ABSTRACT
The conclusion highlights how the choice to narrate diversity by travellers, missionaries and reportists was often not a conscious ethical choice because a tolerant attitude was a survival tool. Nevertheless, it inaugurated a new way to approach diversity, allowing an increasing number of individuals who could experience cross-cultural interactions to modify the European general approach towards diversity considerably. The emergence of an awareness and of an – at least formal – acceptance of different value systems can be undeniably traced in two different pre-modern Mediterranean societies. Nevertheless, it is also undeniable that in the same period, there were coexisting attitudes of individuals who still spoke of the other as barbarian and less human. The ethical narration choice of the book Tolerance Re-Shaped in the Early-Modern Mediterranean Border Lands emphasizes that it is not necessary to believe the same things or share the same values in order to be engaged in a fruitful and constructive interplay with otherness – an attitude starting from the individual and reaching the whole of society.
