Pluralism in the Middle Ages
Title | Pluralism in the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2012-03-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1136622101 |
The challenges of cultural and religious diversity that face European and American societies today are not a new phenomenon. People in the Middle Ages lived in pluralistic societies, and they found highly interesting ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity. While religious and political authorities commanded people to stick to their kind, some people explored the borderland between religious identities. In medieval Iberia, Christians and Muslims challenged the legal authorities’ prohibitions against crossing religious and cultural boundaries when they engaged in mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians or converted from one religion to the other. By examining the topics of conversion and mixed marriages in legal texts of Muslim and Christian origin, Pluralism in the Middle Ages explores the construction of boundaries as well as the reasons explaining such constructions. It demonstrates that the religious and social boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. Moreover, the book argues that Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia did not constitute clearly separated groups, since various categories of people haunted the boundaries between them: false converts employing taqiya strategy (taking on an outward Christian identity while practicing Islam in secret), those engaged in mixed marriages or interreligious sexual relations (and their children), and converts, whose conversion may be perceived as sincere or insincere, total or partial.
Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Title | Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance PDF eBook |
Author | University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Medieval and Renaissance Curriculum and Outreach Project. Symposium |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Bible |
ISBN | 9789047415480 |
Legal Pluralism and Social Change in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Title | Legal Pluralism and Social Change in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Wolfram Brandes |
Publisher | |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 2021-12 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9783465045502 |
Throughout his career, Professor John Haldon has been a hinge between different academic cultures, methods, and disciplines. A true scholar of Byzantine society, he has combined meticulous work on texts and material evidence with a holistic approach to social history that has connected the study of the Byzantine world to new methodological perspectives and ever wider horizons for comparison with other political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds, from late ancient to early modern times. Based on a conference organized at the Center for Collaborative History of Princeton University in 2018, this book takes stock of Haldon's approach by focusing on the history of law and legal culture in the transformation of the Roman world.
Scripture And Pluralism
Title | Scripture And Pluralism PDF eBook |
Author | University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Symposium |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 255 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9004144153 |
This book is a study of the multiplicity of ways the Bible was used by different groups during the Middle Ages. They explore different aspects of Christian Biblical Study in the face of the challenges of religious pluralism in the medieval and early-modern periods.
Scripture and Pluralism
Title | Scripture and Pluralism PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas J. Heffernan |
Publisher | |
Pages | 246 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Religious Plurality and Interreligious Contacts in the Middle Ages
Title | Religious Plurality and Interreligious Contacts in the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Dorothea Weltecke |
Publisher | |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 2020 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9783447114660 |
This volume brings together Spanish and German scholars specialised in the field of religious interaction. Most medieval societies ruled by Muslims and Christians were religiously plural not by choice and ideal but by nature. Religious affiliation and identity had to be repeatedly negotiated, defined, and chosen. The impact of legitimated religious violence towards subordinate religions or of religious wars underlies the more peaceful periods. Semi-permeable borders between the religions favoured inter-religious exchanges, while at the same time the efforts to impose segregation and discrimination aimed to restrict contact and influence. Agency by members of the subordinate religions was administratively and economically welcome and religiously and socially inevitable. 0The authors address topics such as the different strategies for power, order, exchange and identity chosen to organise religious plurality in medieval societies. Rights and regulations by both dominant and subordinate religions for demarcation, and in the opposite direction, pragmatism and forum shopping, were important strategies. A comparative approach stemming from the controversy on the concept of convivencia or coexistence in and beyond the Iberian Peninsula, as a possible model of inter-religious cohabitation, is combined with the inspiring results on religious plurality unearthed by intense research on mixed societies in the Mediterranean, Byzantium, the Crusading States and Central Asia. New theoretical and empirical models and concepts are proposed for comparative work in this research field.
Living Together, Living Apart
Title | Living Together, Living Apart PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Elukin |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 205 |
Release | 2013-12-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691162069 |
This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews. Jonathan Elukin traces the experience of Jews in Europe from late antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation, revealing how the pluralism of medieval society allowed Jews to feel part of their local communities despite recurrent expressions of hatred against them. Elukin shows that Jews and Christians coexisted more or less peacefully for much of the Middle Ages, and that the violence directed at Jews was largely isolated and did not undermine their participation in the daily rhythms of European society. The extraordinary picture that emerges is one of Jews living comfortably among their Christian neighbors, working with Christians, and occasionally cultivating lasting friendships even as Christian culture often demonized Jews. As Elukin makes clear, the expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere were not the inevitable culmination of persecution, but arose from the religious and political expediencies of particular rulers. He demonstrates that the history of successful Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages in fact laid the social foundations that gave rise to the Jewish communities of modern Europe. Elukin compels us to rethink our assumptions about this fascinating period in history, offering us a new lens through which to appreciate the rich complexities of the Jewish experience in medieval Christendom.