Interreligious Communication in and between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic Sphere: Macro-theories and Micro-settings

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The project analyses processes of interreligious communication in and between the medieval Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere. In the past thirty years, research has refined our understanding of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the wider Mediterranean by analysing political, economic, social, and cultural fields of interaction, by highlighting phenomena of mutual perception, transgression, and hybridity, and—last but not least—by proposing systemic models of interreligious interaction ranging from “dhimmitude” to “convivencia” and “conveniencia”. Adding to this, scholars have formulated a large number of unconnected hypotheses to describe various settings and patterns of Jewish-Christian-Muslim communication. In view of the huge variety of interreligious communicative processes documented in the extant primary sources, these models and hypotheses have yet to be critically evaluated in terms of their complementary character, inherent contradictions, and plausibility. Our project engages with the varieties of interreligious communication from a macro-historical and from several micro-historical perspectives. On the macro-historical level, it collects, juxtaposes, and systematizes scholarly hypotheses on interreligious communication. On the micro-historical level, three corpora of primary sources serve to examine the validity of this theoretical framework: a) one subproject on Christian-Muslim conversations focuses on the historiographical documentation of communicative settings, in which Christians and Muslims feature as interlocutors; b) another subproject on letters deals with the written facet of Christian-Muslim interaction; c) the third subproject engages with legal sources concerning Jews who negotiated their concerns and grievances in legal venues subjected to Muslim or Christian dominance. Although these three corpora do not cover all facets of interreligious communication in and between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere, they can serve to critically examine existing models and hypotheses dealing with medieval Jewish-Christian-Muslim communication.Engaged in permanent discussions facilitated by monthly ZOOM-meetings and annual in-person meetings.