This edition has a prefixed section on the life of Mohammad by Roger Long.

This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these depictions, although historically inaccurate, served to enhance and advance assertions of English national identity at this time. The book examines Saracen characters in a manuscript renowned for the variety of its texts, and discusses hagiographic legends, elaborations of chronicle entries, and popular romances about Charlemagne, Arthur, and various English knights. In these texts, Saracens engage issues such as the demarcation of communal borders, the place of gender norms and religion in communities' self-definitions, and the roles of violence and history in assertions of group identity. Texts involving Saracens thus serve both to assert an English identity, and to explore the challenges involved in making such an assertion in the early fourteenth century when the English language was regaining its cultural prestige, when the English people were increasingly at odds with their French cousins, and when English, Welsh, and Scottish sovereignty were pressing matters.

Medieval Christian writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. This book provides a comprehensive study of Christian polemical responses to Islam in the Middle Ages.

The fall of Acre in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. Extensive notes guide the reader through the historical context of this fascinating work

These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".

This is the first and only book to examine the Crusades from the added viewpoint of psychoanalysis, studying the hidden emotions and fantasies that drove the Crusaders and the Muslims to undertake their terrible wars. The reader will learn that the deepest and most powerful motives for the Crusades were not only religious or territorial - or the quest for lands, wealth or titles - but also unconscious emotions and fantasies about one's country, one's religion, one's enemies, God and the Devil, Us and Them. The book also demonstrates the collective inability to mourn large-group losses and the collective needs of large groups such as nations and religions to develop a clear identity, to have boundaries, and to have enemies and allies. Motives which the Crusaders and the Muslims were not aware of were among the most powerful in driving several centuries of terrible and seemingly endless warfare.

Mirage of the Saracen analyzes the growth of monasticism and Christian settlements in the Sinai Peninsula through the early seventh century C.E. Walter D. Ward examines the ways in which Christian monks justified occupying the Sinai through creating associations between Biblical narratives and Sinai sites while assigning uncivilized, negative, and oppositional traits to the indigenous nomadic population, whom the Christians pejoratively called "Saracens." By writing edifying tales of hostile nomads and the ensuing martyrdom of the monks, Christians not only reinforced their claims to the spiritual benefits of asceticism but also provoked the Roman authorities to enhance defense of pilgrimage routes to the Sinai. When Muslim armies later began conquering the Middle East, Christians also labeled these new conquerors as Saracens, connecting Muslims to these pre-Islamic representations. This timely and relevant work builds a historical account of interreligious encounters in the ancient world, showing the Sinai as a crucible for forging long-lasting images of both Christians and Muslims, some of which endure today.