Turning and returning

Abstract

Because Iberia in the Middle Ages was the only land in Europe or the western Mediterranean shared by sizeable populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it is also a uniquely fruitful location to consider the history of religious change, constituting what one historian has called “a laboratory of conversion”. This chapter provides a broad overview of conversion in social and political terms, offering a bird’s-eye view of some key changes that shaped religious encounters in medieval Iberian history. It then raises the question of methodology, suggesting that although “conversion” serves as a useful historiographical shorthand for larger and more complex social processes, it is most meaningfully studied from a critical perspective as a metaphor of cultural expression. It compares the representation of conversion in Iberian literary texts such as Milagros de Nuestra Señora of Gonzalo de Berceo and Cantigas de Santa María of King Alfonso X with theological treatises such as the Sefer Ha-Kuzari of Judah Halevi and the Dialogus contra Iudaeos of Petrus Alfonsi, and first-person conversion narratives such as those Anselm Turmeda, Abner de Burgos, and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī. These examples show that conversion in Iberian societies was as much a topos of discourse as it was a phenomenon of Iberian social and religious history, and merits critical treatment as an aspect of poetics and a metaphor of culture more than as a historical fact or event.