INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN SCHOLAR TO LECTURE ON CHRISTIAN/MUSLIM RELATIONS IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN
18 November 2008
US Fed News
Jacksonville State University issued the following news release: Dr. Anthony Lappin, former head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and current senior lecturer at the University of Manchester in England, will offer a public lecture on the 11th floor of the Houston Cole Library on December 2 at 6:30 p.m. It will be preceded by light refreshments courtesy of Phi Alpha Theta at 6:00 p.m. All are welcome.
Lecture overview: Peter the Venerable, visiting Toledo in 1123, was introduced by the Arabic-speaking Christians that lived in the city - its conquest from Muslim overlordship was still within living memory - to one of the most popular refutations of Islam, the so-called 'Letter of al-Kindi.' From this began a remarkable project to assemble authoritative texts about Islam: the first and perhaps finest translation of the Koran (done by the Englishman, Robert of Ketton) and various Muslim historical works, which were subsequently distributed across Europe from Cluny. This paper will trace the struggle by European Christians to produce an ever-more accurate picture of their Islamic enemy through increasingly encyclopedic collections of works from those beginnings in Toledo in the early twelfth century to the monumental summaries by Alonso de Espina in the fifteenth, and, in the Protestant renaissance, by Bibliander.
Dr Anthony John Lappin is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures of the University of Manchester, in the north of England. His main area of research is in ecclesiastical history and literature, with a particular interest in Hispano-Latin and early vernacular. Current projects include editions of medieval Hispano-Latin hagiography and the early history of the Dominican Order. He is also monographs editor for the Medium Aevum Society. Dr. Lappin did his Doctorate at the University of Oxford.
This lecture is sponsored by JSU and the Department of History and Foreign Languages, with the assistance of Phi Alpha Theta. For more information, contact Dr. Donald Prudlo at ext. 8244.
