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.
Author(s): Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, Debra Blumenthal (eds.)
Series: Studies in Medieval History and Culture
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 272
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
