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In this dissertation, I describe social, economic and political relations between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe before presenting the intellectual and religious context of Jewish life in Christian Spain. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide the framework for analy…

Niketas Byzantios was a Byzantine polemicist active in ninth-century Constantinople. His writings against Islam include two letters in response to an un-named Muslim intellectual and a general refutation of the Qur'an. Unlike earlier Byzantine anti-Islamic writers, Niketas does …

The dissertation analyzes medieval Christian and Jewish, and, to a lesser extent, Pagan and Muslim polemical uses of gendered, visceral, bodily imagery and metaphors of impurity. Drawing from medical texts, bestiaries (compendia of physical and symbolic characteristics of animal…

My dissertation examines the critique of Judaism in Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen of the Shkand Gumanig Wizar . The Shkand Gumanig Wizar is a ninth century CE Zoroastrian theological work that contains polemics against Islam, Christianity, and Manichaeism, as well as Judaism. T…