Convert polemicists dominated medieval Spanish interfaith religious disputes

Evidence

The role of converts in these disputes is central. The anonymous author of the Liber denudationis claims to be a convert from Islam: he describes his former religion as “blindness and stupidity,” out of which God led him. Petrus Alfonsi similarly describes his former religion (Judaism) as a “tunic of iniquity” that he shed when he was baptized in 1106 under the protection of his godfather Alfonso I of Aragon in the cathedral of Huesca—a building that had itself undergone a conversion, as it had been a mosque only ten years earlier. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 800

Categorization

• XREF: The church that was a mosque only a decade prior echoes the ADDENDUM on buildings and conversion, and parallels the architectural reuse theme from ‘Grafting & Growth’ on infrastructure carrying layered meaning.
• SEED: The converted cathedral as physical metaphor for the convert’s own body/‘tunic’ - an essay on how medieval conversion discourse projected the individual’s transformation onto the buildings they worshipped in.
• CANDY: Petrus Alfonsi was baptized in a cathedral that had been a mosque only ten years earlier - the building ‘converted’ alongside its new Christian worshipper.