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A four-week institute for twenty-four college and university faculty on the interconnections among the Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean.

The University of California, Santa Cruz proposes our fourth four-week interdisciplinary NEH Summer Institute devoted to new approaches to the study of the medieval Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500) as a region in which Christian, Islamic, and Jewish communities interacted in a process of contact, conflict, and integration out of which modern notions of ethnic and religious identity emerged. In keeping with the NEH’s “Bridging Cultures” initiative and guided by our Institute faculty, Summer Scholars will study the medieval Mediterranean’s distinctive combination of overlapping and competing notions of culture and identity, both within and across religious and ethnic “divides.” Evidence from social and economic history, literature, art, religion, and archaeology will help us explore how currents of affinity and difference shaped processes of acculturation and hybridity that produced complex and flexible identities capable of crossing ethnic and religious bounds amidst an “age of crusades.”