This essay aims to shed light on Sebald the polemicist and provocateur, draw attention to a central component of his literary criticism that is often ignored from an anglophone perspective. The essay first deals with the two academic monographs in which Sebald violently attacks the German-Jewish writers Alfred Döblin and Carl Sternheim, disparaging them as trailblazers for the Nazis. The consistently negative academic reviews Sebald writes from 1970 onwards as a junior academic are discussed as his personal way of participating in the political upheavals of the 1960s. After the rather quiet decade of the 1980s, Sebald’s polemical impetus flares up again, parallel to his emergence as a literary author. Jurek Becker, another German-Jewish author (and Holocaust survivor) once more serves as target of his polemics. What emerges from an examination of his polemical writings are two major findings: first, Sebald tried to learn lessons from the writers he attacked, avoiding what he saw as their flaws in his own writing. Second, Sebald’s lifelong urge to polemicize was closely tied to the issue of upward social mobility, the aggression arising from feeling to be a perpetual outsider in the social environment of academia.

The third chapter illustrates the nature of the second through fifth chapters. Each seeks to explore Calvin’s engagement with and use of tradition in different contexts. The third chapter takes up Calvin’s polemics with other thinkers and confessions. Through an odd quirk in the historiography surrounding Calvin, this chapter aligns most with the mainstream of Calvin interpretation. Almost every Calvin scholar or early modern analyst will admit that Calvin and other Reformers used tradition in their polemics – but it frequently is stated either as the exception that proves the rule that Calvin depended only upon scripture, or that it is a case where he and other Reforming writers had to adopt the methods of their foes. But the analysis of the material demonstrates that Calvin turned to tradition whether his foes were orthodox or heretical, Protestant, Radical, or Catholic. Calvin’s dependence on tradition and traditional sources undercuts the customary consideration of this area of his activity.

Jewish status as citizens of the Roman Empire since 212 CE devolved during the three centuries from Constantine to Heraklios through political, legal, religious, social, and economic restrictions and suffered from mob pressures resulting in periodic pogroms. A complex Christian program led and implemented a state policy to convert the Jews to the dominant Christian religion in order to achieve the eschaton via the return of the crucified messiah, whom the majority now worshipped as God incarnate.

The purpose of this introductory sketch is to offer a biographical frame that helps the reader to place the articles in this companion in their historical context. The overview of Grotius’ life contains the most important chronological facts, publications and professional occupations that gave shape to his personal, political and scholarly career. Special attention is paid to his research in the fields of law, philology, ecclesiastical politics and exegesis. Much of the information gathered here is to be found in Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). A lifelong struggle for peace in Church and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), but in order to avoid falling back into a downright summary of this biography some new material has been included. The story of Grotius’ eventful life is told along lines offered by a triptych of friendships that determined his scholarly efforts to a large extent: he successively kept close relations with Daniel Heinsius, who rivalled with him in many literary activities, Gerardus Joannes Vossius who assisted him in realizing his political-theological objectives, and Denis Pétau who advised him on his exegetical works. A succinct description of Grotius’ Nachleben serves to show that long after his death his theological works attracted an international readership and enjoyed an acclaim that is comparable to the one he attained in the fields of natural law and international law.

Chapter 5 examines the writings of the highly influential Sunnī scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), and those of some of his detractors, who accused him of advocating anti-ʿAlid doctrines. Ibn Taymiyya discussed his views of ʿAlī and anti-ʿAlids in his multivolume anti-Shīʿī work Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya. He provides comprehensive arguments and many proofs in favor of anti-ʿAlid doctrines while claiming to be a Muslim who respected ʿAlī. His anti-ʿAlid and anti-Shīʿī claims illuminate the tension that some Sunnīs (and their predecessors such as al-Jāḥiẓ) faced in opposing Shīʿism while simultaneously rejecting anti-ʿAlid sentiments.

This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.

This chapter explores the reasons behind the dramatic fluctuations in print output noted in Chapter 1 and analyses the precise context for a wide range of publications, many of which have not become part of the canon of major texts. During the English civil wars, drastic changes occurred in the popular dissemination of new types of political writing. Radical and first-time authors gave English readers access to a wholly unprecedented range of publications, suggesting that the scope for creative political thinking in England in the 1640s, continuing into the 1650s, was greater than anywhere else in Europe and far more visible than either before or after these turbulent years. By comparison, pamphlets from the French Fronde were more limited in political range and seem to have had less radical impact on contemporary readers and wider public opinion. The Netherlands had very different political structures and a more decentralised printing industry during the critical upheavals of 1650 and 1672.