Thinking with the Renegade: Politics of Conversion and Ambiguity of Identity in the Later Middle Ages

The figure of the renegade has often been considered an early modern invention, but the noun renegade and associated verbs entered the English language in the fourteenth century to describe figures who forsook their religious beliefs. This essay explores the coming into being of the medieval renegade. The renegade encapsulates the point at which imperial affiliations meet individual embodiment. The renegade as a cultural figure—embodying an unstable kind of convert, blending resistance with surface compliance—developed in the crucible of conflict between Ottoman Muslims and Christians in the later medieval Mediterranean, especially in accounts of the siege of Rhodes in 1480. The renegade became a trope and a plot device representing the ambiguities and doubts of protocolonial entanglement. In line with Homi Bhabha's theories of mimicry, the renegade traces resistance, mimicry, and ambiguity in the interplay between imperial regimes, pointing to occluded histories of sameness and ambivalence.