Summary This volume explores the sermons and activities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim preachers who shaped ideas about religious and gendered identities and alterity throughout the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Preachers of all three traditions played a decisive role in defining the religious identities of their communities, often in response to negative images projected onto religious others. The studies cover a broad spectrum of premodern Europe and the Mediterranean and address the ways that preaching reflects transcultural contacts as well as social, intellectual, and hermeneutical encounters among diverse societies and religious communities. The essays are divided into three themes. Part One, 'Religious and Gendered Identities and Alterities,' examines how religious identity is inflected by the presence or the 'absent presence' of religious others and interrogates how gender informs religious identity, piety, and alterity. The chapters in Part Two, 'Hermeneutical Identities, Alterities, and Transcultural Relations in Christian and Jewish Preaching', offer contrasting interpretations of the impact of anti-Judaism in Christian preaching and analyse Jewish responses to Christian polemic. Part Three, 'Muslim and Christian Orators and Inter-faith Encounters,' explores these encounters from the dual perspectives of Crusade and military conflict and interreligious dialogue, disputation, and proselytization. The volume positions itself at the intellectual crossroads between comparative medieval sermons studies and transcultural Mediterranean and European studies. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction - LINDA G. JONES Part One: Religious and Gendered Identities and Alterities Giving Birth as a Metaphor: Eude de Châteauroux's Preaching to the Nuns of Orvieto - JUSSI HANSKA AND SARI KATAJALA-PELTOMAA 'Penre am gran amor via de penedensa': la prédication de Hugues de Digne et le mouvement pénitentiel à Hyères dans la première moitié du XIIIe siècle - DAMIEN RUIZ La predicación aljamiada: en torno a la religiosidad mudéjar y morisca - OLIVIER BRISVILLE-FERTIN Preaching Passions and Precepts: The Role of Jews and Muslims in East Norse Sermons - JONATHAN ADAMS Part Two: Hermeneutical Identities, Alterities, and Transcultural Relations in Christian and Jewish Preaching Anti-Jewish Preaching as Part of an Anti-Jewish Narrative in Late Medieval Spain - ORIOL CATALÁN El Contra Judaeos de Isidoro de Sevilla en la predicación regular ibérica del final del siglo XII: Entre identidad confesional y estaturia - AMÉLIE DE LAS HERAS Addressed in Absentia: Meaning and Uses of Jewish Cultural References in Medieval Preaching: The Case of St Vincent Ferrer's Sermons - CAROLINA LOSADA Rabbi Isaac Nathan, Vincent Ferrer, Pope Benedict XIII, Thomas Connecte, and the Mendicants: Jewish Homiletics and Preaching as a Reflection of Jewish-Christian Encounters - RAM BEN-SHALOM Part Three: Muslim and Christian Orators and Interfaith Encounters Notes on the Speeches at the 1228 Corts in Barcelona to Debate the Conquest of Mallorca - XAVIER RENEDO St John of Capestrano's Crusade Preaching and the Ottoman-Italian Encounter - NIRIT BEN-ARYEH DEBBY Ab? Madyan, Shu'ayb al-?urayf?sh, and the Miraculous Conversion of Ten Monks to Islam: Reflections of Contacts between the Western and Eastern Mediterranean - LINDA G. JONES La Disputa de la Sagena de Marraqech entre Fray Pedro de Alcántara y el Talbé Abdalá Ordopesa - CÁNDIDA FERRERO HERNÁNDEZ Index