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A Spiritual Reaction to Islamic Prosperity: The Power of Sorrow in Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s "Letters to the Triumphant Church"
No full textThis chapter tackles the argumentative strategies behind Riccoldo da Monte di Croce's "Epistole ad Ecclesiam Triumphantem" written in the aftermath of the Mamluk conquest of Saint John of Acre (1291), the last outpost of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. I will linger on how the threatening presence of Muslims in the East allowed Riccoldo to develop a creative meditation on faith, a refined theological and rhetorical manifesto providing the author and his Christian readers with a spiritual shelter from the dramatic events taking place on earth. I am going to examine in particular Riccoldo’s experience of "sorrow"—one of the possible translations of the Latin word "tristicia"— by looking specifically at the ways in which he describes his faith in God. I will show how, on a rhetorical level, Riccoldo’s exegesis of the Book of Job through Gregory the Great turns out to be the exhortative backbone of the whole collection of his imaginary letters. Referring to Job, it has been claimed that the "Epistole" bear witness to the author’s spiritual crisis, particularly to his crisis of faith, as well as to his loss of certainty and hope in God’s plan—this implies an interpretation of the Book of Job in a deterministic, literalist and pessimistic fashion. I aim to challenge this interpretation of the "Epistole" as a desperate lament conceived by an author who finds himself incapable of escaping a fatalistic view of the present, realistically confused regarding God’s salvation plan and even suffering from agnosticism. I will demonstrate that by means of careful exegetical and rhetorical strategies, the "Epistole" instead provide substantial evidence of Riccoldo’s very faith vis-à-vis the general crisis surrounding him, shedding light on his expectations about the reaction of the Dominican Order—and the Western Church on a broader level—to the last stage of Islamic expansion
Riccoldo da Monte di Croce (†1320): Missionary to the Near East and Expert on Islam
No full textRiccoldo da Monte di Croce, a Dominican friar, traveled to the Holy Land in 1288, living in Muslim Baghdad where he learned Arabic and studied the Qur’an. Returning to Florence after 1300, he wrote extensively on non-Christian peoples and religions. Riccoldo’s Liber peregrinationis details his travels, offering ethnographic insights and theological discussions. His Epistolae ad ecclesiam triumphantem laments the fall of Acre to Muslims and the subsequent enslavement of Christians, whereas his Libellus ad nationes orientales explores Eastern religions based on firsthand
interactions. Riccoldo’s major work, Contra legem Sarracenorum, is a detailed refutation of the Qur’an, which significantly influenced Western European studies of Islam. In this volume 16 authors offer various perspectives on Riccoldo’s works and his influence on Christian European
writers and thinkers. The contributions were originally presented at a conference held on 7–8 September 2017 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm
Transfer and Religion. Interactions between Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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