(B2-15) Conversion in the Middle Ages: On the Ordering Function of a Cultural Narrative
The project investigates the phenomenal domain of conversion in the Middle Ages from a cultural historical perspective. In view of Paul’s conversion or of Augustine’s conversion experience, which reflect a biographical pattern that claimed normativity in the Middle Ages, conversion is understood to be a radicalisation figure which often appears as a medially controlled effect of precipitousness – as in, for example, the paradigmatic reading experience of Augustine. It finds expression (indeed also as a collective phenomenon) as an accelerated turnaround within one’s own religio-cultural systems, or as a conversion from one religion/denomination to another. Obviously, conversion accounts are constitutive for the different manifestations of all conversions in the religious field of discourse. This interrelation may even be exaggerated to the effect that there is no conversion without a conversion account. Conversion as a narrative pattern and conversion as a cultural pattern are inextricably linked. In this respect, a cultural narrative spanning discourses and practices becomes manifest in them.