It is rare that one reads a collection of essays resulting from a colloquium or workshop with a sense of real excitement. This collection is one of those rare occasions. It stems from James Montgomery's response to reading Lenn E. Goodman's Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh, 1999). Much intrigued by Goodman's notion of crosspollination, which was developed in reflecting on issues of cultural contact, he led a colloquium on the theme at Cambridge in early 2005. The quality of what emerged is marked; by high levels of scholarship (revealed in the substantial supporting apparatus for each essay made possible by the generosity and wisdom of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust); by, for the most part, serious intellectual engagement with the central issue; by ambition; and by an outcome of no small cumulative impact.

The contributors to the volume are as follows: Elizabeth Fowden on Muslim interest in Christain monks and Holy Places over three centuries; Garth Fowden on the coming together of Greek myth and Arabic poetry in the Umayyad caliph, al-Walid's, hunting lodge at Qusayr ‘Amra in modern Jordan; Anna Akasoy's exploration of the influence of Arab traditions of falconry and hunting on medieval Europe; Ulrich Rudolph's exploration of the way in which ninth-century Arab thinkers for their own purposes played boldly and creatively with the Pre-socratic philosophers; Peter Pormann's demonstration of how the translation by Nestorian Christians of Greek medical texts into Arabic in the ninth century illustrates the profound cosmopolitanism of medicine at the time and of Baghdad as a crosspollinatory arena; David Nicolle's venturesome comparison of Byzantine, Western European, Islamic and Central Asian influences in arms and armour from the seventh to the fourteenth century; Deborah Howard's exploration of the meaning of Alexandria for Venice as expressed in architecture; John Marenbon's exposition of Latin Averroism; and James Montgomery's overview piece “Islamic Crosspollinations”.

Several pieces brought particular enlightenment and pleasure. For instance there is Elizabeth Fowden's examination of the early Muslim engagement with Christian churches and holy places, an engagement of sharing and respect in which monasteries by the early Abbasid period had come “to represent in the Muslim literary imagination places of sensual beauty and ease where food, wine, sacred books and sexual titillation converged”. She demonstrates in a range of ways how Christian monastic culture nourished Arab Muslim culture. This crosspollination is one notion which many, both Christian and Muslim, might deny should they ever get to hear of it. In a most entertaining piece of detective work Garth Fowden decodes a distinctive Greek presence in the bathhouse of al-Walid's hunting lodge. He identifies a painting in a key transitional point in the building as a version of an image relatively widely available in the eastern Mediterranean world, that of Dionysius discovering Ariadne asleep on the beach at Naxos. He links this to al-Walid's poetry mourning the loss of his beloved Salma. Ariadne asleep “is a symbolic expression of longing for reawakening from death through the intervention of a god”. Great hunch, great crosspollination! Then, there is Deborah Howard's fascinating demonstration of how the citizens of Venice appropriated the Egyptian city of Alexandria – cradle of Christianity, the place where the Bible was translated into Greek and the site of the martyrdom of St Mark – reproducing the city's famed Pharos as the campanile of San Pietro di Castello and depicting Alexandria, Egypt and the story of St Mark in the mosaics which decorated the Duomo of San Marco. Montgomery's piece, which rounds off the collection, is a magisterial survey of the approaches to cultural contact in the Islamic context which have already been taken and also approaches which might yet be taken. When he starts by exemplifying what he means by crosspollination with instances from Leonard Bernstein's musical Wonderful Town and a declaration of love which al-Jahiz puts into the mouth of a ninth-century doctor, one knows one is in for a good time. The approaches of Montgomery Watt The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe (1972), D. Agius and R. Hitchcock eds., The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe (1994), Patricia Crone Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987) and Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (1998) to cultural contact are subjected to a searching examination, from which only Ostrowski emerges with credit. He then dissects one by one the methods and paradigms which have been applied within Islamic studies to explain what might be taking place when Muslims and Muslim societies engage with predominantly non-Muslim peoples and practices. He discusses influence on and in, appropriation and diffusion. Consideration is given to other paradigms such as transculturation, transplanting, hybridity, polygenesis, intersection and grafting. But crosspollination is the answer because “I relish its metaphorical appeal, its promise of insight but not at the expense of a specific commitment to consequence . . . I also hope that it will include ‘more than the maker . . . at the time knew’, though some may judge that ‘crosspollinations’ is more parsimonious than my aspirations for it”. From time to time he lets his passion for the Arab Muslim world show through, and not least when he is discussing the brilliant Arab response to Greek learning. ‘Crosspollinations’, he reminds us, “is not a theory but an approach, one which provides a vision of Islam considerably at variance to some versions of Islam currently prevalent. It is a vision of a crosspollinatory and crosspollinated Islam, standing between Antiquity and Medieval Europe, an open, dynamic and vibrant system which thrived on, and pulsated with diversity”. All scholars addressing issues of cultural interaction will benefit from consulting this essay. The book as a whole, moreover, for this and other essays should go on to the undergraduate bibliographies of those reading medieval Islamic and European history.