Introduction

Abstract

The seven articles in this thematic issue address written responses to different periods of turmoil that impacted Muslim and Christian societies in the western Mediterranean from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. By highlighting the complexities of the literary artifacts produced in Sicily, al-Andalus, and North Africa, it offers new perspectives on the interactions between Islam and Christendom at a time of traumatic transition from one political and religious hegemony to another, as reflected in a variety of genres: apologetic and hagio-graphical works, interreligious polemics, military and diplomatic dispatches, historiography, travel narratives, and romance. These analyses reveal a cultural panorama in which "internal otherness" and religious rivalry are both generative forces within a Mediterranean of fungible linguistic and social boundaries, where traditional genres are inflected and re-invented and new vernacular forms arise from multicultural and multi-confessional encounters.