Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Rites of Passage: European and Extra-European Perspectives on the Early Modern Period

/ Einträge

Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Rites of Passage: European and Extra-European Perspectives on the Early Modern Period

Veranstalter
Dr. Cecilia Cristellon, History Department, Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders", Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Veranstaltungsort
Goethe University, Campus Westend, Casino 823
Ort
Frankfurt am Main
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
03.07.2014 - 04.07.2014
Website
Von
Cristellon, Cecilia

The goal of the conference is to analyze religious/confessional contacts and conflicts through the prism of rites of passage from the perspective of current research on the Early Modern period. The permeability of confessional/religious boundaries where rites of passage are concerned will receive special attention. The focus is on birth and initiation rituals such as baptism or circumcision as well as rituals connected with mixed marriages and death. In the last case, for example, one could ask whether members of different faith could be buried in the same cemetery or if there was any interchangeability of clergy officiating at the moment of dying.

An important aspect of examining rites of passage will be to decode the ways in which these rituals were shaped and established as well as strategies for coping with differences in the religious, political and social dimensions of such rites. These rites of passage should be understood as a central marker for drawing confessional and religious boundaries, that is, as key indicators of boundary crossing. In them, manifestations of church, state and local power can be read. They can also be understood as a medium that numerous actors used to express their own interests, identities and differences in strategies and resources and one that could spark mobility and set migrations in motion. Moreover, rites of passage helped to influence the content and dynamics of confessional and religious boundary relationships through the processes of inclusion and exclusion, integration and isolation, and the perceptions of self and other that were bound up with integral aspects of these rituals.

In Europe the processes of confessionalization and nation state formation made rites of passage into a political issue. Different types of authorities — ecclesiastical, state, local — both competed among themselves for, and simply sought to establish, control over interconfessional and interreligious contact/conflict — alternately clashing, negotiating, and compromising. In this light, Early Modern Europe appears as a laboratory for religious co-existence. Rites of passage helped to lay the foundations for religious coexistence and tolerance and to negotiate interconfessional and interreligious boundaries both internal (between Catholic, Protestant and Reformed, and Jewish communities and regions) and external (with the Muslim world, the East, and the New World).

Programm

3 July

9.30-9.45 Introduction
Cecilia Cristellon, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

European Perspectives

9.45-10.45 Chair:
Heide Wunder, University of Kassel

Keynote lecture

Silvana Seidel Menchi, University of Pisa

Searching for a Bride of the Same Faith: The Experiences of Philo-
Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century Italy

10.45-11.15 Tea & coffee

11.15-12.45 Chair:
Magnus Ressel, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Cristina Setti, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Religious Contacts and Conflicts between the Catholics and the
Greek Orthodox in the Venetian Territories in the Seventeenth
Century

Iwo Hryniewicz, Dawid Machaj, University of Warsaw

Violent Disruptions of the Rites of Passage in Early Modern
Cracow

12.45-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Chair:
Kerstin Weiand, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Danielle McCormack, European University Institute, Florence

Religious Conflicts as a Means of Understanding Personal Drama
in Early Modern Ireland: A Case of Marital Breakdown in 1660s
Fermanagh

Josef Kadeřábek, Charles University, Prague

Changes in the Rites of Passage in the Multi-Confessional Milieu
of a Bohemian Town in the Seventeenth Century

16-16.30 Tea & coffee

16.30-18.00 Chair:
Keith Luria, North Carolina State University

Ellinor Forster, University of Innsbruck

Forced Baptisms, Mixed Marriages and Confessional Conflicts in
the Recently Parted Territory of Silesia against the Background of
Austrian Political Strategies in the Eighteenth Century

Cecilia Cristellon, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Borach Levi, the Roman Inquisition and Jurisdiction over Jewish
Marriages in the Eighteenth Century

4 July

Extra-European Perspectives

09.30-10.30 Chair:
Silvana Seidel Menchi, University of Pisa

Keynote lecture

Keith Luria, North Carolina State University

Baptisms and Marriages in Constructing a Catholic Community in
Seventeenth-Century Annam

10.30-11.00 Tea & coffee

11.00-12.30 Chair:
Benjamin Steiner, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Cesare Santus, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa / Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes, Paris

Necessary Transgressions: the Problem of Communicatio in Sacris
in the East in a General Inquiry of the Propaganda Fide

Benedetta Albani, Max Planck Institute for European Legal
History, Frankfurt am Main

The Marriage of the Cristianos Nuevos in Mexico (Sixteenth-
Seventeenth Centuries)

12.30-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Chair:
Heide Wunder, University of Kassel

Otto Danwerth, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History,
Frankfurt am Main

Funeral Rituals in Spain and Peru as an Indicator of Religious
Contacts and Conflicts (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)

Concluding remarks and final discussion

Conference sponsored by the Max Weber Foundation

Kontakt

Cecilia Cristellon

History Department, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main

cristellon@em.uni-frankfurt.de