Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality

Description

Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume’s geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures and tables Acknowledgments List of contributors Introduction Notes PART 1: Race 1. The space between Borno and Palermo: Slavery and its boundaries in the late medieval Saharan-Mediterranean region The margins: Palermo and Borno The space between the two seas Reconfiguring Palermo Notes 2. Race and vulnerability: Mongols in thirteenth-century ethnographic travel writing John of Plano Carpini and knowledge production Conversion in William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium Notes PART 2: Geography 3. Anglo-Saxons, evangelization, and cultural anxiety: The impact of conversion on the margins of Europe Notes 4. Malory’s Sandwich: Marginalized Arthurian geography and the Global Middle Ages Notes 5. The past and future margins of Catalonia: Language politics and Catalan imperial ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula Notes 6. Why kings? Notes PART 3: Gender 7. Measuring the margins: Women, slavery, and the notarial process in late fourteenth-century Mallorca Introduction The top of the page – women in the marketplace The top of the page – networks of widows, wives, and single women The bottom of the page – leaving their “weakness” behind The bottom of the page – women behind the scenes The bottom of the page – pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain … Conclusion Notes 8. The marginality of clerics’ concubines in the Middle Ages: A reappraisal Clerical concubines between church reform and modern scholarship Concubines in Italy Conclusion Notes 9. Reviled and revered: The importance of marginality in the pastoral care of beguines Beguines, religious movements, and reform Robert of Sorbon: man at the center Marginality and the poor masters of the Sorbonne “No name is more despised”: beguines and marginality Notes PART 4: Law 10. How marginal is marginal? Muslims in the Latin East Disciplinarity and the current model Muslims in the Frankish legal sources Muslims in the political sphere Condominia/Muna.afat Conclusion Notes 11. Pirates as marginals in the medieval Mediterranean world Notes PART 5: Body 12. Marginality and community at the Hospital of Saint-Esprit in late medieval Marseille The Hospital of Saint-Esprit: a marginal element Incorporation and the hospital Notes 13. Disabled devotion: Original sin and universal disability in the Prik of Conscience The impairment of man’s kynde Disabling likeness: Adam, animals, and analogy The knowing of man’s kynde: stratifying disability Notes Select bibliography Index