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Scholars have turned with increasing interest in recent years to the history of the Mediterranean. The subject is not new, but the ways in which we approach it have changed. No longer viewed primarily from the vantage points of either economic or imperial histories, the Mediterranean has emerged as a site of immense cultural complexity. As a result, the rather sharply defined contours of religions and cultures that seemed to shape the identities of those who lived around its shores now appear far more fluid, much less fixed than they did to an earlier generation of scholars. Yet there were precursors to this shift in perspective. As long ago as the late 1940s, for example, Fernand Braudel called attention to the complexity of this environment in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. In numerous splendid passages, perhaps most notably in his romanticized but suggestive description of the folklore and religious beliefs of highlanders in the opening pages of his study, Braudel cautioned against thinking of their worlds in purely Christian or purely Muslim terms.1 To the contrary, making sense of religious belief, Braudel maintained, requires attention to the whole social environment, and historians need to recognize not only the relative ease with which men and women of the Mediterranean could pass from one faith to another, but also the tenacity of ancient peasant beliefs, even as Christian and Muslim authorities sought to impose new ways of thinking. Braudel problematized the question of religious identities for largely stable populations. The studies in this issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, by contrast, focus primarily, though not exclusively, on highly mobile populations: on travelers, runaways, merchants, missionaries, and warriors. While the case studies I have gathered here are diverse, their authors have — in their attempts to illuminate the making and unmaking of religious boundaries in the Mediterranean — drawn, either directly or indirectly, on new questions about the past enabled by recent work in

Crossing Religious Boundaries in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean