Introduction: The “Religious Other” through early modern eyes

Abstract

The focus of Through Your Eyes is the (mostly Western) understanding, representation and self-critical appropriation of the ‘religious other’ between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mutually constitutive processes of selfing/othering are observed through the lens of creedal Jews, a bhakti Brahmin, a widely translated Morisco historian, a collector of Western and Eastern singularia, Christian missionaries in Asia, critical converts, toleration theorists, and freethinkers, in other words by people dwelling in an ‘in-between’ space which undermines any binary conception of the Self and the Other. The volume had its genesis in exchanges between eight international scholars and the two editors, intellectual historian Giovanni Tarantino and anthropologist Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, who share an interest in comparatism, debates over toleration, and history of emotions.