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Religious Diversity and Cultural Transmission in Pre-modern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2023

John Tolan
John Tolan*
Affiliation:
Département Histoire, Nantes Université, 44312 Nantes Cedex 3, France.
*
Email: john.tolan@univ-nantes.fr
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Abstract

Over the past several decades, historians of Medieval Europe have worked to show the complexity and diversity of Europe’s religious, linguistic and cultural landscape. Medieval Europe was neither a multicultural paradise nor an ethnically pure enclave. Archaeology, ethnolinguistics, literary studies and textual studies all show the constant movement of populations into and across Europe, from earliest antiquity until today. I have participated in two European-funded projects that explore different aspects of that religious and cultural diversity. From 2010 to 2015, I directed an ERC advanced grant entitled ‘RELMIN: The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th–15th centuries)’. Since 2019, I am one of the four directors of an ERC synergy grant, ‘The European Qur’ān,’ which explores the place of the Qur’ān in European culture between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. This article presents these two European research programmes and their implications for understanding the history of Europe’s religious diversity.

Type
AE Annual Conference Lecture
Information
European Review , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , August 2023 , pp. 391 - 405
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academia Europaea Ltd

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