Friday, February 27, 2015

Review of Morlet et al. (eds.), Les dialogues Adversus Iudaeos

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:
Sébastien Morlet, Olivier Munnich, Bernard Pouderon (ed.), Les dialogues Adversus Iudaeos: Permanences et mutations d'une tradition polémique. Actes du colloque international organisé les 7 et 8 décembre 2011 à l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Collection des Études Augustiniennes. Série Antiquité, 196. Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 2013. Pp. 428. ISBN 9782851212634. €46.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Barbara Crostini, Stockholm University (barbara.crostini@su.se)


[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

This is an extremely wide-ranging, informative, and balanced collection of essays on a body of literature that is as important as it is sensitive in the current scholarly investigations of intercultural and interfaith relationships across the centuries. The individual contributions are of the highest level, displaying remarkable scholarship but also subtlety in reviewing the materials. While the weight of the evidence lies in the late antique period, which receives the greatest number of contributions in the volume (pp. 49–268), the perusal of this genre into the medieval period (pp. 269–384) and beyond (pp. 385–402) affords a better perspective by which to evaluate the earlier dialogues, whose context is necessarily constrained by our limited knowledge about the period.

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