Muslims and Jews in the Late Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Gloss of the Decretum (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 283/676)

Muslims and Jews were consistently treated together in legal materials from the latter part of the twelfth century. This does not, however, alter the fact that, within Christian theology, Judaism, and by extension Jews, played an essential role that Muslims did not. Augustine's maxim that Jews had a place in Christian society because they bore witness to Christianity never applied to Muslims. This article analyses how a selection of twelfth-century canonists commenting on Gratian's Decretum continued to distinguish between Muslims and Jews and explores whether their treatment of Islam and Judaism reveals any actual interaction with contemporary Jews or Muslims. The study centres on the Anglo-Norman Gloss of the Decretum written in Oxford in the late 1190s and two of its main sources: the so-called Summa Lipsiensis, an Anglo-Norman commentary on the Decretum (1186) and the widely disseminated Summa on the Decretum by Huguccio (1188-90).