Interreligious Communication

This introduction lays the conceptual and methodological groundwork for the special issue “Interreligious Communication: Transmediterranean Perspectives (7th–16th Cent.)”. It aims to reassess Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the premodern Mediterranean by foregrounding communication as a distinct analytical category. While such relations have been widely studied, their underlying communicative practices—verbal, written, symbolic, embodied—remain undertheorized. Critiquing binary narratives of coexistence versus conflict, the introduction shifts focus from representations of the religious “other” to lived practices of interaction, including those only indirectly documented. It proposes a framework based on communicative acts, settings, and constellations, and introduces a typology of three overlapping levels: intersocietal (between political-religious spheres), intercommunal (between coexisting religious groups), and intracommunal (within religious communities). Emphasizing asymmetry, contingency, and historical context, the introduction argues that small-scale, everyday interactions must be analysed through—and in turn refine—this framework, advancing both theoretical and empirical understandings of interreligious communication in the premodern Mediterranean

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