Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Negotiating Apostasy -- The Gates of Upward Social Mobility -- From Savage to Civilized: Village Schools and Student Life -- Life Outside the Walls: Clergymen on the Road -- The Heyday of Popular Culture: The Shared Time and Space of Laity and Clergy -- Contested Coexistence: Lay-Clerical Disputes and Their Settlement -- Tales of a Peasant Revolt -- Shifting Identities in the Christian-Muslim Contact Zone -- Conclusion.

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Negotiating Violence examines the ways in which ordinary people used a transnational papal court of law for disputing their private local hostilities and for negotiating their social status and identities. Following the career and routine crossovers of runaway friars, the book offers vivid insights into the late medieval culture of violence, honour, emotions, learning and lay-clerical interactions. The story plays itself out in the large composite state of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, which collapses under the Ottomans’ sword in front of the readers’ eyes. The bottom-up approach of the Christian-Muslim military conflict renders visible the rationalities of those commoners who voluntarily crossed the religious boundary, while the multi-tiered story convincingly drives home the argument that the motor of social and religious change was lay society rather than the clergy in this turbulent age.