The role of religious and ethnic identities in the making and breaking of trust in the late medieval Mediterranean.

宗教和种族身份在中世纪晚期地中海信任的建立和破坏中的作用。

• 批准号: 2436780
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2436780
• 关键词: role; religious; ethnic; identities; making

The interactions of people of different ethnic and religious identities were central to the functioning of the medieval world. Yet there has been little exploration of how trust, or distrust, was negotiated among and between cultural groups. This project will address the following questions: How did religious and ethnic identities impact commercial relationships, including those with an "other"? How were trusting relationships negotiated within and between groups? How did questions of trust and distrust impact the life and work of medieval merchants?The late medieval Mediterranean world is an exciting arena for exploring such questions. I will use comparative analysis to examine how trust is formed across and within groups, and the role that local institutions played. Case studies will be selected from evidence concerning merchants in three major trading cities: Barcelona, Venice, and Alexandria. In each, I will examine the ways in which trust was created and negotiated between or within ethnic and religious groups to consider how trusting commercial relationships were established and sustained, and how identity was affected in the process. Group labels will be constructed carefully, based on the evidence, to explore how ethnicity and religion can combine to create inter-religious difference. I will examine commercial, legal, and diplomatic documents as study of commercial disputes and notarial records can reveal how trust functioned in personal relationships and how institutional contexts affected, sustained, or hindered trust.Investigations into cross-cultural trade have a rich historical past and long-distance relationships have been central to Global History. However, recent work on trust adopts a productive new angle. "New Legal History" approaches explore a culturally-inflected economic history, considering the effects of institutional and legal contexts but also the extent to which culture can be seen as a predeterminant of trust, dismissing essentialising views of intra-community relationships. Forrest (2018) and Forrest and Haour (2018) show trust to be multifaceted, subject to constant negotiation through physical and linguistic performances. Trust is seen as cultural as well as economic, a human decision and emotion. Created in specific moments rather than arising naturally from culture, trust requires learning and negotiation, rather than possession of an essential similarity. I will combine these approaches to trust with a performative understanding of identity, constantly negotiated and constructed rather than a given category.This study will change our understanding of medieval inter-cultural contact by centring individual/small-scale inter-group relationships, instead of understanding cultural contact as group-to-group contact. Exploring how emotional and performance-based trust was shaped by identities allows us to consider medieval communities in a more complex and actor-centric way and address historical discussions of the conceived transition from medieval to modern forms of economy and trust. I will locate this work within important research regarding the development of world systems at the end of the medieval period, questioning the extent to which the late medieval functionality of trust differed from what are conceived to be later forms of state, institutional, and actor-based trust.Co-existence in increasingly multi-cultural contexts brings questions of how modern-day communities react to and form trusting relationships with "the stranger" and the state across and within state/national boundaries. Despite popular perceptions of the medieval as backwards and cruel, notions related to the lamentable yet tenacious characterisation of the "dark ages" coined by renaissance philosophers, this was a time of complexity and development from which much can be learned.

不同种族和宗教身份的人之间的互动是中世纪世界运作的核心。然而，很少有人探讨信任或不信任是如何在文化群体之间进行谈判的。本项目将解决以下问题：宗教和族裔身份如何影响商业关系，包括与“他人”的商业关系？群体内部和群体之间的信任关系是如何协商的？信任和不信任的问题如何影响中世纪商人的生活和工作？中世纪晚期的地中海世界是探索这些问题的一个令人兴奋的竞技场。我将使用比较分析来研究信任是如何在群体之间和群体内部形成的，以及当地机构所扮演的角色。案例研究将从三个主要贸易城市的商人的证据中选出：巴塞罗那，威尼斯和亚历山大。在每一个，我将研究如何建立信任，并在种族和宗教团体之间或内部进行谈判，考虑如何建立和维持信任的商业关系，以及如何在这个过程中的身份受到影响。将根据证据仔细构建群体标签，以探索种族和宗教如何联合收割机创造宗教间的差异。我将研究商业，法律的，和外交文件的商业纠纷和公证记录的研究可以揭示如何在个人关系中的信任功能，以及如何影响，维持，或阻碍制度环境trust.Investigations跨文化贸易有一个丰富的历史过去和长途关系一直是全球历史的核心。然而，最近关于信任的工作采用了一个富有成效的新角度。“新法律的历史”方法探索了一个文化影响的经济史，考虑到制度和法律的背景的影响，但在何种程度上文化可以被视为信任的先决条件，解雇本质化的社区内关系的观点。Forrest（2018）和Forrest and Haour（2018）表明信任是多方面的，通过身体和语言表现进行不断的谈判。信任被视为一种文化和经济，一种人类的决定和情感。信任是在特定的时刻产生的，而不是从文化中自然产生的，需要学习和谈判，而不是拥有基本的相似性。我将结合联合收割机这些方法来信任的身份，不断谈判和建设，而不是一个给定的category.This研究将改变我们的理解中世纪跨文化接触的中心个人/小规模的群体间的关系，而不是理解为群体对群体的接触文化接触。探索情感和基于表现的信任是如何由身份塑造的，使我们能够以更复杂和以行为者为中心的方式考虑中世纪社区，并解决从中世纪到现代经济和信任形式的设想过渡的历史讨论。我将把这项工作放在关于中世纪末期世界体系发展的重要研究中，质疑中世纪晚期信任的功能在多大程度上不同于后来被认为是国家、制度、在日益多元的文化背景下共存带来了现代社区如何反应和形成信任关系的问题。陌生人”和国家跨越和国家/国家边界。尽管人们普遍认为中世纪是落后和残酷的，文艺复兴时期的哲学家们创造了一个可悲而又顽强的“黑暗时代”，但这是一个复杂和发展的时代，从中可以学到很多东西。