Religious conversion
Subtitle: history, experience and meaning
By: edited by Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin
Contributors: Limor, Ora
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Burlington
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9781472421494; 9781472421500; 9781472421517
Subjects: Religion and culture; Conversion; Konversion; 11.09 systematic religious studies: other
Work titles: Religious conversion (Ashgate (Firm))
Description: Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Conversion of space / Ora Limor; title: Demography, geography and the accelerated Islamisation of the Eastern Mediterranean / Ronnie Ellenblum; title: The Christianisation of time in fifteenth-century Ethiopia / Steven Kaplan; title: Church space and religious change in Reformation Germany / Bridget Heal; title: Changing minds; title: changing bodies : the gender and subject of conversion / Joshua Levinson; title: Conversion and masculinity in the early Medieval West / Yitzhak Hen; title: Looking for change : Jewish women and conversion in eighteenth-century Germany / Rotraud Ries; title: Constructing and undermining Converso Jewishness : Profiat Duran and Pablo de Santa María / Yosi Yisraeli; title: Jewish self-definition against Christianisation / Simha Goldin; title: 'Double conversions' in the early modern period : the road to religious scepticism? / Michael Heyd.