TRANSOTTOMANICA – ORTHPOL Workshop. “Religion Matters: Interreligious Encounters in the Trans-Ottoman Setting”

How much do we know about interreligious and interconfessional encounters in the Early Modern period? Where do we draw the line between daily encounters with people of different faiths and disputes on religious matters? How “performative” had to be the “real” interreligious debates? Building on recent developments in the field of interconnected religious history, the workshop revolves around the theme of religious polemical disputes as “performed” by the Orthodox Christians against the “other” – other religions (Judaism, Islam), other religious denominations (Latins, Armenians), or even other Orthodox Christians. Seeking to go beyond the binaries “Muslim” and “Christian”, “Eastern” and “Western”, the participants scrutinize the personality of the interreligious polemics’ authors, reconstruct their personal, religious, and societal networks, tackle the Early Modern revival of the genre of public disputations on religious matters, and address the transfer of knowledge via manuscripts and printed books between the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe.