The Medieval History Journal

Research on religious conversion has grown into an extraordinarily dynamic field in the course of the past decade. While the subject was never absent from the agenda of an earlier historiography, the mid-1990s witnessed a fresh resurgence of interest across the world in the phenomenon of conversion. The explanation for this might lie in the fact that recent approaches to conversion intersect with the concerns of a culturally-oriented historiography, thereby affording fresh perspectives and modes of coming to grips with the centrality of religion as an analytical category of pre-modern history. Religious faith is indeed an important constitutive factor that shapes our understanding of pre-modern societies within and beyond Europe. Investigating the process of a change of faith can provide new entry points into the domain of religious transformation and can help map the shifting boundaries of religious communities and identities. Such identities are a site of contention in most modern multi-cultural societies, where a dominant community wields overwhelming power. Historiography in young post-colonial nations tends to either project present-day conflicts on to a pre-colonial past or else, seeks resolution of these tangled issues through suggesting an overweening cultural commonality that transcends religious difference. Historicising the study of religious conversion then becomes an important exercise that might help to find a way of accommodating conflict and rupture within the process of negotiating religious plurality.

This article discusses the growth of predominantly Muslim populations in two regions of South Asia—western Punjab and eastern Bengal. No evidence supports conventional understandings that Islamisation in these areas resulted from a desire for social liberation on the part of the lower orders of the Hindu caste system. Nor should Islamisation in these regions be characterised as instances of ‘conversion’, a term embedded in the nineteenth century Protestant missionary movement and thus, inappropriate for reconstructing religious processes in medieval Bengal and Punjab. Rather, transformations of religious identity in these two regions appear to have been gradual and unselfconscious in nature. They also appear to have been part of larger socio-political and economic changes that were occurring in the regions, in particular the diffusion of settled peasant agriculture.

This article examines the conflict between two understandings of conversion: one which saw it as a voluntaristic transformation, free from compulsion and another which claimed that coerced conversions could be valid. Rival Catholic and Protestant churches believed that true conversion resulted from an individual’s search for truth while also recognising a role for constraint in maintaining conformity. Theological traditions underpinned both views. Catholics reconciled the contradiction by equating religious orthodoxy with political fidelity to the monarchy. Minority Protestants also insisted on their loyalty, but Louis XIV’s 1680s campaign to force their conversions provoked a crisis of conscience. Two sources from western France illustrate the impact of the campaign on individual consciences. The first, a memoir by the Protestant schoolmaster Jean Migault, reveals the tortured conscience of a forced convert. The second, the personal confession of Bishop Henri de Barillon, demonstrates how a prelate reconciled conversion and coercion. Together they show that neither side thought of conscience as free. Royal policy and confessional competition ensured that consciences were constrained to conform.

This article examines different paradigms of conversions to Christianity in regions of Africa prior to the advent of colonial modernity. Religious change, in general, connected converts and various intermediaries to resources and power within specific settings. Even though African cultures were oral, conversions generated the production of texts which became important print media and were at least partly responsible for prompting conversions elsewhere in the world. The first case study explains how mission initiatives along the so-called West African slave coast almost always resulted in failure between 1450 and 1850, but how these failed efforts figure as important halfway options which reveal fundamental mechanisms of conversion. The dynamics of interaction were different in the African Kingdom of Kongo, where conversions became intimately entwined in the consolidation of political power and where, subsequent to the adoption of Christianity, new understandings of power evolved. Last but not least, in South Africa, again, another paradigm of conversion developed within the nexus of conflict and settler violence. Contested narratives of Christianity and conversion emerged as settlers tried to keep Christianity as a religious resource to be shared among whites only.

Using letters written by the Italian Jesuit missionary Niccolo Longobardo, this article explores in depth the encounter between the Christian mission and different strata of early seventeenth century Chinese society in Shangdong province. It follows Longobardo’s evangelical activities among Ming feudatory princes, Muslim mullahs, Confucian literati and leaders of secret popular religious sects. By using Jesuit records and Chinese documents of the late Ming, this article tries to analyse the attractions of Christianity for different segments of late Ming society, one that experienced a profound social, political and economic crisis. Both, the reasons for conversions and arguments against Christianity are presented in the specific social context of early seventeenth century Chinese society.

Conversion as a historical process is discussed in South Asian post-independence historiography mostly following the demands of the political present. In the present article, I first try to trace a fragmentary and in-complete history of what I will call conversion historiography in and about South Asia, referring mostly to conversion to Christianity from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Then, I discuss a particular case of religious and cultural conversion, in which the descendants of the early converts to Christianity in Goa re-appropriated conversion histories as an analytical and historiographical tool in order to reconfigure their relation with the past and the present and thus, shore up their cultural authority. In the process, they created their own communal history and historiography that fed directly into Portuguese and Catholic Orientalism. This particular historical example should help us see to what extent the act of conversion is a self-transforming work in progress, a communicational project without teleological guarantees, capable of empowering alternative historical readings.

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two conversion narratives of Johannes Ferdinand Franz Weinberger, who converted in 1687 from Catholicism to Lutheranism and returned to the Catholic church one year later. After his reconversion, Weinberger found himself confronted by those who doubted his credibility and was consequently under considerable pressure to justify the path he had taken. At the same time, he felt impelled to explain his behaviour to himself, to come to terms with his own conscience. In such a situation, it was necessary for him to adhere closely to the contents, the form and the leitmotifs of his first conversion narrative, changing at the same time his concept of self and interpreting his con-version to Lutheranism in a different mould.

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Beatrice Michiel fled an unhappy marriage in Venice for Constantinople. She converted to Islam, taking the name of Fatima, remarried, and because of her access to the imperial harem, played a significant role in Veneto-Ottoman relations in this troubled period. Beatrice/Fatima’s experience provides a suggestive window into the often ignored experience of renegade women on the Mediterranean frontier. While women’s religiosity is usually viewed as more unwavering than men’s, this case study suggests that while their motivations may have differed from those of men, women too might convert without compulsion. This story also provides a window onto ways in which women were able to subordinate societal and cultural mentalities and structures through utilising the political, religious and cultural frontiers of the Mediterranean as a means to prise themselves free from familial and economic circumstances in which they normally had limited power to act.

The last century of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula (1391–1492) was marked by continuous persecutions leading to the conversion of a large number of Jews to Christianity. Known as ‘New Christians’, they escaped from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ottoman Empire, where—under Muslim dominion—they could return to their ancestral creed, reconverting to Judaism. This article examines the three waves of migration that took place during the last decade of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth century. The legal status of the newcomers with regard to the Jewish religion was to be settled by rabbinical decisions. Contemporary Jewish rabbanim were aware of the conflicting factors that had motivated migration from Portugal and their attitudes towards the newcomers reflected suspicions about the latter’s ability to integrate within the existing Jewish congregations.

The article seeks to retrace the processes by which Jewish converts and their descendants in the late medieval Kingdom of Naples were included into and/or excluded from Christian society. It focuses on a case study of the Apulian seaport of Trani. Following a systems theoretical perspective, it conceives exclusion as a multidimensional process of (re-)production of differences in social practices that affect the position and action of an individual in different fields of society. It then attempts to explain the success and failure of the inclusion of converted Jews and their descendants into Christian society by analysing the reproduction of difference as an interplay of cultural and material factors.

The article aims at defining what Arab Muslims of the crusading period knew about the conversion of Latin Europe to Christianity through an analysis of Arabic-Islamic sources written up to the fourteenth century. Whereas Christianity seems to have interested the first generations of Muslims mainly as a theological phenomenon, the emergence of more comprehensive forms of Muslim historiography led to the creation of Arabic texts dealing with the formation of Christianity. The latter’s primary focus lay on the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. However, the premises that set the stage for the emergence of Latin–Christian Europe (Roman hegemony in the West, ‘period of migrations’, Romano-Germanic successor states) do not seem to have been fully understood until translated Latin sources were diffused in the Arabic-Islamic world. Hence, most references to the Christianisation of the post-Roman peoples of Western Europe are short and out of chronological context. Continuity is only fully acknowledged in the case of the papacy.