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The authors purpose is to criticize the basis of the Sunn legal theory, especially the
doctrine of ijtihd, which is the main tool for introducing changes in positive law, and
at the same time to defend the Ismil doctrine. The core of that doctrine is the concept
of submission. After a demonstration that the submission (taqld) of the Sunn jurists to
their authorities is arbitrary and thus illegitimate, al-Q al-Numn explains the reasons
for which the Ismils submit to their authorities, that is, the imams: We ask them [the
imams] about that which we do not know only because God has commanded that they
be asked about it, and we obey them only because God has imposed obedience to them
(77). In fact, the Ismils did not need a legal theory because they had a living imam who
was taught by God. This is why, after the fall of the Fimids, Ismil juridical thought
vanished even among the Ismil groups who survived.
This book will be useful especially to those who are interested in the history of law and
secondarily to those who are interested in the history of the Fimids.
Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, cole pratique des hautes tudes, Sorbonne

Christine Caldwell Ames, Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2015. Paper. Pp. xiv, 354; 13 black-and-white gures and 5 maps. $29.99. ISBN: 9781-107-60701-9.
doi:10.1086/685587

Recent years have seen a growth in studies dealing with the shared histories of and interaction among communities of the three monotheistic religions in premodern times. While
these endeavors underscore the methodological utility of comparative research, highlighting the historical drama within and without confessional boundaries, they often come at
the expense of detail and depth. Medieval Heresies is likely to be a target of this kind of
scrutiny posed by representatives of a scholarship that tends to focus strictly on singlereligion frameworks of inquiry. But even if it can be shown to suffer from certain shortcomings of detail and fact, these do not undermine the books achievement: Christine Caldwell
Ames not only provides us with a comprehensive study of heresy, or heresies, in medieval
European and Near Eastern lands, but also puts forward a convincing thesis about the interplay between religious thought and social dynamics that cuts across confessional traditions.
Acknowledging differences in their character, Ames seeks to examine the circumstances in which members of the Latin, Byzantine, Jewish, and Muslim communities made
recourse to doctrine and adapted it to their changing needs in the Middle Ages. Specically, she describes how heresy and its textual underpinnings were put to use as means
of attaining, consolidating, or sustaining political and social positions by players of both
hegemonic and minority communities. The premise of this inquiry is that the leaderships
of all three religions at its center balanced sacred texts with commentary and interpretation that sought to translate lessons composed in a particular time with the always-moving
pace of history. Thus, Ames describes her book as a comparative history of heresy, and
of responses to it (1), noting that considering heresy through the lens of different religious
traditions provides a broader understanding of medieval heresy and of the agenda of its
proponents. To that end, she proposes to locate what she calls tipping points at which
religious differences were either tolerated or rejected. Her inquiry is constructed chronologically, beginning with the Roman legislation and persecution of Christian heretics in the
late fourth century and concluding in the 1500s.
The introduction begins with a historical survey of the religious communities under
discussion and the foundations of their outlooks on heresy. While under the late Roman
Empire heresy was initially perceived as a matter of personal choice, it was when the state
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turned to insist upon doctrinal unity that the persecution of heresy was set off. Indeed,
quite often it was the consolidation of orthodoxy that instigated heresy. Ames makes it
clear from the outset that the question of heresy, and that of orthodoxy, were never detached from preoccupations with power, whether imperial, ecclesiastical, caliphal, or legal
(the ulama, and the rabbis). Thus, by the time of Constantine, heresy was not only an
ecclesiastical concern, but also a matter for the public custodianship of secular power
(14). Intriguingly, however, Ames argues that one of the notable tipping points of heresy involves moments of institutional or communal vulnerability, a point that later on
supports her thesis about the shared interest of both majority and minority groups in the
persecution of heresy.
The books methodology and its progression are dictated by the authors decision to
break the history of medieval heresy into chronological episodes. Each chapter offers a
summary of the main heresy-related issues of the given time period so as to allow Ames
to locate the aforementioned tipping points of heresy and lead the reader through a
history in which heresy was neither a constant notion nor addressed in a single, uniform
way. Chapter 1, Peoples of the Book, considers the period from Theodosius Is proclamation of Christianity as the Roman Empires ofcial religion in 380 until the assassination of the fourth caliph Ali in 661. Here Ames locates the beginning of both Western
Christian and Sunni and Shiite Islamic perceptions of heresy. Among the main arguments
of the chapter is the idea that theological disagreements went hand in hand with political
and social agendas; that sacred texts were variably used to determine norm and orthodoxy;
and that heresy and orthodoxy often traded places, depending on who held authority.
Chapter 2, Triumphs of Orthodoxy, covers the period from the Umayyad takeover in 661 to its fall in Iberia in 1031. Here Ames reviews and discusses an Islamic
sectarianism that stemmed predominantly from the question of caliphal religious authority; the appearance of Rabbinic Judaisms greatest rival, Karaism; the debate about icons
between Byzantine iconoclasts and their iconophile rivals in Islamic-dominated lands; and
papal-Byzantine confrontations. A comparison of these cases supports her argument that,
despite differences, they demonstrate shared ways of thinking about God and his revelations with humanity, shared ways of interpreting texts and traditions that lent themselves
to increasing fears of disunity, diversity, and wrong belief (135).
Chapter 3, The Perfect Hatred, begins with the fragmentation of Iberia in the 1030s
and ends with the Albigensian Crusade in 1209, a moment in time when, according to R. I.
Moore, Christian Western Europe transformed into a persecuting society (139). It was
from this point on that a series of groups of others (Jews, Muslims, lepers, and heretics)
were designated as threats to Christian society and sovereignty. This is also the period
of the rst Crusades, a historical episode that is closely linked to heresy and persecution
through Pope Gregory VIIs campaign to centralize papal authority by means of a holy
brutality (142). And it is this feature of holy war that grounds further cross-religious
comparison, as jihad featured conspicuously in contemporary heresy-related discourses
and initiatives in the Islamic east and west (the taifa kings, Fatimids, Saljuqs, Zanjids,
and Ayyubids). At the same time Jews, too, despite their lack of state-sanctioning means,
resorted to violent discourses about heresy. Finally, whereas Latinists and Muslims were
waging war against heresy from a position of power, their Byzantine contemporaries were
doing the same in the context of political instability, military weakness, declining incomes,
and loss of territory.
Chapter 4, Cinders and Ashes, focuses on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as
a period that saw an increasing high temperature of religious and secular authorities
response to heresy (203). The chapter begins with the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 (a
papally sponsored war against heresy) and closes around 1328 with the death of Meister Eckhart and Ibn Taymiyyah, two heresiologists who ended their days being charged
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with heresy. The careers of these two men, the rst a Dominican friar, the second a Sunni
Hanbali scholar, aptly illustrate Amess argument throughout the book that heresy was
an allegation wielded variably in accordance with changing circumstances. This is also a
historical period in which religious others (e.g., Jews for Western Christianity) blurred
into heresy (204), a process propelled by a series of political, social, and religious changes,
including the Mongol conquest of the East, the Reconquista in Iberia and consequent
Muslim conversion to Christianity, and a deterioration in the status of the Jews in Western
Europe. The crucial shift that occurred in this time frame, however, was the treatment of
heresy through the body rather than the soul, that is, through physical brutality rather
than instruction and exhortation. And although variably executed, this attitude was embraced across the various communities, if only as a theoretical principle. This is also the
period that witnessed the failure of Latin-Byzantine attempts at reconciliation, the burning
of the Talmud, the appearance of Jews before the Inquisition, and growing anxieties in
both Jewish and Muslim circles about the introduction of philosophy into religion.
Chapter 5, Purity and Peoples, concerns the years 13281510 and brings the study
full circle by describing this as the period when the classications of heresy nally reached
the level of collective groupingsan early prototype of modern perceptions of national
afliations founded on common language and lineage. This time frame marks what
Ames describes as the beginning of a powerful notion of race, a biological and genetic
category that assigned inherent traits to certain groups and sifted those groups into superior and inferior ones (264). This development evolved out of earlier modes of persecution and in response to a series of political developments in Europe and the Near East,
including the rise of the Ottomans to power and of the Shiite Safavids in Iran in the
East; growing rates of conversion to Christianity in the West, a trend that inuenced not
only Christian perceptions of converts but also the attitudes of minority communities toward members seeking reentry into their fold; the failure to achieve unity between Latins
and Greeks; the sack of Constantinople; and the proclamation of the Third Rome in
Moscow.
One of the many insights that Medieval Heresies has to offer is that perceptions of heresy
changed signicantly over time and across confessional settings, in tune with contemporary circumstances and sociopolitical exigencies. However, given the studys rather concrete
chronological and geographical boundaries, one question that looms over it is how to justify
the drawing of these linesis the fourth century in fact the starting point for such a survey?
Can the choice to concentrate on these particular communities be amply justied? Just a bit
further East, where Medieval Heresies drops off, lay a vast stretch inhabiting an equally rich
mosaic of theologies of additional Christian denominations, Zoroastrians, and others, who,
as is well known, were no less zealous about dening and redening themselves and others.
Rather than undermining the achievement of Medieval Heresies, however, such quandaries
highlight once again the importance of the question of boundaries, a discussion of which
Ames may now claim to be one of its leading patrons.
Uriel Simonsohn, University of Haifa

Baldric of Bourgueil, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. Steven Biddlecombe. Woodbridge, UK,

and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2014. Pp. cvii, 153. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84383-901-9.
doi:10.1086/685457

The astonishing wave of textual production inspired by the First Crusades conquest of
Jerusalem in 1099 is remarkable not only for its scale, generating a greater number of historical narratives than any earlier medieval event, but also the variety of resulting works,
which appeared in verse and prose, Latin and the vernacular. Among the rst generaSpeculum 91/2 (April 2016)