Over the last decades, studies in converso history have reached a new peak, inquiring into new research problems and opening new paths towards entanglements between Jewish, Christian and Muslim, converso and Morisco history, on the Iberian Peninsula, in the Sephardic diaspora(s) and beyond. A series of illuminating contributions has emerged from the Madrid based ERC-Project CORPI (‘Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond’), among them this volume.

Based on a conference in Madrid in 2016, the volume is dedicated to topics and theories in the history of forced conversions in medieval and early modern Iberia. As stated in the introduction, forced conversions were and are part of at least two of the three monotheist religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And yet they have always been contested from within their own religion. In addition, understandings and justifications of forced conversions have always been part of distinct historical and cultural settings so much so that basic concepts (such as ‘will’ or ‘compulsion’) need to be historicised and new questions to be formulated to replace traditional ones about the ‘truth of conversion’ or the ‘true identity’ of the convert (p. 15). Given the importance of interrelated questions and the urgency of discussions about the ‘violent potential of radical universalisms’ (p. 24), the editors correctly emphasise the value of the Iberian Peninsula as a ‘laboratory of interfaith problems’ (p. 3) and suggest that the case studies not be viewed ‘in isolation’ but in the larger context of early modern Europe and beyond. In general, the introduction is a noticeable summary of illuminating thoughts, and a remarkable effort to integrate the different chapters of the volume into one research programme.

After the introduction, the volume continues with a high degree of coherency into the contributions of the first section. Contributors explore the model of Visigoth forced conversions between the sixth and seventh centuries and the continuation of Visigoth church legislation into canon law and medieval theological discussions (Elsa Marmursztejn); into the legal and theoretical conflation of conversos, Jews and baptised Jews in the aftermath of the Toledo Revolt in 1449 and the implementation of the Sentencia Estatuto (Rosa Vidal Doval); and into debates beyond the proper topic of forced conversion (such as debates about forced apostasy, forced ordination and/or forced marriage) in and after the Council of Trent (Isabelle Poutrin). One of the major issues connecting the three discussions and continuing throughout the volume is the dichotomy between Thomists and Scotists regarding the usefulness or uselessness of forced conversions. In colonial Latin American studies, scholars have long ago emphasised that this dichotomy resulted in fundamental differences between the missionary strategies of Dominicans and Franciscans in the early Spanish Americas. The present volume emphasises the different layers of its early Iberian roots and the importance of Visigothic forced conversions as a trigger of later scholastic discussions.

The second section is dedicated to forced conversions in Spain under Almohad rule (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) and offers different readings of Muslim religious violence in medieval Iberia. It opens with an important analysis of Almohad Islam with its development from a Shia-inspired messianic movement to a variety of Sunni Islam in opposition to traditional Sunni Islam concerning interpretations of dhimma and interreligious coexistence (Maribel Fierro). Afterwards, contributions continue into a discussion of the importance of Ibn Ḥazm and his writings as an additional source for Almohad intolerance (David J. Wasserstein); and they close with Jewish memorial cultures and the difficulty of integrating anti-Jewish violence in Almohad Iberia into traditional Jewish narratives about peaceful coexistence in Islamic worlds (Alan Verskin).

Unfortunately, the third and fourth sections are less interconnected than the first ones and address a huge variety of different questions and research problems. And yet each and every chapter offers illuminating insights into the state of research on ‘The forced conversions of Jews in 1391 and beyond’ (pp. 173–288) and related problems ‘Between history and theology’ (pp. 289–403). In the fourth section Ryan Szpiech uses the writings of Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid to argue for a continuity in Iberian anti-Judaism and question Yitzhak Baer's interpretation that 1391 marked a radical turning point in the history of the Jews in Christian Spain; Ram Ben-Shalom proposes new steps towards a sociolinguistic study of Jewish and converso identity constructions after 1391; Yonatan Glazer-Eytan explains how Inquisitors in charge of persecuting crimes of belief increasingly came to justify the persecution of ‘Judaizers’ who were first and foremost denounced for their deeds; and Tamar Herzig draws our attention to Christian dichotomies between salvation of the soul and salvation of the body by examining cases of convicted Jews in Northern Italy who were partly freed from their temporal punishment after conversion.

In the fifth section Davide Scotto deconstructs what he calls ‘the myth of Talavera’, namely the radical difference between Hernando de Talavera and Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros's approaches to conversion; Giuseppe Marcocci discloses unexpected entanglements between Jewish and Christian trauma regarding the forced conversions of Portuguese Jews in 1497; and Mercedes García-Arenal uses the example of the forced conversions of Muslims in Valencia (1521) to argue for early sixteenth-century entanglements between a growing importance of biological kinship and a decreasing belief in the sacrament of baptism. In his epilogue, David Nirenberg combines the different results of the various contributions into one encompassing perspective, and closes with some intriguing observations on conflicts of interpretation and modern dialectics between ‘the power of history’ and ‘the power of conversion’, respectively ‘the persistence of the old’ in contrast to ‘the possibility of the new’ (p. 400). His remarks add to the opening remarks by the editors to the effect that the impact and importance of forced conversions in medieval Iberia go far beyond the geographical scope and time limit of the actual events and that they need to bother all historians and scholars of religion up to the present day – independently of our respective research foci and interests.