Brian Catlos

University of Colorado at Boulder/UC Santa Cruz

2014 Albert Hourani Book Award Winner

The Winner of the Albert Hourani's Book Award for 2014 goes to Brian Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Various members of the committee described it as "a major work of scholarship," "magisterial," "a classic," and "the result of decades of historical and archival research."

The book examines the history of Islamic societies after conquest in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and during the wars of the Crusades between 1050-1614. The author works with primary sources and scholarly literature on both the Islamic and Western sides, and examines the religious, political, and economic history of Islamic society as a minority, and its cultural interactions in environments ranging from accommodation to intolerance and systematic exclusion. Catlos provides a landmark work of synthesis on the neglected history of the Muslim subaltern during and after the so-called Reconquista. His work sets a model for future research on Mediterranean studies, and encouraging not only a new level of complex analysis but also hybridization of Medieval European and Islamic history.

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