CONVERSAS provides a systematic, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis of the religious and social practices of Muslim- and Jewish-origin communities in the premodern Crown of Aragon between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on women’s role in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. During this period, forced religious conversion affected both Jewish and Muslim populations, giving rise to comparable crypto-religious communities across Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon and enabling a cross-cultural examination of shared patterns of religious adaptation. The EU-funded CONVERSAS project explores how these minorities negotiated identity and belief within a forced mono-confessional society marked by religious surveillance and institutionalized persecution. At its core is a comparative framework that examines the strategies employed by Conversas (Christian women of Jewish origin) and Moriscas (Christian women of Muslim origin), who were suspected of secretly adhering to the religions of their ancestors. Although these women differed in religious tradition and social background, they faced similar forms of persecution as baptized Christians accused of heresy. CONVERSAS demonstrates that, despite these differences, women developed comparable religious practices and coping strategies, underscoring their central role in preserving and transmitting ancestral cultural and religious heritage under conditions of coercion. Drawing on a wide corpus of fifteenth- and early modern sources, including manuscripts and early modern texts, the project employs interdisciplinary methods to analyse women’s religious experiences and the emergence of female authority within domestic and communal settings. This approach enables a comparative assessment of how gender shaped religious identity and practice in a premodern Mediterranean context.
The objective of the “Conversas of Muslim and Jewish Origin in the Premodern Crown of Aragon: Parallels and Contrasts” (CONVERSAS) is to explain how Conversas and Moriscas in the early modern Crown of Aragon safeguarded religious practices, cultural memory, and intangible cultural heritage when public and institutional forms of Judaism and Islam were prohibited. The fellowship is carried out at the Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), under the supervision of Professor Linda Gale Jones. Through an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, CONVERSAS analyses practices of cultural preservation, coping mechanisms, and negotiation strategies, revealing the resilience of crypto-religious communities and the central role of women in sustaining religious and cultural continuity under persecution. By examining everyday practices such as ritual observance, foodways, life-cycle ceremonies, oral transmission within domestic spaces, and embodied forms of devotion, the project demonstrates how cultural and religious identities endured despite repression. In doing so, it contributes to broader European debates on cultural diversity, gender equality, minority inclusion, and the long-term consequences of religious intolerance.
