The present panel puts four papers by graduate students and early- to mid-career scholars in dialogue. The papers range in chronological sweep from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries, and stretch from Iberia and the Maghrib to Ottoman lands. We begin with Emma Snowden’s “The Collapse of Muslim and North African Identities in Christian Chronicles from Medieval Iberia,” which analyzes the labels applied to Muslims in medieval chronicles written by Christians in Iberia, arguing that many of them intentionally collapsed religious and ethnocultural identities, conflating Muslims and North Africans. Next, in “Cypriot identity under the Lusignans after the fall of Acre, 1291,” Gail Hook attempts to identify methods of accommodation and survival used by non-Frankish natives and refugees under Lusignan rule in Cyprus (1192-1489) after 1291, as they worked to insert themselves in this socio-cultural environment in which full integration with the dominant Lusignan identity proved impossible. Third, Marina Schneider’s” Staging Brotherhood: Confraternities and Processions in Early Modern Iberian Cities,” considers the various policies of inclusion and exclusion applied to Jews, Muslims, and converts in cities around Iberia, in order to suggest that confraternities and processional space served sites for resistance and social validation and even the integration of out-group individuals. Finally, in “European Archives by Other Means: The Ottoman Registers of the 'Foreign Nations' in the Seventeenth Century,” Constantine Theodoridis examines the seventeenth-century Ottoman “registers of the foreign states,” demonstrating European agency in the development of this administrative institution, and showing how the “identity‚” of a state archive can at times be as complicated as the identities of the historical actors to which it pertains.

These papers offer a range of approaches to the subject of the construction and intersection of ethnic and religious identities, in a range of historical and cultural environments. With four papers bridging the breadth of the Mediterranean and the length of the long Middle Ages, the panel eschews a formal respondent, in favor of comment by the session chair and discussion involving the audience.