New book by Alexandra Cuffel on interreligious dynamics of identity formation in the Middle Ages

In her latest book Shared Saints and Festivals in Three Faiths: Shared Religious Practices and Polemics in the Medieval Mediterranean, Alexandra Cuffel explores the dynamics of religious interactions between Jewish, Christian and Muslim people in the Middle Ages. The main focus of the study is the analysis of shared practices in the context of religious festivals and pilgrimages in the Mediterranean region. In this regard, Cuffel examines the meanings that the presence of the 'religious other' at sacred sites and during ritual practices had for each of the three communities.

Especially during pilgrimages and religious festivals, as Cuffel shows, existing boundaries between the religious communities were softened, redrawn or even completely abolished - at least temporarily. Based on the source material examined, however, it can be seen that rites practiced together paradoxically promoted the tendency to set oneself apart from others. In medieval Europe, however, Christians sometimes went so far as to compel Jews and Muslims to participate in Christian processions and ritualized violence in order to underscore Christian dominance and religious superiority. Religious  elites shaped polemical patterns of interpretation in relation to shared religious practice. Otherness was claimed as a central motif in the formation of identity, thus emphasizing the superiority of one's own faith. This had a lasting impact on the religious communities' theological understanding of themselves and others.

The publication makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of religious encounters, the strategies of demarcation in the Middle Ages and shows how religious identities were formed in a dynamic process between encounter and demarcation. The examination of Cuffel's work is certainly also of interest beyond the historical object of research in relation to timeless questions of coexistence in religiously diverse societies.

The book is available as an open access publication via the following link: https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/135808