Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning by Ira Katznelson,Miri Rubin PDF

non secular conversion - a shift in club from one neighborhood of religion to a different - can take various varieties in noticeably diverse conditions. because the essays during this quantity show, conversion should be protracted or unexpected, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or huge. it can be the results of energetic missionary efforts, instrumental judgements, or highbrow or religious appeal to another doctrine and practices. which will examine those a number of meanings, and the way they could range throughout time and area, this assortment levels in all places throughout medieval and early smooth Europe and past. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the jap Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the quantity highlights salient beneficial properties and key techniques that outline non secular conversion, specific the Jewish, Muslim and Christian reports. via probing similarities and adaptations, continuities and fissures, the amount additionally extends the diversity of conversion to target concerns much less quite often tested, resembling pageant for the which means of sacred area, adjustments to our bodies, styles of gender, and the methods conversion has been understood and narrated through actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered procedure that deepens inquiry by way of opting for and suggesting constellations of components that either compose specific situations of conversion and help in making systematic comparisons attainable via indicating tips on how to ask related questions of usually tremendously assorted situations.