Next Events of the CRCS

Prof. Dr. Brian Catlos (University of Colorado Boulder)

Convenience, Conflict and Collaboration in the Age of Convergence: Modelling Mediterranean Diversity

Lecture on Thursday, October 19th, 2023, 18.00-20:00 Uhr

Debates regarding the nature of Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages remain largely mired in arguments revolving around the supposed tolerance or intolerance of Islamic and Christian societies in the Middle Ages, based on positions that reflect the predilections and biases of modern scholars as much or more than social, cultural and political realities of the time. Brian Catlos steps back from scholarly assumptions to take a phenomenological approach to intercommunal identity and relations, in a pre-Modern West that stretched from the Indus to the Atlantic and from the Sahel to the Baltic during the “Age of Convergence” (ca 650–1650CE). Catlos shows how the both the formal and informal manifestation of ethno-religious identity and intercommunal relations emerged out of social, economic and political structures that emerged in the broader Mediterranean world at this time – relations that rooted first and foremost in “convenience” rather than ideology or doctrine.