E. Natalie Rothman
University of Toronto
on
Conversion, Convergence, and Commensuration
in the Early Modern Mediterranean
In 1621, a girl ran away from the Ottoman fortress of Klis, in Bosnia, where her father served as castellan. Six years later, she was a devout Catholic living in Venice. When her father came to visit, he was taken on a well-orchestrated tour of her new home, an institution for elite girls, accompanied by interpreters for Turkish and Slavic. This paper will examine the interactions between the father, the girl, and Venetian officials, as narrated to the Venetian Senate by the two interpreters. Building on recent developments in the study of syncretism the paper will suggest how this case may help shed light on practices of socio-religious boundary-marking and boundary-crossing in the early modern Mediterranean.