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This chapter examines the pericope adulterae in the Latin West. Approximately two-thirds of extant Old Latin manuscripts included the story, and mixed texts invariably either included it or show an awareness of its presence elsewhere. Only one-third of the Old Latin copies exclude it altogether. Fourth-century Latin Christian writings and copies of John preserving Old Latin texts therefore confirm the widespread inclusion of the pericope adulterae within John in the Latin West. By the end of the fourth century, however, there was also already great textual diversity in the Old Latin tradition in general, and the pericope adulterae in particular, which is evident from a comparison of these extant Old Latin manuscripts and citations by Latin fathers.

This concluding chapter argues that not only were there such practitioners of Christian kalām in the lifetime of Alfonso VIII—and most likely in Toledo—but that their works were, moreover, the fruit of such interaction between the Latin-Christian and Arab-Christian intellectual traditions. The rationalist arguments for the Trinity advanced in two Arabic works that survive only fragmentarily both continued a long tradition of Middle-Eastern Trinitarian argumentation rooted in kalām, and incorporated at the same time emerging Latin-Christian Trinitarian theology devised by Peter Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor. As such, they were evidence of an intellectually vital Arab-Christian community that was actively cultivating Arab-Christian and Latin-Christian thought in the twelfth century. However, important scholarly work has appeared on a handful of issues surrounding these texts and their Trinitarian arguments. The chapter then revisits the texts, considering the via impugnandi advanced by these tracts.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the general theme of the book. It discusses and defines the terminology employed to describe, analyse, and evaluate Arabic-Islamic records on medieval Western Europe on a macro-historical scale. An overview of the range of available sources introduces the reader to the material that is subject to analysis in the following chapters. An account of the current state of research questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records and outlines the study’s alternative approach: to analyse and interpret the extant material thematically and in chronological order, thus tracing and explaining the processes of transmission, reception, and contextualization that facilitated the production of the extant Arabic-Islamic records on certain Latin-Christian phenomena. Two short overviews at the beginning and end of the chapter explain the structure of the current study.

Chapter 2 features an overview of relations between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Its purpose is to show how much information on medieval Western Europe was potentially available in the Arabic-Islamic sphere and to provide an understanding of where to place the authors of Arabic-Islamic records within an overriding framework of transmission and reception. From Antiquity and leading up to the fifteenth century, it explains how the Arab sphere was integrated into the Roman orbit, discusses the effects of the Roman Empire’s disintegration on the pre-Islamic Arab world-view and presents the Arabic-Islamic expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries as a process that acquainted the Muslims with new information on the western Mediterranean. With regards to the ensuing period, characterized by various forms of intra- and intersocietal neighbourship in the Mediterranean sphere, the chapter lists channels of transmission by which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic world.

Chapter 6 analyses the semantic evolution of the Arabic term for ‘Franks’. Direct contact on the Iberian Peninsula as well as exchanges with the Abbasid sphere provided scholars of the ninth and tenth centuries with information about the Frankish realm. Thanks to the Franks’ early medieval expansion and to the later involvement of groups from this expanded territorial base in various Mediterranean enterprises, the ethnonym ‘Franks’ became coterminous with ‘Latin Christians’ in many texts, more often of Middle Eastern than of western Muslim origin. This equation not only gave birth to theories of a Frankish rise to power in the Mediterranean, but also to terminological complications concerning the various semantic levels of the term ‘Franks’. The rise of a new terminology for the emerging realm of ‘France’ complicated issues even further. In consequence, the term Franks never reached the status of an uncontested generic term for European Christians.

Chapter 7 analyses how Arabic-Islamic scholars depicted the papacy. Eastern Christian recollections of Late Antiquity provided Arabic-Islamic scholars in the Middle East of the ninth and tenth centuries with information about the late antique patriarch of Rome. Contacts in the border zones furnished additional material about the spiritual authority of the Roman patriarch, alias ‘the pope’, among Christians from the Frankish sphere. Although Arabic-Islamic scholars do not seem to have been aware of the direct papal correspondence with various Muslim rulers in the first half of the thirteenth century, Middle Eastern scholars recorded the papacy’s endorsement and active support of Latin-Christian expansionism as well as its conflict with the Staufen dynasty. In contrast, scholars from the Muslim West largely ignored the papacy. Taken together, however, Arabic-Islamic scholarship traced the rise of the Roman patriarch of Late Antiquity to one of the most important leaders of Christendom.

Chapter 9 provides a concluding re-evaluation of Arabic-Islamic records on Latin-Christian Europe. It relegates the extant records to a specific milieu within the Arabic-Islamic sphere and reflects on this milieu’s potential access to information about the non-Muslim world. It discusses the role of ‘mental barriers’ and religious ideology in impeding processes of reception and defines them as one among many obstacles in an information landscape made up of ever-changing resources and infrastructures and moulded by important geopolitical changes. Record-keeping was thus subject to certain dynamics influenced by smaller and greater factors, one of them being the expansionism of either the documenting or the documented cluster of societies. The chapter concludes with general reflections on how Arabic-Islamic records depicted the Latin-Christian sphere. Arabic-Islamic sources repeatedly formulate the rather diffuse notion that the Christian societies of the northwestern hemisphere constituted some kind of entity, but without using any clear-cut term or concept.