Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction. Early Modern Iberia and Beyond (CORPI)

In an early sixteenth-century treatise, Martín de Figuerola, who had been preaching to the Muslims of Aragón, reports a story he claims to have heard from the Muslim judge of Cocentaina (València). The latter had told him that, in marriage contracts between local Muslims, it was customary for women to demand that their husbands take them to the capital city of València for the springtime festivities of Corpus Christi and those of the Virgin Mary in August. Simply put, the purpose of this project is to unravel the complex interplay of all the ingredients that this apparently trivial yet fascinating anecdote encapsulates. It will bring under close analysis the existence in sixteenth-century Iberia of cross-currents common to different religious groups, areas of local religiosity in which different religions overlapped, and vague or hybrid sorts of religiosity which indicate the blurring of clear ascriptions, categories, and borders. At the same time, it will also scrutinize the efforts made by different social actors (and generations of scholars after them) to establish clear, essential differentiations, to define neat categories and ascriptions, and thus to separate, reject, and stigmatize individuals and groups. Many of those nevertheless were involved in high levels of local accommodation, adaptation and negotiation. The project will study adversarial relationships, reconceived as dependencies, against a complex backdrop of dramatic religious change: shortly before Martín de Figuerola wrote his text, Iberia’s Jews had been expelled, and a few years later, its Muslims would be forced to convert to Christianity, only to be expelled in their turn a century later. The multi-faceted analysis of these phenomena will involve unearthing new archival material, most notably Inquisition trials, as well as numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts (both manuscripts and early modern editions) ranging from new translations of the Qur’ān and other Jewish and Islamic classics, to a rich polemical literature (disputes, controversies, apologies, polemical hagiographies), as well as theological treatises on new converts, both in Latin and Spanish. It will unearth unknown archival materials, and will bring into the discussion alternative and previously disregarded sources crucial for the understanding of modern intellectual history. The project will show that part of those texts were complex products with a capacity for shaping long-term intellectual change. The project, in a nutshell, is concerned mainly with the intellectual consequences of mass conversion.Peer reviewe