EXC 2060 A3-6 - Religious Buildings Change their Identity: Iberia 711–1609

Basic data for this project

Description

In the course of Iberia’s political history religious buildings frequently changed hands. Most often these buildings were not destroyed, but, rather, appropriated. These acts transported conquerors and conquered, majority and minority of different religious background from a zone of political conflict into one of cultural confrontation. Such appropriations most commonly followed conquests, acts of religious persecution, expulsions of either the Jewish or the Muslim minority, and as a by-product of forced baptism among large groups of population. While the appropriation of religious buildings occurred under a variety of circumstances, modern art historians and archeologists so far attended primarily to the material aspects and the physical changes these buildings underwent. The cluster project is dedicated to synagogues that passed into the hands of Christian organizations. The focus will, however, not be put on physical change, but, rather, on the cultural aspects of these appropriations. For several decades now, the historical discourse on religious minorities in Iberia is governed by the so-called “Convivencia” controversy. Recent scholarship addresses the tensions, conflicts and modes of co-existence of the divers religious groups in attempts to contextualize them in the political, theological, social, and cultural developments of the period. Whether pregnant with tension or not, these groups were entangled with each other to varying degrees. Thus, the appropriation of religious buildings is a visible marker of the extent of such processes. While expulsions and the following appropriation of buildings were often a clear symptom of disentanglement, several of these structures changed hands already prior to the expulsions of the minorities in the late fifteenth (the Jews) or the early seventeenth century (the Muslims), while the different groups were still intensely entangled.