Dr Teresa Witcombe

I work on the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, with a particular focus on Muslim-Christian relations, translation and transfer across frontiers, and the formulation and curation of religious identities. My training as a historian began at St John’s College, Oxford, where I did my BA in History. This was followed by a Masters at the Sorbonne Paris-IV and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and several years working at UNESCO. I received my PhD in History from the University of Exeter in 2019, and subsequently held a Leverhulme Trust research award to pursue postdoctoral research in Madrid, where I was affiliated with the CSIC-CCHS and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. I returned to Oxford in 2022 to take up a British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship.

Research Interests

My doctoral research, forthcoming as a monograph, explored the life and thought of the enigmatic Bishop Maurice of Burgos, an early thirteenth-century prelate, scholar, and patron whose extraordinary career unfolded on the borderlines between the Islamic world and the Latin West.

The ways in which medieval Iberian Christians understood and interacted with Islam has been the central theme of my subsequent postdoctoral research. During a Leverhulme Trust research scholarship in Madrid, I investigated the ‘images of Islam’ constructed in texts from Castile, including the liturgy – notably, prayers ‘against the Saracens’ to be said on the eve of battle. I am also particularly interested in the efforts of medieval scholars and translators to render Arabic texts into Latin. My recent publications include two papers on the Latin translation of the Qur’an, and the increasingly literal and detailed way in which Christians approached the holy texts of Islam in thirteenth-century Iberia.

My new research project, funded by the British Academy, focuses on the movement of people – specifically, slaves and captives of war – between Muslim and Christian societies in Iberia over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Drawing on sources from across the Peninsula, I explore the ways in which interreligious slavery was defined, regulated, and understood, and the effects that enslavement had on those captured and on their societies – both those they left and those they were constrained to join. In so doing, I aim to provide an integrated and interconnected analysis of interreligious slavery and its place as a topic of ever-growing importance for our understanding of the medieval world.