The past decade has seen the publications of numerous excellent studies on the Black Death. For the most part, however, scholars have been preoccupied with debating whether the Black Death was caused by plague or not, parallels between the first, second, and third plague pandemics, and broader historiographical questions of continuity and change. Less attention has been devoted to revisiting the religious responses of Christians, Muslims, and Jews to the natural disaster. Recent scholarship has begun to question previous paradigms in which the responses of these three communities were viewed as qualitatively different in essential characteristics such as their conception of contagion. By emphasizing the internal diversity of views within these monotheistic communities, and drawing on recently published primary sources, scholars attempting to write a nuanced comparative history of the religious responses to the Black Death will be able to avoid the misleading generalizations promoted by their predecessors.

The Black Death, which struck al-Andalus in the second half of the 8th/14th century, was an unprecedented natural disaster. In this essay I examine the legal and ethical responses of two Granadan scholars to the social and intellectual challenge posed by this event. Whereas previous scholarship has almost universally lauded the stridently critical stance of the wazir Ibn al-KhaãÊb as an exceptional example of rational empiricism, I argue that his stance is more productively understood when compared to that of his teacher Ibn Lubb. Both scholars articulated an ethical response to an insurmountable challenge from within a medical and legal framework. Their interpretive choices and conclusions were based not so much on one scholar's privileging of empirical evidence over legal dogma, or vice versa, as they were on both scholars' grounding their respective statements in differing understandings of the nature of the evidence at hand.

In recent years, the subject of science in the Muslim World in the pre‐modern period has largely been discussed in the context of two master narratives: (1) how and to what extent did Muslim scholarship influence European intellectual history, and (2) the nature of the decline of science and intellectual life in general in the Muslim world during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. This essay moves beyond these two narratives by first summarizing the history of European studies of science in the Muslim world. It then draws upon recent developments in Europeanist history of science and outstanding work by historians of Islamicate science to stress the importance of avoiding Whiggish readings of the history of the natural sciences in the Muslim world as well as the necessity for situating the same sciences in relation to developments in theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and mysticism.

Th e place that al-Andalus occupies in contemporary popular and academic discourses is characterized by an ill-defi ned but heartfelt nostalgia. Th is essay returns to the historical texts written during and immediately following the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula in order to elucidate the conceptual place al-Andalus occupied in them. Th ese narratives convey little in the way of nostalgia and frame al-Andalus instead as a place of wonders, jihād and eschatological events. Th is essay concludes with a brief consideration of when the understanding of al-Andalus as a "lost paradise" emerged and how this understanding may now itself be changing.

No abstract