Paul, N., Review of: Learning in a Crusader City

Reviews 246 of interest not only to students of medieval Latin but also to anyone working in late antique romance or on the Apollonius tradition, whether Latin or vernacular. Siân Echard, University of British Columbia Jonathan Rubin, Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 224; black-and-white figure. $105. ISBN: 978-1-1071-8718-4. doi:10.1086/717877 Rarely does a book appear that manages to effect such a complete transformation of a fundamental set of scholarly assumptions with such astonishing efficiency (175 pages of text and an essential nineteen-page appendix) as does this important new work by Jonathan Rubin. The assumptions in question relate to the nature of intellectual life in the territories conquered and ruled by Latin European crusaders on the eastern Mediterranean littoral; viewed as anemic or, at best, as a deeply conservative “fragment” of European thought disconnected from the flowering of the universities and related developments in western Europe. As Rubin demonstrates, these assumptions are linked not only with the absence of a university in the Latin East but also with the identification of European intellectual vitality with intercultural exchange in Latin and Arabic, exemplified by the great translation centers of Palermo and Toledo. Rubin’s focus on the city of Acre in the period when it served as the capital of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem from the Third Crusade to its annihilation by the army of al-Ashraf Khalil in 1291, sets him up nicely to challenge these associations. Acre in the thirteenth century, unlike Antioch in the twelfth, is not known as a center of major translations from Arabic and Greek into Latin, and indeed did not possess a significant population of free Muslims. Nor did the conquest and establishment as a regional capital and nexus of international crusade operations in 1191 result in the concomitant establishment of a university, as occurred at Toulouse in 1229. Leaving Western models behind, Rubin establishes without any doubt that it was nonetheless a center of vibrant and creative intellectual life. At the core of Rubin’s study are the data compiled in his appendix, a list of forty-four texts most likely written in Acre where the authorship, context, and evidence for an Acre provenance are briefly outlined. The book itself refers back to this list repeatedly, drawing out from it Rubin’s arguments over the course of six chapters. An initial chapter presents the sociocultural context for intellectual life, outlining the contours of the Frankish society represented by the clergy, mendicants, nobility, and burgesses and Jewish society, which included Western settlers such as Nahmanides and Easterners like the children and grandchildren of Maimonides. Chapter 2 does the important work of establishing the existence of centers of learning. Two major institutions can be identified in the convents of the Dominicans and Franciscans, and good evidence seems to exist for a Latin cathedral school, but other less formal educational centers clearly also existed within both the Latin Christian and Jewish communities, including the presence of various “masters” to whom children were entrusted for education. Among those was the Kabbalah scholar Isaac of Acre, and Rubin finds in Isaac’s work references to a knowledge of Arabic among the students (presumably born in Acre) whose teachers were ignorant of the language. Language and translation come to the forefront of discussion in chapter 3, which addresses both the acquisition and utilization of eastern languages and the role of the Old French vernacular. In the former case, Rubin mobilizes a wide range of evidence, including an intriguing, extensive Arabic-French pharmaceutical glossary. In the latter case, Rubin demonstrates that John of Antioch’s portfolio of translations from Latin into French also includes significant meditation on the act of translation itself. By far the greatest corpus of Old French works from the Latin East are the great treatises on customary law composed by knight-jurists like Philip of Speculum 97/1 (January 2022) Reviews 247 Novara and John of Ibelin. Rubin’s fourth chapter observes that Acre was the site of interface between this customary tradition and the learned Roman and canon law traditions of Europe. Using three case studies based on the summae of John of Ancona, he demonstrates that the different traditions competed with and responded to one another in Acre. While challenging the assumption that intellectual vitality in the Middle Ages must be identified with cross-cultural exchanges of knowledge between Latin Christianity and Islam, Rubin concludes his study offering two alternative arenas in which cultural contact could foster intellectual activity. The first highlights the role of Acre not as a site of knowledge exchange with the Islamicate world but as a site of curiosity about and study of Muslim religious traditions and beliefs. In addition to reports of Dominican activity on this front, Rubin mobilizes as a major piece of evidence the Notitia de Machometo of the Dominican William of Tripoli, a treatise on Islam containing details about religious practices and texts not found elsewhere. Rubin proposes that this treatise was based in part on Latin materials circulating among the Dominicans in Acre, that it suggests reading and translation of the Qur’an in Acre, and that Eastern Christians and Jews served as intermediaries for knowledge about Islam found in the Notitia and elsewhere in Acre. While Latins and Eastern Christians may have collaborated in their study of Islam, they also exchanged religious texts and disputed matters of their common faith, and these interactions are the focus of Rubin’s final chapter. Here, Rubin examines the efforts of two of the most “systematic” critics and interlocutors of Eastern Christianity: Benoit of Alignan, bishop of Marseilles, and Thomas of Agni, bishop of Bethlehem and papal legate, both of whom wrote or worked in Acre. Once again Rubin brings to bear evidence that has previously been neglected, including a narrative describing the interrogation (reportedly including torture and threats of execution) of two Greek monks on theological matters by Thomas of Agni. An illustration made in an Acre atelier (also reproduced on the book’s cover) is interpreted by Rubin as evidence not only of learned disputation between Greeks and Latins, but the use of such disputations in formal educational settings in Acre’s Dominican convent. This is a rich book which will renew and inspire further scholarship on the Latin settlements of the crusading East. Left open by Rubin is the question of his work’s implications for the debate over the colonial character of Acre or what contrast could be drawn with other crusader cities like Antioch, where the Muslim, Greek, and Armenian communities are well attested. While the book attempts to throw off the need for Western models of intellectual life, this reviewer wondered how the situation in Acre might compare with Aleppo or Damascus, similarly polyglot and with similar confessional diversity. Despite, or perhaps thanks to the lack of a “towering patron” or central institution of learning, Rubin’s Acre is a city teeming with intellectuals from near and far pursuing a wide variety of projects, all of which were richer for the context the city provided. Nicholas Paul, Fordham University Tristan Schmidt, Politische Tierbildlichkeit in Byzanz: Spätes 11. bis frühes 13. Jahrhundert. (Mainzer Veröffentlichungen zur Byzantinistik 16.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020. Pp. xvi, 449; black-and-white figures. €98. ISBN: 978-3-4471-1365-6. doi:10.1086/717875 Byzantine political discourse during the “long twelfth century” deployed animal imagery in a dazzling variety of ways. Tristan Schmidt delves into this richness in this latest addition to the Mainz Byzantine Studies series, reprising his dissertation. He dexterously deploys textual sources that run the gamut from an epigram inscribed on a sword to Niketas Choniates’s History to elucidate several pervasive themes: order and rule, threat and conquest, community. Animals feature as part of a larger Byzantine Herrschaftsdiskursen that sees parallels for political realities in the conventional depiction of the natural world’s hierarchies, with some Speculum 97/1 (January 2022)