Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet

In the summer of 972 a group of Muslim brigands based in the south of France near La Garde-Freinet abducted the abbot of Cluny as he and his entourage crossed the Alps en route from Rome to Burgundy. Ultimately, the abbot was set free, but the audacity of this abduction outraged Christian leaders and galvanized the will of local lords. Shortly thereafter, Count William of Arles marshaled an army and succeeded in wiping out the Muslim stronghold.

The monks of Cluny kept this tale alive over the next century. Scott G. Bruce explores the telling and retelling of this story, focusing on the representation of Islam in each account and how that representation changed over time. The culminating figure in this study is Peter the Venerable, one of Europe's leading intellectuals and abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156, who commissioned Latin translations of Muslim texts such as the Qur'an. Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to examine Christian perceptions of Islam in the Crusading era.

Scott G. Bruce is Professor of Medieval History at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He is the author of Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism and editor of Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

This is a welcome work, bringing greater attention to a small but telling episode in the life of one Cluniac abbot and the polemical work of another Cluniac abbot, while also satisfying a modern desire for insight into Christian-Muslim relations in the past.

Meticulously researched and highly readable, this book will be a valuable addition to the shelves of all scholars of polemic and interreligious interactions in the Middle Ages. In drawing scholarly attention to the influence of devotional and hagiographical texts in shaping the attitudes of medieval theologians, Bruce provides fresh material and an original perspective to ongoing conversations about the ways in which medieval Christian writers interacted with Islam and the texts that shaped their thought-worlds.

A thoughtful and provocative book... Bruce has demonstrated the importance of the vita of Maiolus on the attitudes of the twelfth-century abbot and raised new ways to think about Peter's approach to Islam.

Crisply written and easy to read, given the density of some of the material. Highly recommended.

Overall, this is an impressive book. It diligently unpacks the development of the hagiographical legend surrounding the kidnapping of Maiolus and assesses its impact upon later Cluniac authors—especially Peter the Venerable. It makes positive contributions to several major debates surrounding Peter and the broad character of the Cluniac engagement with non-Christians and places that discussion within a long-term context. Bruce expresses himself with some neat turns of phrase and the book as a whole is a very easy read. It is much to be recommended!

Steven Vanderputten, Ghent University, author of Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform:

Scott G. Bruce's book uncovers the driving forces behind views on Islam, and on Islamic culture, in Cluniac texts of the tenth to twelfth centuries. It makes a strong case for the need to examine their genesis explicitly in a context that takes into account the evolving societal, spiritual, and intellectual position of Cluny and its subsidiary institutions. Most surprisingly, his empirical approach to the evidence reveals that Cluniac monks did not have a single, cohesive opinion of Islam up until the second decade of the twelfth century; and that Peter the Venerable's campaign to overcome Islam by use of rational arguments was determined more by circumstance than design. In many ways, Bruce's work is a radical departure from previous scholarship in this field. Its most important achievement, perhaps, lies in the fact that it helps the reader come to the inevitable conclusion that there was no such thing as 'the medieval Christian view' on Islam.

Constance Brittain Bouchard, Distinguished Professor of History, The University of Akron, author of "Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought:

In a highly original work, Scott G. Bruce has brought together the abduction of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny by Muslims in 972, eleventh-century monastic stories about Muslims before the First Crusade forced Christians to gain a better understanding of Islam, and Abbot Peter the Venerable's twelfth-century efforts to use rational arguments to persuade followers of Islam that they were wrong—once the Second Crusade made clear that force alone was not going to work. He demonstrates that accounts of a saint, here Maiolus, were not simply concerned with the saint himself but could influence how one thought and wrote about religious and cultural issues many years later. A particular strength of the book is Bruce’s understanding of how complex were medieval approaches to religion, polemic, and reason.