The workshop takes early modern Iberia as a case study for exploring practices of reading under conditions of persecution, suspicion, and confessional pressure. Focusing particularly on conversos, crypto-Jews, Moriscos, and other religious minorities, we are interested in how readers appropriated, reinterpreted, and sometimes transformed texts and
discourses produced within dominant religious cultures. More broadly, the workshop asks how reading could become a means of negotiating the boundaries between conformity and dissent, public orthodoxy and private belief, imposed religion and inherited memory. Alongside Sina Rauschenbach and Axel Kaplan Szyld, the workshop will bring together Mercedes
García-Arenal, Stefania Pastore, Carla Vieira.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please contact
axelkaplanszyld@gmail.com.

13:30–13:40
Sina Rauschenbach and Axel Kaplan Szyld (Potsdam)
Welcome Address

13:40–14:35
Axel Kaplan Szyld (Potsdam)
“Christian Books, Judaizing Readers: Practices of Reading under the
Inquisition”

14:35–15:30
Mercedes García-Arenal (Madrid)
“Morisco Readers of ‘Christian’ Books”

15:30–16:00
Coffee Break

16:00–16:55
Stefania Pastore (Rome)
“Alias. Books and Diasporas in the Early Modern Mediterranean”

16:55–17:50
Carla Vieira  (Lisbon)
“From Stigma to Pride: How Did Inquisitorial Discourse Consolidate
Sephardic Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic?”

17:50–18:00
Closing Remarks