Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CONVERSAS (Conversas of Muslim and Jewish Origin in the Premodern Crown of Aragon: Parallels and Contrasts)
Période du rapport: 2023-10-23 au 2025-10-22
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.
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.
CONVERSAS carried out extensive archival research in major Spanish repositories, engaging with both digitized and previously inaccessible, undigitized manuscripts. This research focused on reconstructing the relationship between religious practice and identity formation among crypto-religious minorities in the Crown of Aragon, with particular attention to women’s roles within domestic and communal settings. The archival work resulted in the identification, collection, and systematic analysis of a substantial corpus of primary sources, including inquisitorial records, notarial documents, legal texts, and religious writings. This corpus enabled examination of concrete forms of everyday religious practice under conditions of surveillance. The analysis allowed for a comparative reconstruction of how Jewish- and Muslim-origin communities negotiated religious conformity and cultural continuity within a coerced mono-confessional framework. On the basis of this empirical material, the project developed an integrated analytical framework that foregrounds gender as a key factor in the transmission of transgenerational religious knowledge and cultural memory. The research produced peer-reviewed scholarly outputs that advance understanding of women’s religious agency, the restructuring of gender roles under forced conversion, and the mechanisms through which intangible cultural heritage was preserved despite repression. Together, these achievements constitute the core scientific outcomes of the project and provide a robust foundation for further research in the fields of religious history, gender and heritage studies, and minority resilience.
CONVERSAS repositions women as central historical agents in the preservation of religious and cultural identity, demonstrating that domestic practices, informal religious education, and embodied forms of devotion functioned as deliberate and adaptive strategies of cultural continuity under conditions of surveillance. Activities such as food preparation, festival observance, lifecycle rituals, oral transmission, music, and dance emerge not as residual traditions but as structured, embodied modes of resistance and identity maintenance, functioning as counter-performances that sustained communal memory, inverted dominant Christian norms, facilitated transcultural exchange, and foregrounded the sensory, performative, and affective dimensions of religious life. A central finding is that forced conversion produced a profound reconfiguration of religious gender roles. As male religious authority eroded through repression, exile, or assimilation, women emerged as the primary custodians of ritual knowledge, religious practice, and communal memory. Methodologically, the project bridges the divide between prescriptive discourse and lived experience, revealing how repression paradoxically generated new forms of agency and transformed domestic and communal spaces into sites of religious creativity and negotiation. Together, these results offer a revised understanding of forced conversion as a process that reshaped rather than eradicated religious diversity through gendered, embodied, and comparative dynamics, contributing original perspectives to the study of religious minorities, gender history, and cultural resilience in European history.