In recent years the medieval Mediterranean has been the focus of research concerning cultural contacts, convivencia and multiculturalism. Often evoked, these concepts have become almost banalities. However, they speak volumes about the way in which historians interact with contemporary issues such as religious coexistence and pluralistic societies in the Mediterranean. The current pervasive discourse of tolerance, cultural exchange, minorities and contacts does not necessarily influence the historical approach, but promotes the focus on these arguments.

Most often, the cultural groups of the Mediterranean world have been studied from a religious viewpoint, inserted into the political framework: that is to say that each religious sphere (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) is the object of a state-focused study divided into subgroups (the Arab world, the Ottoman world, the Persian world, the Byzantine world, the Latin world, and so forth). Then the focus becomes more finely differentiated (Mozarabic Christians in Al-Andalus, Christian minorities in Islamic Sicily, Jewish communities in Islamic Persia, etc.) in order to conduct comparative analyses: what it meant to be Jewish in Capetian France, in the Byzantine Empire or in Islamic Syria. Dynamics of coexistence and cohabitation in daily life, peaceful or not, harmonious or not, are also compared (the famous convivencia theme2), and even if the word ‘tolerance’ has now become almost taboo and is rarely used in academic discourse, the story of ‘living together’ is, in fact, seen through this logic: tolerance or no tolerance, that is the question. To address this issue, two main directions have recently been taken: juridical studies and anthropological input in the field of cultural contacts.

Since the frontiers and the content of minorities and communities are fortunately less and less described in terms of ethnicity, historians increasingly privilege medieval criteria such as law. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, lex was used for both ‘law’ and ‘religion’ (lex Iudeorum, lex Christi, lex Mahometi, etc.). Whatever the debate on personal or territorial law could be, the medieval documentation often defines the people by their law. Consequently, numerous scholarly works and research programmes have focused on the legal regimes of minorities, in particular in the medieval Mediterranean.