However, the volume does present some minor flaws. First, several studies presume an extensive ba... more However, the volume does present some minor flaws. First, several studies presume an extensive background in paleography, therefore limiting the extent of their non-specialized readers; however, this is somewhat compensated by the foresight of the contributors to offer English translations of excerpts they culled from Hincmarian texts and employed, which has the advantage of offering the results of their research to an audience not necessarily proficient in Latin. Secondly, some minor stylistic problems exist, particularly inconsistencies in citation format. Two striking examples are the inconsistent citations of Patrologia Latina on page 37 and the incomplete citation of Heinrich Schrörs's Hinkmar, Erzbischof von Reims: sein Leben und seine Schriften, on page 29, where the first reference employs an abbreviated instead of full citation.
Essays and Op-Eds by Anthony Minnema
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 ([email protected]) with your name, title of proposed paper, institutional affiliation, and email address by 28 September 2015.
Papers by Anthony Minnema
Traditio, 2014
The Latin translation of al-Ghazali&a... more The Latin translation of al-Ghazali's Maqās˙id 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.
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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Books by Anthony Minnema
Drawing on Arabic, Latin, and vernacular sources, The Last Ta'ifa uses the history of the Banu Hud to connect the pursuit of legitimacy in al-Andalus to the politics of other emerging kingdoms and emirates. The actions of Hudid leaders, Minnema shows, echoed across the region as other kings, rebels, and adventurers employed parallel methods to gain power and resist the forces of centralization, highlighting the constructed nature of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean.
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 ([email protected]) with your name, title of proposed paper, institutional affiliation, and email address by 28 September 2015.
Papers by Anthony Minnema
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).
Drawing on Arabic, Latin, and vernacular sources, The Last Ta'ifa uses the history of the Banu Hud to connect the pursuit of legitimacy in al-Andalus to the politics of other emerging kingdoms and emirates. The actions of Hudid leaders, Minnema shows, echoed across the region as other kings, rebels, and adventurers employed parallel methods to gain power and resist the forces of centralization, highlighting the constructed nature of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean.
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 ([email protected]) 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