Mozarab Readers of the Bible, From the Córdoban Martyrs to the <i>Glossa Ordinaria</i>

In this dissertation, I offer four case studies in how medieval Iberia’s Arabic-speaking Christians (Mozarabs) appropriated Latin, Arabic, and Islamic culture. I have focused upon the Mozarabs’ reading of the Bible: (1) how they translated it from Latin to Arabic, (2) how they thought about the Last Days, (3) how they read it with a foremost interest in the meaning of individual words and phrases, and (4) how they employed biblical commentaries to understand scripture better. As the reader will see, the Mozarabs’ translations of the Bible into Arabic and the Latin manuscripts which they annotated in that language have much to tell us about these Arabic-speakers and inter-communal relations in the medieval Mediterranean more broadly. Indeed, what we see in these manuscripts are Christians acting ethnically Arab—and at times employing Qur’ānic vocabulary—concretely on manuscript folios.