Abstract
This talk focuses on the travels and travails of Christian devotional objects—including their looting, breaking, and redemption. It argues that devotional objects shaped encounters and relations between Christians and Muslims (including Moriscos and renegades) in the Maghrib. Christian captives in the Maghrib crafted, received, and venerated images, or, if they converted to Islam, handed them over to their former coreligionists. Images’ intermediary role culminated in the threats of Muslim rulers and slave owners to break images; these threats were often carried out. Thus, the circulation of religious images across the sea offers a unique vantage point for the analysis of early modern Muslim iconoclasm—profaning and damaging images—and iconoclasm more broadly. While Christians framed real and imagined Muslim iconoclasm as based on theological prohibitions on figuration, hatred, or avarice, for Muslims it was often grounded in a non-aniconic theologically and always served political goals—breaking images was means for rulers to prove themselves spiritual guardians, enhancing their political sovereignty. Images were efficient mediators between these communities because they played a constitutive role for Catholics, which Muslims acknowledged but rejected. The talk positions these contentious objects at the center of the world of ransom over which Mediterranean rulers, redeeming friars, and merchants struggled, and analyses them as part of a trans-regional political economy of ransom. Reconstructing images’ trajectories offers a new way to understand cross-confessional relations across the Mediterranean. Moreover, studying these images sheds new light on a forgotten early modern Maghribi chapter in the history of Christianity, and reflects the importance of Christian artifacts in the Muslim material culture of the Maghrib.
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