Chapter 8 looks at some of the ways local historians represented their region’s or town’s history and the ways they crafted narratives that placed their local, idealised communities within the history of wider communities. The chapter looks in particular at the ways local historians discussed the historical topography of their regions and towns, the ways they dealt with non-Muslim and pre-Islamic history, and the master narratives they used to build their communities’ histories, in particular the ways in which those narratives differed from the ones often encountered in universal histories. One overarching argument of the book, brought to the fore in this chapter, is that local history-writing was, in the early Islamic centuries at least, not always as distinct from universal history-writing as we are sometimes led to think; and that where differences can be seen, they often concerned the conception of community and the role of elites as much as whether a given work covers the history of one region much more thoroughly than others.

The Introduction outlines the essential premises behind this book and the structure the book will take. It also offers some thoughts on the book’s approach to periodisation.

Part I of the book provides the framework and contexts for appreciating the significance of local history-writing. Chapter 1 deals with the different professional and elite groups who were the principal producers of history in the early Islamic world. Many works were produced by those loosely known as religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ, sing. ʿālim), but other professional groups such as government chancery officials and administrators (kuttāb, sing. kātib) are considered as well, as are those who can be very loosely labelled litterateurs (udabāʾ, sing. adīb). The chapter investigates how these groups thought about themselves as communities and how they derived social authority as elites. It is frequently assumed that these groups used history-writing as one way of underpinning their authority, but it is less frequently examined explicitly how such authority operated. Since this book absolutely agrees with the now well-established principal that history-writing supported the position and authority of relevant groups, it is important to establish in what precise ways this worked and what the opportunities to exercise authority were to those groups whose members produced local histories.

Part II of the book turns to the field of history-writing more specifically and includes three chapters that approach the categorisation of history as universal or local in three different ways. Chapter 4 introduces early Islamic universal history-writing and the key concerns and interests of authors and compilers of such works down to the end of the fifth/eleventh century. It begins with a discussion of what a universal history was in the early Islamic world and moves on to look at the contexts and purposes of universal history-writing. The chapter ends with some consideration of whether universal histories are really any less parochial than local histories in their concerns.

The Introduction presents the topic of feminine imagery for the Church and the book’s method for examining this imagery in both expository and literary sources and across the traditional medieval and early modern periodization divide. It presents Lady Church both as a theological person with a transcendent ontological status not identical to the ecclesiastical institution and as a literary figure developed through drama, poetry, and literary techniques used in other genres.

Chapter 5 identifies how partisan figures in fourteenth-century England, such as John Wyclif and Roger Dymmok, sharpened feminine imagery for the Church, especially in debates over the legitimacy of ecclesiastical wealth. In his Trialogus, Wyclif presents Lady Church as a damsel in distress who was assaulted by the Donation of Constantine, while Dymmok in his anti-Lollard treatise presents Lollards as matricidal vipers and the endowed Church as a mother whose uterus and breasts nurture her educated clergy.

This chapter explores the approach of the Italian Thomist and Kierkegaard scholar, Fr. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995), to move contemporary scholarly discussions toward consensus regarding the dialogue between Thomism and continental philosophy, which centers on the question of the meaning of being (esse) and contingency. The central observation is that what is now taken as the canonical Thomist view of creation and freedom is indebted to Fabro’s research on the metaphysics of participation. For Fabro, the forgetfulness of being that Heidegger rightly identifies loses its way with the forgetfulness of the act of being. By distinguishing esse from existentia with Fabro’s notion of participation and act of being (actus essendi), Fabro’s Thomism avoids Cartesian dualism and phenomenological monism, which opens a constructive dialogue with continental thought. Briefly rehearsing Fabro’s metaphysical distinction between factical existence (existentia) and being (esse) illuminates Fabro’s critical evaluation of continental thought as a speculative scheme of necessary emanation or pure immanence. The chapter concludes that the best way to approach this question is not to limit it to the empirical realm of factical existence (existentia) but rather to open up the existential question to the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo.

Chapter 1 demonstrates how several patristic and Carolingian biblical commentators develop ecclesiological readings of the foremothers of Jesus listed in the genealogy of Matthew’s gospel (Matt 1.1–18). This history of exegesis demonstrates that a high view of the Church as Christ’s preexistent consort developed from an early stage of Nicene-orthodox Christianity as an alternative to Jerome’s condemnatory views of biblical women perceived as sexually deviant – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

St. Thomas and Thomists hold that the ground for having basic rights (including the right to life) is being a person. And a person can be defined as: an individual substance of a rational nature. This chapter sets out and defends this position, including its application to the beginning of human life, issues at the end of life, and capital punishment and killing in war. I argue that St. Thomas’s principles for determining when human life begins are correct, and that when applied to the embryological facts known today, show that human beings begin at fertilization. I set out St. Thomas’s position on capital punishment (where he holds that a human being can lose his inherent dignity) and discuss both criticisms and defenses of this position by later Thomists, indicating the centrality for this issue of the notions of dignity, the common good, and punishment.

Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

Divine Truthmaker Simplicity (DTS) avoids collapsing God into a metaphysical property by arguing that, to identify God with God’s wisdom, goodness (etc.) is not to identify God with a property, but rather to claim that God is the truthmaker for the predication “God is wise” (etc.). DTS has been the target of a number of recent objections. This chapter explains how Aquinas’s often overlooked distinction between two ways in which a thing can have a perfection – essentially and by participation – enables a response to these objections.