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The challenges of cultural and religious diversity that face European and American societies today are not a new phenomenon. People in the Middle Ages lived in pluralistic societies, and they found highly interesting ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity. While religious and political authorities commanded people to stick to their kind, some people explored the borderland between religious identities. In medieval Iberia, Christians and Muslims challenged the legal authorities’ prohibitions against crossing religious and cultural boundaries when they engaged in mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians or converted from one religion to the other. By examining the topics of conversion and mixed marriages in legal texts of Muslim and Christian origin, Pluralism in the Middle Ages explores the construction of boundaries as well as the reasons explaining such constructions. It demonstrates that the religious and social boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. Moreover, the book argues that Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia did not constitute clearly separated groups, since various categories of people haunted the boundaries between them: false converts employing taqiya strategy (taking on an outward Christian identity while practicing Islam in secret), those engaged in mixed marriages or interreligious sexual relations (and their children), and converts, whose conversion may be perceived as sincere or insincere, total or partial.
This volume brings together Spanish and German scholars specialised in the field of religious interaction. Most medieval societies ruled by Muslims and Christians were religiously plural not by choice and ideal but by nature. Religious affiliation and identity had to be repeatedly negotiated, defined, and chosen. The impact of legitimated religious violence towards subordinate religions or of religious wars underlies the more peaceful periods. Semi-permeable borders between the religions favoured inter-religious exchanges, while at the same time the efforts to impose segregation and discrimination aimed to restrict contact and influence. Agency by members of the subordinate religions was administratively and economically welcome and religiously and socially inevitable. 0The authors address topics such as the different strategies for power, order, exchange and identity chosen to organise religious plurality in medieval societies. Rights and regulations by both dominant and subordinate religions for demarcation, and in the opposite direction, pragmatism and forum shopping, were important strategies. A comparative approach stemming from the controversy on the concept of convivencia or coexistence in and beyond the Iberian Peninsula, as a possible model of inter-religious cohabitation, is combined with the inspiring results on religious plurality unearthed by intense research on mixed societies in the Mediterranean, Byzantium, the Crusading States and Central Asia. New theoretical and empirical models and concepts are proposed for comparative work in this research field.
Throughout his career, Professor John Haldon has been a hinge between different academic cultures, methods, and disciplines. A true scholar of Byzantine society, he has combined meticulous work on texts and material evidence with a holistic approach to social history that has connected the study of the Byzantine world to new methodological perspectives and ever wider horizons for comparison with other political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds, from late ancient to early modern times. Based on a conference organized at the Center for Collaborative History of Princeton University in 2018, this book takes stock of Haldon's approach by focusing on the history of law and legal culture in the transformation of the Roman world.
This book is a study of the multiplicity of ways the Bible was used by different groups during the Middle Ages. They explore different aspects of Christian Biblical Study in the face of the challenges of religious pluralism in the medieval and early-modern periods.
My dissertation consists of three essays on the medieval debate between pluralists (those who believe that a substance can have more than one substantial form) and unitarians (those who think that a substance can have only one substantial form). In the first essay, I argue---contrary to a common assumption in the secondary literature---that at least some medieval philosophers recognize two fundamentally different kinds of pluralism. I use the writings of Aquinas as my main example, arguing that he distinguishes two kinds of pluralism and takes the time to argue against both. In the second essay, I challenge the assumption, common both to Aquinas and to many more recent commentators, that Aristotle holds a unitarian view of living things. I show that Aristotle's view of living things might be categorized as pluralism, albeit a kind of pluralism that differs from that of medieval pluralists such as Scotus and Ockham. In the third essay, I argue that Ockham's arguments for pluralism presuppose a version of mind-body dualism that differs from both substance and property dualism. I show that this Ockhamist dualism avoids a common objection to mind-body dualism, namely that dualism implies a morally and/or metaphysically problematic division between certain beings and the rest of nature.