Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam : Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond

Leiden: Brill, 2020. First edition. Hardcover. near fine. Octavo. xiv, 418pp. Index. Pictorial buckram, lavender spine lettered in white & black. A near fine, but ex-library copy with a minimal rubber library stamp on title page and at bottom edge of text block.

Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula but examining related European and Mediterranean contexts as well, Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam traces how Christians, Jews, and Muslims grappled with the contradictory phenomenon of faith brought about by constraint and compulsion. Forced conversion brought into sharp relief the tensions among the accepted notion of faith as a voluntary act, the desire to maintain "pure" communities, and the universal truth claims of radical monotheism. Offering a comparative view of an important yet insufficiently studied phenomenon in the history of religions, this collection of essays explores the ways in which religion and violence reshaped these three religions and the ways we understand them today. (Publisher)

Contents: Introduction: Forced conversion and the reshaping of Judaism, Christianity and Islam : tradition, interpretation, history / Mercedes García-Arenal, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan -- Uses and echoes of Visigothic conciliar legislation in the scholastic controversy on forced baptism (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) / Elsa Marmursztejn -- "Qui ex iudeis sunt": Visigothic law and the discrimination against conversos in late medieval Spain / Rosa Vidal Doval -- Theorizing coercion and consent in conversion, apostasy, ordination, and marriage (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) / Isabelle Poutrin -- Again on forced conversion in the Almohad period / Maribel Fierro -- The intellectual genealogy of Almohad policy towards Christians and Jews / David J. Wasserstein -- Medieval Jewish perspectives on Almohad persecutions: memory, repression and impact / Alan Verskin -- On the road to 1391? Abner of Burgos / Alfonso of Valladolid on forced conversion / Ryan Szpiech -- The development of a new language of conversion in fifteenth-century Sephardic Jewry / Ram Ben-Shalom -- Incriminating the Judaizer: inquisitors, intentionality, and the problem of religious ambiguity after forced conversion / Yonatan Glazer-Eytan -- The coerced conversion of convicted Jewish criminals in fifteenth-century Italy / Tamar Herzig -- "Neither through habits, nor solely through will, but through infused faith": Hernando de Talavera's understanding of conversion / Davide Scotto -- Remembering the forced baptism of Jews: law, theology, and history in sixteenth-century Portugal / Giuseppe Marcocci -- Theologies of baptism and forced conversion: the case of the Muslims of Valencia and their children / Mercedes García-Arenal -- Epilogue: Conversion and the force of history / David Nirenberg. (OCLC)

Volume 164 of Brill's "Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions."