Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera is the history of a Muslim colony in the southern Italian city of Lucera during the Middle Ages. Author Julie Taylor draws on a vast array of primary sources, unpublished manuscripts, and archeological data to provide a detailed account of the lives of Muslims against the backdrop of the social and political complexities of medieval Lucera. Taylor's work illuminates the legal and social status of Muslims in Christendom and the contributions made by Muslims to the economy and defense of the kingdom of Sicily, and it also yields noteworthy insights into Muslim-Christian relations. Muslims in Medieval Italy is a thoroughly researched and absorbing account.

Taylor's contribution lies mainly in her analysis of the limited number of diplomatic sources that do exist. Her work represents the first detailed monography on the colony's origins, its inhabitants, and its destruction. As such, historians interested in this anomalous colony ought to be grateful to her. * American Historical Review *
Taylor makes creative and extensive use of chronicles, archives, coins, and various archaeological sources to reconstruct a history rich in detail. . . . Julie Taylor'sMuslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera is a well-documented and original piece of work that constructs a cohesive narrative built on a large and diversified corpus of materials. . . . This work stands among those that provide a more nuanced understanding of the complexities that marked Muslim-Christian relations in southern Italy in the thirteenth century. -- William Granara, Harvard University * The Journal Of Religion *
The establishment of the Muslim colony at Lucera was an extraordinary and innovative experiment, one of the most unusual of those attempted in the central middle ages as western Europeans tried to come to terms with the indigenous populations now passing under their control. In the first full-length scholarly study of Lucera, Julie Taylor follows the Muslims from their original home in central Sicily to the settlement founded for them on the mainland and traces the history of the colony until its suppression. This first-class study is a must for those interested in Sicily and southern Italy under the Hohenstaufen and Angevin rulers and in the relations between Christianity and Islam in the central middle ages... -- Jonathan Riley-Smith, The University of Cambridge

Julie Taylor is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Dearborn.