The Bible in Historical Perception and Writing of the Transcultural Iberian Societies, Eighth to Twelfth Centuries

Abstract

In stark contrast to the Bible‘s paramount role of being the only book declared to have »World Heritage« status by the UNESCO, research on the »Book of Books« from a transcultural perspective is an almost neglected phenomenon: Neither the Bible’s relationship to other »holy or sacred« scriptures as modes of religious and cultural perceptions and transformations of the Others’ world, nor its decisive role as a »normative order« in the many modes of religious, social and cultural interaction in the Euro-mediterranean world have been comprehensively studied from a historical perspective. Because of their pretension of normativity, the religious laws of this world (Tanach, Talmud, Bible and Qur’ān) were competing against and confronting each other with alternative models of perceiving time, space and history. The diverse concepts of the three monotheisms had consequences for their common but nevertheless specific narratives, genres and books of exegetical, polemical and historiographical practice; yet, we do not have clear-cut ideas of the processes of possible entanglement between these modes of perceiving and transforming the Others’ history; nor do we know their exact place and value in the systems of knowledge or their retroactive effects (on either side) on the interpretations of their own religious laws. Our project intends to give answers to these basic questions based on the evidence of the Christian biblical and historiographical legacy in the transcultural frontier societies of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. We thereby change the perspective on the biblical legacy of these societies: Bible manuscripts are no longer seen as testimonies of texts or text traditions alone, but as bearers of canons: theoretical and practical concepts of history and perceptions of religious alterities. We therefore re-contextualize these perceptions of »the Others’ world« within, on the one hand, the larger context of the typological thinking of preserved biblical manuscripts, their materiality and mediality; and on the other hand, in their narrative framework of the related Iberian historiographical production.

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