ABSTRACT
The introduction explores the concept of ‘tolerance,’ its inclusion in a wider ‘toleration’ and the crucial role of the practice of otherness in developing tolerant behaviours. This practice forces the individuals to engage with diversity, leaving aside the urge to reject the unknown (/unfamiliar) in order to achieve something that is globally convenient for all the parties involved in social exchange. On these bases, the book Tolerance Re-Shaped in the Early Modern Mediterranean Borderlands examines different tolerant behaviours in the early modern Mediterranean space, going beyond an over-localized approach, overcoming the difficulties represented by a poly-semantic Mediterranean space and trying to better express through the comparison of distant environments the complexity of the Mediterranean as a unit of analysis. A crucial aim of the book is neither to define a comprehensive concept of tolerance in the central-eastern Mediterranean of the 17th–18th centuries, nor to engage in the contribution of its theoretical formulation, but to problematize the concept in the attempt to reveal the differences in the understanding of tolerance itself. The book supports the main theoretical assumption that toleration was undeniably present as a daily tool across the Mediterranean borders, albeit in disparate and contradictory forms. The methodological approach followed is the micro-historical one.
