Beheading the Son: Muhammad and Bertran de Born in Inferno 28
In recent years, partly because of the current political resonance of the relationship between Islam and the West, significant attention has been paid to the disturbing portrait of the prophet Muhammad in Inferno 28 and, more broadly, to the issue of Dante and Islam. In this essay I analyze Dante’s depiction of Muhammad in relation to its theological framework, arguing that the Muslims’ rejection of the dogma of the Trinity, which constitutes the central source of doctrinal dissension between Islam and Christianity, allows us to establish a link between Muhammad and Bertran de Born, the other main character in the gallery of sowers of discord presented in Inferno 28. As both sinners severed the tie between father and son, the former breached the principle upon which the unity of the Church is founded, whereas the latter violated the norm that undergirds the dynastic legitimacy of a kingdom. In contrast with Bertran’s and Muhammad’s language of division, Dante conceives his work as a vessel for peace and reconciliation between secular and spiritual authorities.
Muhammad and the Saints: The History of the Prophet in the Golden Legend
ç 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2004/10102-0001$10.00 James of Voragine is mostly known for his immensely successful collection of saint’s lives, the Golden Legend,1 composed around the year 1265. Lesser known is the fact that he wrote a historical chronicle inside his magnum opus, inserted in the second-to-last chapter. Though this chapter claims to be about Pope Pelagius I, a secondary figure in the canon of popes, the life of Pelagius is only a small part of the entire chronicle, which is often referred to as the Historia lombardica. In some versions of the manuscript of the Golden Legend, the chronicle has in fact given its name to the entire work. Fascinatingly, the Historia lombardica also contains a life of the prophet Muhammad, a seemingly unlikely choice for a chapter in a collection of the lives of Christian saints. The role of the Historia lombardica within the Golden Legend as a whole has not been studied in depth until recently, and the passages concerning Muhammad in particular have received only fleeting attention from scholars.2
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited