Christian-Muslim Everyday Interactions in the Context of Food and Medicine

The shared culinary heritage of peoples living in and around the Mediterranean Sea is commonly known as “mediterranean diet”. While also praised today for contributing to a healthy lifestyle, in premodern times, food played a key role in medicine. Be it for medical or nourishing purposes, the production and consumption of food came to be an important site of everyday interaction between Jews, Christians, and Muslims – despite religious dietary laws and the demarcation lines these drew.

As part of the conference on “Insular Entanglements: Malta, 300–1700”, this research projects examines trial records, travelogues, and captivity memoires from Malta to investigate how Christians and Muslims interacted in the context of food and medicine. The expected entanglements encompass both concrete interactions between individuals from different religions and conceptional entanglements between nourishment, medicine, and magic