Religious plurality and interreligious contacts in the Middle Ages
By: Ana Echevarría Arsuaga, Dorothea Weltecke (Eds.).
Contributors: Echevarria, Ana, editor
Series: Wolfenbütteler Forschungen -- 161; Wolfenbütteler Forschungen -- 161.
Publisher: Harrassowitz Verlag (in Kommission)
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Wolfenbüttel
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9783447114660
Copyright date: 2020
Subjects: Religions; Relations; History; Religion; Christianity and other religions; Judaism; Islam; Christianity
Description: 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.  The 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ten contributions in English, one in Spanish.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Dorothea Weltecke; title: The motives behind anti-Jewish repression under the Visigothic Kingdom: political or religious? / Raúl González Salinero; title: The Christian community around the monasteries of Egypt: relations and connections in the Theban region in the seventh & eighth centuries / María Jesús Albarrán Martínez; title: On the question of neo-Platonic elements in the Zoroastrian literature of the ninth century / Götz König; title: Being Christian in the Emirate of Córdoba: the impact and concepts of holiness and sacrality / Klaus Herbers; title: The migration of Muslim minorities in Medieval Europe / Ana Echevarría Arsuaga; title: Ritual performances to install a new Coptic patriarch in twelfth-century Fatamid Cairo / Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler; title: Loca Sancta: contacto y convergencia interreligiosa en Tierra Santa en el siglo XV en el Evagatorium de Felix Fabri (1483-1484) y la Riḥla de Omar Patún (1491-1495) / Xavier Casassas; title: The Melkites between Byzantium, Muslims and Crusaders / Johannes Pahlitzsch; title: Religious movements in Mudéjar communities: identity and relational dynamics in the Crown of Aragon / Nikolas Jaspert; title: Power strategies and cohabitation between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages: Galicia / María Gloria de Antonio Rubio.