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Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century

encounters in the late Middle Ages. Harvey J. Hames sees that the extant Hebrew account of an encounter in Paris in 1240 was written after, and heavily influenced by, Nahmanides’ account of the 1263 Barcelona disputation. This was, in a sense, boundary construction, which is also the focus of the following two essays (and final two in the third section), which consider in turn Pablo de Santa María’s Additiones to the work of Nicholas of Lyra and Arragel’s fifteenth-century glosses on his new translation of the Bible. Finally, the fourth section of the volume is dedicated to questions related to gender. The masculinity of Jesus’ portrayal in the Toledot Yeshu merits the attention of Alexandra Cuffel. Nina Caputo then returns to Nahmanides, a subject familiar to many of the volume’s authors. Caputo sees in his exegesis of Genesis VI:1–4 an attempt to reconcile “human flesh and divine spirit in a theology that fundamentally denies to the divine any human qualities” (p. 186), but in a reading that seems to have alienated medieval Christians and Jews alike. Next, the “strange woman” of Proverbs transforms in Hebrew exegesis, revealing a rich intellectual debate occurring across several authors and shifting socio-cultural contexts. The final essay, by Steven F. Kruger on Guilllaume de Bourges, takes a cue from the work of Jay Rubenstein and sees Guillaume’s exegesis as a form of autobiography, with Guillaume specifically attempting to defend his conversion from Judaism to Christianity and establish himself as a legitimate Christian reader of sacred texts. Although it is not nearly as comprehensive as its title would suggest, and a number of the contributions read somewhat like lightly revised conference papers (specialised to the focus of the original conference), the volume itself is well produced and rewards patient reading. One might be tempted to dip into the volume, looking for a particular essay then putting the book down, but to do so would be to miss something important. The real value of the book lies in the impression it leaves of the interactions between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the late Middle Ages. Indeed, most importantly, taken as a whole, the volume should be read as a coherent examination of how Muslims, Jews and Christians both reinforced and transgressed the boundaries of their communities during the late Middle Ages by speaking to one another through exegesis. A colleague once wondered aloud during a conference panel whether the academy was going through an “exegetical turn”. Given this present volume and other recent works, I certainly hope so; this will be a profitable path to investigate further. The richness that the study of exegesis can reveal about the intellectual life of the Middle Ages emphasises for us the very humanity of our subjects. Their intellectual debates demonstrate the contingency of the past, that decisions mattered to them (and hence to us) and that things were not necessarily destined to turn out as they ultimately have.