Notes sur la littérature médiévale chrétienne d’expression arabe

Abstract

Spurred by a recent American work offering an overview of the intellectual life and literary output of the Christians in the Land of Islam during the middle ages, we propose to revisit the question from a broader basis and a differently structured perspective.

Provided with working instruments of different origins and based on intense personal research, we hinge this presentation on three axes: the Christian Arab studies as such, the Arabic Christian literary movement up to the high middle ages, and the forms and genres of this literature.

In this way, we hope, in our turn, to illustrate the extraordinary intellectual convivial spirit that reigned between a rather uniform Moslem majority and the ethno-linguistic Christian communities scattered between the Valley of the Nile and Greater Mesopotamia, passing through the variegated Syro-Palestinian territories. Incidentally, we will recall the impact of this joint Islamic Christian complicity on Medieval Europe.