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

不同族裔和宗教特性的人之间的互动是中世纪世界运转的中心。然而，关于信任或不信任是如何在文化群体之间或之间谈判的，几乎没有人探索过。该项目将解决以下问题：宗教和种族认同如何影响商业关系，包括与“他人”的关系？团队内部和团队之间的信任关系是如何协商的？信任和不信任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令人兴奋的舞台。我将使用比较分析来考察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挑选出来：巴塞罗那、威尼斯和亚历山大。在每一本书中，我将研究在种族和宗教团体之间或内部建立和谈判信任的方式，以考虑信任商业关系是如何建立和维持的，以及身份认同在这个过程中是如何受到影响的。将根据证据仔细构建群体标签，以探索种族和宗教如何结合起来创造宗教间差异。我将研究商业、法律和外交文件，因为对商业纠纷和公证记录的研究可以揭示信任如何在个人关系中发挥作用，以及制度环境是如何影响、维持或阻碍信任的。对跨文化贸易的调查具有丰富的历史渊源，远距离关系一直是全球历史的核心。然而，最近关于信任的研究采用了一个富有成效的新角度。“新法律史”方法探索了一部受文化影响的经济史，考虑了制度和法律背景的影响，但也考虑了文化可以在多大程度上被视为信任的先决条件，摒弃了对社区内关系的本质看法。《阿甘正传》(2018)和《阿甘正传》(2018)显示出信任是多方面的，需要通过身体和语言的表演进行不断的谈判。信任既被视为经济上的信任，也被视为文化上的信任，是一种人类的决定和情感。信任是在特定时刻创造的，而不是从文化中自然产生的，它需要学习和谈判，而不是拥有本质上的相似之处。我将把这些信任的方法与对身份的行为理解结合起来，不断地协商和构建，而不是给定的类别。这项研究将改变我们对中世纪跨文化接触的理解，通过以个人/小规模的群体间关系为中心，而不是将文化接触理解为群体对群体的接触。探索情感和基于绩效的信任是如何由身份塑造的，使我们能够以更复杂和以行动者为中心的方式来考虑中世纪社区，并解决从中世纪向现代形式的经济和信任过渡的历史讨论。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范围内，质疑中世纪晚期的信任功能与后来被认为是基于国家、制度和行为者的信任形式的不同程度。在日益多元的文化背景下共存带来了现代社区如何反应并与跨越国家/国家边界的国家形成信任关系的问题。尽管人们普遍认为中世纪是落后和残酷的，这些观念与文艺复兴时期哲学家们创造的令人遗憾但顽固的“黑暗时代”特征有关，但这是一个复杂和发展的时代，可以从中学到很多东西。

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.