ABSTRACT
Increased suspicion by clerical and monastic authorities of “the other” within Christian society was matched by an increased awareness and suspicion of “others” at its borders. In particular, there was great fear and antipathy toward the Muslims or Saracens, as twelfth-century Christians often called them. Whereas, in later eras, warfare seemed the only effective response to these “followers of Islam,” some twelfth-century Christians claimed to believe that it was possible to persuade Muslims, or indeed Jews, of their errors and to successfully convert them to Christianity, and some works were written that present dialogues or conversations between Jews and Christians as if they were actual exchanges on a level playing field. It is as such works of persuasion for the conversion of heretics, Jews, and Muslims that the three treatises by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), Against the Jews, Against the Petrobrusians, and Against the Sect of the Saracens (Contra sectam Sarracenorum), have usually been treated by Western historians.
