Project Details
Projekt
The Sea of the New Christians: Mobility and Ambiguity of converted Jews and their Descendant in the late medieval and early modern Adriatic
Applicant
Professor Dr. Benjamin Scheller
Subject Area
Medieval History
Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Term
since 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322729370
The project continues the research project on the migration of New Christians from Puglia to the Adriatic metropolises of Venice and Ragusa in the 15th and 16th centuries, which was started in the first funding period of the research group (FOR) and strives to highlight the interrelations between geographical mobility of the New Christians from Puglia in the Adriatic and their perception as persons and/or group with an ambiguous religious identity and affiliation. The New Christians of Puglia were descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity in a mass conversion at the end of the 13th century. While the migration of the New Christians of Puglia to Venice was investigated in the first funding phase, their migration to Ragusa in Dalmatia will be researched and analyzed in the second funding phase. Aim of the project is to compile a prosopography of the New Christians of Puglia that are documented in Venice and Ragusa making it thus possible to detect the quantitative dimension of their presence there and whether there was a continuous presence of New Christians from Puglia in Venice and Ragusa during the 15th and 16th century.Yet, overall objective of the project is to analyze the degree to which the New Christians of Puglia were perceived as Persons and/or group with an ambiguous religious identity and affiliation at the main destinations of their migrations in the Adriatic. The prosopography therefore records the designations that labeled them as religiously ambiguous and renders it possible to trace the socio-political position, the networks of the New Christians of Puglia and the intineraries of their mobility thus laying the basis for a subsequent analysis and comparison of discourses about religious ambiguity and their impact on the self-observation of the urban societies of Puglia, Venice and Ragusa in the 15th and 16th century. At the same in the second funding phase the project sets a new thematic focus by scrutinizing the interrelations between the spread of a new concept of the alleged religious ambiguity of the New Christians of Puglia, which tied it to their descent from Jews, and processes of transregional mobility. The project thus investigates the spreading of semantics of ambiguity and discourses about ambiguity beyond geographical and political boundaries and interrelations between the emergence and formation of these semantics and discourses in the urban centers of the Adriatic that were connected by the mobility of the New Christians from Puglia. It elaborates on the question whether mobility led to disruptions in the perception of the New Christians of Puglia and on the consequences of mobility for the stabilization of figures of ambiguity in discourse. Doing so it opens a comparative perspective allowing it to identify the factors that had a decisive impact on the perception of the New Christians of Puglia as a group with an ambiguous religious identity and affiliation.
DFG Programme
Research Units
