Diverging Paths?

Reviews / Votes

"This attention to one common question, along with a spirit of comparative analysis, gives the diverse chapters in this book an overarching unity, despite the diversity of approaches and subjects. ...The whole is greater than the sum of its (for the most part excellent) parts. This volume is a model for collaborative comparative scholarship that deftly combines a diversity of approaches and subjects with unity of purpose."
John Tolan, Universite de Nantes, in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. LXVIII, no. 4, Winter 2015


"This sophisticated volume illustrates the impressive, thought-provoking results an accomplished, diverse group of scholars can produce in pursuit of a simple and open-ended yet ultimately difficult and complicated question... The project took the same name now borne by this handsome volume and pursued a fascinating and timely inquiry into the comparative institutional development of societies of the premodern Mediterranean, a topic that has of course interested historians for generations. Yet with a plethora of highly trained and interested experts and arguably more collaboration between scholars working on the formerly much too isolated Islamic and Christian sides of the Mediterranean world (encouraged by numerous and proliferating networking associations), academia has never been better prepared to tackle such a project... It is uncommon to find an edited volume for which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, such is the case with Diverging Paths?, which manifests an impressive degree of synergy among its widely varied contributions... This well-presented volume offers its readers an array of perspectives on a subset of the comparative historical issues that are intriguing premodern scholars in a mode that will be challenging yet still accessible to non-specialists, while both highly engaging and valuable for experts."
Thomas W. Barton, University of San Diego, in The Medieval Review, 15.10.01


"On l'aura compris, Diverging Paths pose un jalon salutaire et extremement fertile pour les approches comparatistes mediterraneennes premodernes. Notre recension ne rend qu'imparfaitement compte des resultats obtenus et des riches perspectives tracees par ce tres dense ouvrage. Le prisme de l'institution et de ses formes tient ses promesses."
Sebastien Garnier, in Studia Islamica 111, 2016.

"...The general theme explored in the essays is how power is reflected in the institutions that developed around two of the three religions that claim belief in a single God, namely Christianity and Islam. The articles accurately reflect the title of this complex book, but explore ideas well beyond simple comparison and contrast. ...Most readers will not be across all fields. However, that is the point and the strength of such a book: to bring together scholars of varied backgrounds and to query the reader's approaches and viewpoints. ...Diverging Paths? is a tightly integrated, complex text that explores the relationships between institutions via three key paths: law, resources and elite physical structures, but expands our ideas of all of these. It would be valuable for scholars who already have a reasonable knowledge of the Christian and Islamic histories of the early Middle Ages and would like to understand those world views using the tools of anthropology, law, history and sociology."
Penelope Nash, University of Sydney, in Royal Studies Journal II, 2015.


"The originality of this work largely lies in its careful and knowledgeable use of historical documents to engage with contemporary conceptions of 'power and institutions'. The book dialogues with wider historiographical trends and with issues of contemporary politics, in a way that allows the authors to look at medieval sources from unexpected angles....[The book is] original, engaging, and valuable for scholars and students in the humanities and the social sciences beyond the geographic-cultural areas under examination."
Cecilia Palombo, Princeton University, in Early Medieval Europe 25, 2017.


"[This book is] a most successful thematically harmonized presentation of states of research in the three fields of Islamic, Byzantine, and Western-Latin Medieval Studies. The essays are of the highest calibre - well written and eminently erudite. Although they might not conclusively explore the question of diverging paths of medieval Christendom and Islam, they raise sufficient doubt to question the validity of such stark opposition suggesting and in part already trying a different approach of entangled development. Thus, they reveal convergence and parallel developments as much as divergence (cf. 370). While also illustrating the divergence of disciplinary paths in Medieval Studies, they provide a portal through which the scholar daring enough to pick-up and continue the quest for institutional divergence in disciplinary convergence will have to pass. It will thus remain a passage oblige and most useful starting point for future 'divergence' studies."
Georg Christ, University of Manchester, in Mediaevistik 34, 2021.