Religious Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern Societies Introduction

Research on religious conversion has grown into an extraordinarily dynamic field in the course of the past decade. While the subject was never absent from the agenda of an earlier historiography, the mid-1990s witnessed a fresh resurgence of interest across the world in the phenomenon of conversion. The explanation for this might lie in the fact that recent approaches to conversion intersect with the concerns of a culturally-oriented historiography thereby affording fresh perspectives and modes of coming to grips with the centrality of religion as an analytical category of pre-modern history. Religious faith is indeed an important constitutive factor that shapes our understanding of pre-modern societies within and beyond Europe. Investigating the process of a change of faith can provide new entry points into the domain of religious transformation and can help map the shifting boundaries of religious communities and identities. Such identities are a site of contention in most modern multi-cultural societies, where a dominant community wields overwhelming power. Historiography in young post-colonial nations tends to either project present-day conflicts on to a pre-colonial past or else, seeks resolution of these tangled issues through suggesting an overweening cultural commonality that transcends religious difference. Historicising the study of religious conversion then becomes an important exercise that might help to find a way of accomodating conflict and rupture within the process of negotiating religious plurality.