Today, my article, “The Converting Sea: Religious Change and Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” appeared in the journal History Compass. Religious conversion in the Mediterranean is a big deal for people who study the Middle Sea, myself included.
In fact, my forthcoming book is about a Jewish convert to Catholicism who becomes a priest and tries to convert others to become Catholics. Likewise, there are all sorts of figures in the early modern period in particular who converted for one reason or another, often not because of religion. Scholars like to call these folks renegades, which both aptly captures who these people were in some cases—social outcasts and cultural rebels—but is also just a really cool word.
But in “The Converting Sea,” I wanted to think about conversion in a different way. Instead of just tracing how and why people changed religions, I explored how changes occur when religions and cultures interacted. It’s a relatively short essay, but I cover a lot of ground. Here are just some of the many types of conversion I unpack:
- Religious conversion as a tool for empire-building
- Conversion not just as changing faiths but as faiths changing and new identities emerging
- Conversion as an identity crisis
- Depictions of converts and religious change in literary culture
- Interfaith and cross-cultural intellectual exchange
- Conversion in visual culture, architecture, and city planning
Such a broad way of thinking of conversion allows me to think more critically about the Mediterranean itself and how the Sea is in a sort of dialogue, a symbiosis even, with its inhabitants. As I say in the conclusion of the essay, I see the Mediterranean as “a crucible of religious change and cross‐cultural interaction, which allowed individuals and societies to change themselves by wrestling with difference and negotiating its meaning.”
This was a fun essay to write. I got to read about a whole slew of “conversions,” ranging from architectural changes in Venice due to Venetian mercantile contacts throughout the Eastern Mediterranean to evolving depictions of Muslims and Jews in Italian romance literature and English theater.
This whole interdisciplinary approach to conversion has even inspired me to write another essay on conversion, this time on how translation—literally converting texts from one language and genre to another—functions as a critique of cultural difference and challenge to the dominance of foreigners.
Tackling the Mediterranean this way and broadening the definitions of seemingly straightforward words like “conversion” are good ways to not just study the Sea between Lands, but to think more broadly about the ways humans create and imagine the world around them. By thinking of the Mediterranean as a Converting Sea—one that is shaped by the people it shapes—the world—the one we make and the one that makes us—comes fuller into view.
Robert Clines, Ph.D. 