IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1231: Narratives of Conversion and Crises of Faith in the 11th-Century Eastern Mediterranean
Wednesday 3 July 2024, 14:15-15:45
| Organisers: | Cosimo Paravano, Institut für Byzantinistik & Neogräzistik, Universität Wien Lewis Read, Institut für Geschichte, Universität Wien |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien |
| Paper 1231-a | Conversion, Kafiyah, and Rhetorical Competition in 11th-Century Constantinople: The Metrical Abridgement of the Bible by Grigor Magistros (Language: English) Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Language and Literature - Other and Rhetoric |
| Paper 1231-b | From Christianity to Islam and Back Again: The Conversions of Ignatius Bar Qiqi, Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of the East, in Early-11th Century Baghdad (Language: English) Index terms: Islamic and Arabic Studies, Language and Literature - Other and Rhetoric |
| Paper 1231-c | The Surrender of Muslim Sicily: Chammud's Conversion in Malaterra's De Rebus Gestis Rogerii (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Language and Literature - Latin and Rhetoric |
| Abstract | The act of conversion has often been explained in terms of a crisis of faith. When an individual or group turned away from their religious community, historical sources often pointed to a decisive change in belief or a momentous event which permanently shifted the foundations of identity and faith. However, the motivations behind this act could be far more pragmatic, blurred, and plural, where individuals occupied a liminal space between conversion and reversion. Beneath the ideological frameworks of sources which project conversion as crisis, there is a spectrum of political, socio-cultural, familial, legal, and economic factors which forced or motivated individuals to turn away from or back towards their faith. Every social context and every source offers a different framework of response in which the drivers of conversion and reversion might be articulated. This panel will discuss the different ways in which three eleventh-century eastern Mediterranean sources written in Armenian, Syriac, and Latin contemplate acts of conversion in Norman Sicily, Constantinople, and Baghdad. These papers will explore the various scripts and ideological tools that were deployed by medieval authors to justify or challenge conversion, examine the mechanisms that facilitated or impeded this act, and demonstrate the contemporary social-cultural, intellectual, and political environments which these sources reflect. |