Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris. William J. Courtenay. The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. $45.
among Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule, and that of women. Chapter 7, on the roles of encyclopedic texts and discourses on the “classification of the sciences” (“tasṇīf al-ʿulūm”) in education, contains some of the book’s most innovative arguments, but may also be the most difficult for those unfamiliar with the intellectual terrain. Chapter 8 is also particularly dense, but its attentiveness to such things as glossation and signs of use in manuscripts makes it something of a mini-seminar in premodern Islamicate reading and writing practices. The bibliography points to a wealth of related scholarship in European languages, and the index is comprehensive enough to be useful.