New book explores religious shifts in early modern Mediterranean

Historian Claire Norton edited a new book, “Religious Transformation in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Allure of the Other,” recently published by Dar Qurtas in Erbil, Iraq, and translated into Arabic by Islam Saad and Ahmed Abd El-Monem.

The 315-page book examines religious conversion as a way to understand relationships that developed in the Mediterranean region during the early modern period.

Norton and the book’s contributors challenge the idea that people changed religions solely due to individual spiritual beliefs, instead showing how social, political, geographical, and economic factors also played a role, alongside issues of belonging and identity. The book argues that religious conversion was often linked to specific historical circumstances and contributed to reshaping identities and creating new connections between groups and cultures.

Researchers in the book view converts as intermediaries between cultures and empires, people who moved within a Mediterranean space where political, religious, familial, commercial, and diplomatic boundaries blurred. The book is divided into three main sections. The first section explores the relationship between religious conversion, movement across borders, political advancement, and patronage networks. The second section studies how identities formed, showing conversion as intertwined with social integration, political threats, the search for security, and establishing belonging.

The final section focuses on complex identities and the ability to combine multiple religious and cultural elements, examining individuals who navigated both Christian and Islamic beliefs and cultures. The book draws on primary sources in several languages, including Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Latin, German, Hungarian, and English, such as letters, diplomatic correspondence, personal memoirs, official documents, legal texts, court records, and religious literature.