Download PDF | (Studies in Medieval History and Culture) Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, Debra Blumenthal (eds.) - Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality-Routledge (2020).
273 Pages
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.
Ann E. Zimo is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on cultural interaction in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the crusades.
Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher has published articles on priests, women, and ecclesiastical regulation in Speculum, Journal of Medieval History, and Bulletin of the History of Medicine. She is currently an independent scholar as well as project manager at Beutler Ink, a digital marketing agency.
Kathryn Reyerson is Distinguished University Teaching Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and founding director of the Center for Medieval Studies. She has published widely on merchants and trade, and on women and gender. Her current research focuses on medieval Mediterranean piracy.
Debra Blumenthal is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her publications explore the history of slavery and race, as well as gender and cross-cultural relations in the medieval Mediterranean.
Contributors
Debra Blumenthal (editor) is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara whose publications explore the history of slavery and race as well as gender and cross-cultural relations in the medieval Mediterranean. Her first book, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth Century Valencia (Cornell University Press, 2009), examines the lives of Muslim, Greek, Tartar, Circassian, and Black African slaves at a key moment of transition: when slave status increasingly became associated with black skin color. The book was awarded the Premio del Rey by the American Historical Association in 2010. Her current book project focuses on the construction of maternity in late medieval Iberia; it explores interactions between midwives, wet nurses, and birth mothers as well as the circulation of infants between them.
Roisin Cossar (contributor) is Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. Her research interests include the social history of the Christian church in the fourteenth century as well as archives and historiography. Her recent book, Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy (Harvard University Press, 2017), explores how fourteenth-century parish clerics in northern Italy represented their domestic worlds in written records. Her current research projects include an essay on the women who lived with parish clerics in Italy during the fifteenth century and an exploration of how seasonal cycles shaped Christian life at the end of the Middle Ages.
Jeremy DeAngelo (contributor) is a lecturer at North Central University in Minneapolis. He previously taught at Carleton College, and has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. Having received his doctorate from the University of Connecticut, he has published articles in Scandinavian Studies, Anglo-Saxon England, and Peritia, and has recently published his first monograph, Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Literature of the Early Medieval North Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
Lori De Lucia (contributor) is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA who researches early modern slave trades of the Mediterranean, with a focus on enslaved West Africans in Palermo, Sicily, and early formations of racist ideologies on the frontiers of the Mediterranean. She received funding from the Council for American Overseas Research Centers and the Andrew Mellon Foundation for her current research in Palermo. She has also lived and worked in Niger, West Africa, for over two years and has helped produce Hausa language curriculum for Boston University.
Nahir I. Otafio Gracia (contributor) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Her theoretical frameworks include translation theory and practice, the global North Atlantic, and critical identity studies. She has published a number of articles on literature from the Global North Atlantic, including “Towards a decentered Global North Atlantic,” Literature Compass (2019); “Presenting Kin(g)ship in Medieval Irish Literature,” Enarratio (2018); and “Vikings of the Round Table,” Comitatus (2016). She is working on her monograph, The Other Faces of Arthur: Medieval Arthurian Texts from the Global North Atlantic.
Sierra Lomuto (contributor) is Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College, where she also holds a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018-2020). Her teaching and research interests focus on medieval histories of global contact and the literature they engendered; the formation of racial ideologies in the Middle Ages; and contemporary appropriations of the medieval past. She is currently working on her first book, Exotic Allies: Race, Literature, and the Construction of Mongols in Medieval Europe. Her public writing has appeared in In the Middle, Public Books, and Medievalists of Color. Her scholarly articles have been published or are forthcoming in Exemplaria and postmedieval, and she is a contributor of The Chaucer Encyclopedia. She has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA and BA from Mills College, and is a former community college student.
Caley McCarthy (contributor) is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Her research focuses on late medieval healthcare, particularly at the Hospital of Saint-Esprit in late medieval Marseille, and its function in the urban landscape of this port city.
Kevin Mummey (contributor) has most recently been a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He has published on medieval prostitution, gender, and slavery in the Mediterranean and is the co-author of several publications on pedagogy. His monograph Women in Chains: Mallorcan Slavery after the Black Death is slated for publication in 2019. He teaches courses in medieval gender and medievalism in cinema and has also been a faculty member in St. Olaf’s Great Conversation program. Kevin is also a musician and composer, having recorded and toured widely across the United States and Europe. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his partner Lynn and son Cecil.
Kathryn Reyerson (editor, contributor) is Distinguished University Teaching Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and founding director of the Center for Medieval Studies. She has published widely on merchants and trade, including The Art of the Deal: Intermediaries of Trade in Medieval Montpellier (E. J. Brill, 2002) and Jacques Coeur: Entrepreneur and King’s Bursar (Longman, 2005). Recently, she published two books on women: Women’s Networks in Medieval France: Gender and Community in Montpellier 1300-1350 (Palgrave, 2016) and Mother and Sons, Inc.: Martha de Cabanis in Medieval Montpellier (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Her current research focuses on merchants and pirates in the medieval Mediterranean world.
Meg Roland (contributor) is Associate Professor at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. She writes about romance and geography and is a recent contributor to the forthcoming New Companion to Malory (“Malory and the Wider World”). Her chapter “After Poyetes and Astronomers: English Geographical Thought and Early English Print” was published in Mapping Medieval Geographies (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and her essay “The Rudderless Boat: Time and Geography in (Hardyng’s) Chronicle and (Malory’s) Romance” was published in the journal Arthuriana (2012). Her current book project, Mirror of the World, explores literature and geographical writing in late medieval and early modern England.
Samantha Katz Seal (contributor) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the co-editor (with Nicole Nolan Sidhu) of two special issues on feminism that were published in 2019 for The Chaucer Review and postmedieval, respectively. She will be an ACLS fellow for 2019-2020, working on her second book, Chaucerian Dynasty, a biography of the Chaucer and de la Pole families.
Tanya Stabler Miller (contributor) is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and several essays and articles on lay religion, gender, and urban culture. Miller’s research has been supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Medieval Institute at University of Notre Dame (2011-2012) and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2015-2016). She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Men, Women, and Religious Networks in Medieval France.
Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher (editor) has published articles on priests, women, and ecclesiastical regulation in Speculum, Journal of Medieval History, and Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her research has been funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Bilinski Educational Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Olivia Remie Constable Award from the Medieval Academy of America. Dr Vann Sprecher has served as faculty at Kingsborough Community College, ranked among the top ten community colleges in the nation by the Aspen Institute, and at Wayfinding Academy, an alternative 2-year college in Portland, Oregon. Dr Vann Sprecher is active in public outreach, having taught medieval history in prisons and community organizations across the country. She is currently an independent scholar as well as project manager at Beutler Ink, a digital marketing agency.
Lisa Wolverton (contributor), Professor of History at the University of Oregon, concentrates her research on the Czech Lands in the early and central Middle Ages. Her books include Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), a translation of Cosmas of Prague’s Chronicle of the Czechs (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), and Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics (Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Her current projects include a study of Czech involvement in the German civil war of the late eleventh century, monographs on the Deeds of Wiprecht and Lampert of Hersfeld’s Annals, a book of essays on the Slavic frontier in the Ottonian era, and, with Jonathan Lyon and Chris Halsted, a website dedicated to Slavs and Germans along the medieval Elbe.
Ann E. Zimo (editor, contributor) is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of New Hampshire and a medieval historian. Her research focuses on cultural interaction in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the crusades, which has been supported most recently by an NEH Fellowship at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (2020). She has published on topics related to interaction and identity in the crusader states in al-Masaq and Crusades. Her book project, tentatively titled In Plain Sight: Muslims of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, explores how Muslims fit into the geographic, economic, legal, political, and cultural spheres of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Introduction
Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, and Debra Blumenthal
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. In particular, we must be careful to avoid designating people as “marginal” on the basis of our own modern assumptions, rather than perceptions evidenced in medieval sources. 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. 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.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the first modern focus on marginality. Michel Foucault propelled this trend with statements such as, “The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the ‘outlaw’, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.”! In 1962, Michel Mollat launched the Annales ESC investigation into poverty that bore fruit in the 1970s in Les pauvres au moyen dge.? Bronistaw Geremek brought the marginals of Paris to prominence, first in Polish (1971), then French (1976), and then in English as The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris.*
Later explorations of medieval marginality have been informed by theoretical works by scholars such as, to name only a few, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and Tovi Fenster. Bourdieu’s multivalent concept of capital as encompassing the social, economic, political, and symbolic, enriched our understanding of power, specifically in terms of who had it and who did not.* Likewise, studies of medieval marginality have broadened the definition beyond criminals and the poor, to include, for example, categories such as sexuality and gender as sites where margins are delineated and defended.
De Certeau’s essay, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life argued that urban spaces are produced through use in ways that marginalized some of its inhabitants.° Folding cultural analysis into an examination of the city, Tovi Fenster emphasizes that the city is governed by “patriarchal power relations, which are ethnic, cultural and genderrelated.”’ She takes issue with H. Lefebvre’s vision of citizenship as “the right to the city” and argues that “the denial of the right to the city is a daily practice for many women and men.”® In a similar vein, medieval scholars have blended examinations of culture and space to complicate a clean division between margin and center. For example, Sharon Farmer has shown that, when belonging to a community was vitally important in the city of Paris, people who lived on the margins of this society could be particularly vulnerable. But they could also be empowered to form their own communities, redefining the center and placing themselves within it.”
The concept of marginality has been extensively explored but there is still much room for added nuance. The genesis of this book project was a panel for the 22nd annual Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference co-organized by Joélle Rollo-Koster and Kathryn Reyerson. The theme of the conference that year (2016) was “Marginal Figures in the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance.” In the lively Q&A that ensued at the conclusion of the panel, Rollo-Koster articulated an insight inferred in many of the papers presented: “We assume that the Middle Ages marginalized when, in many cases, it is we who want to see that marginalization.” The overarching aim of this volume is to take up RolloKoster’s implied challenge and problematize the “marginal” label that has often been affixed to the communities under analysis in this volume, largely in the wake of the publication of the enormously influential book by R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250.'° Moore contended that, as a consequence of the intellectual and institutional developments of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a general thrust to designate and marginalize “the other” best characterizes late medieval Western Europe. Even so, there is need for caution here, as we do not wish to argue that people in the Middle Ages were not marginalized. Rather we wish to critique the use of the concept and to refine its application.
We wish to push the category of marginal in a way that has been inspired by scholars who have pushed and refined the category of race in recent years. Often presented as developing during the Enlightenment and thus serving as a marker of “modern time,” the concept of race has been examined by medievalists who have demonstrated the ways in which medieval people did and did not think in racialized terms. For example, Robert Bartlett’s work has shown that, like the modern concept of race, medieval race involved a conflation of biology, culture, and religion.'! But unlike the modern tendency, people in the Middle Ages conceived of race as mutable.
Since then, scholars like Peter Biller have investigated scientific treatises to understand how race was situated in understandings of the body, and Steven Epstein has argued that, based on his research on slavery in Italy and in overseas colonies of Italian city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean, racism, very much approaching modern forms, existed in the medieval period.'? In the last decade, Geraldine Heng has been on the forefront of incorporating post-colonial theoretical frameworks into the examination of race in the European Middle Ages to argue that racial thinking was fundamental to medieval constructions of power.'*? The following collection of essays seeks to similarly problematize marginality as a concept through an acknowledgment of the mutability of labels, a reexamination of medieval sources, and an interrogation of our own modern assumptions.
The overall purpose of this volume is to highlight that marginality was often a question of perspective. People labeled as marginal by some might be regarded in wholly different terms by others; perceptions varied significantly depending on the context. Essays included in this volume also expose the Impermanence of an individual’s or group’s so-called “marginalization.” Marginalization was sometimes temporary or conditional as individuals were marginalized only at certain times or within particular communities. By the same token, people were rarely marginalized in any essential way; embodying multiple identities simultaneously, people might be considered marginal in some facets of their self while not in others. We would put particular stress on the push-pull dynamic here, the desire to expel perpetually contending with the desire to assimilate.
We have divided this volume into five thematically distinct sections: Race, Geography, Gender, Law, and Body. We acknowledge that, as with any category, these sections do not adequately describe or circumscribe the richness of that contained within. Many of the essays incorporate one or more of the volume’s themes in their analysis. For example, Lori De Lucia’s contribution, “The Space Between Borno and Palermo: Slavery and Its Boundaries in the Late Medieval Saharan-Mediterranean Region,” blends race and geography in an examination of how the definitions of both shifted in concert with contemporary political and economic changes. In particular, De Lucia demonstrates how slaves trafficked from Borno were increasingly redirected to markets in the Western Mediterranean after the Ottoman takeover of Constantinople. Also shared along these trajectories were racial ideologies that defined blackness in opposition to the Abrahamic religions due to Christian and Muslim injunctions on enslaving coreligionists. The primacy of a slave market undergirded by religious codes prompted North African and European writers to define “black Africa,” not according to geographical features, but as areas inhabited by pagans, and therefore, peoples who they believed could be justifiably enslaved.
Similarly, Sierra Lomuto’s contribution, “Race and Vulnerability: Mongols in Thirteenth-Century Ethnographic Travel Writing,” highlights how the medieval Latin European sense of marginality was imbricated with the construction of race. Her chapter challenges previous scholars’ characterizations of medieval ethnographers as somehow innocent of, or lacking in, racial bias. Indeed, she points out that the process of making Mongols objects of study became part of a long-term colonial project, one that was only successful in the Early Modern period. She argues that a close reading of ethnographies/travelogues produced in the mid-thirteenth century by Franciscan and Dominican friars reveals that Latin Christian fear and vulnerability vis 4 vis the Mongols prompted the production of a racialized discourse that constructed the Mongols not only as threatening and brutal anti-Christians, but also as physically distinct, barbaric, and inferior. Lomuto argues against those who may dismiss these friars’ works as inconsequential — citing the adverse power dynamics between the Mongols and western Europeans and emphasizing how the thirteenth-century “mission” to the Mongols bore little fruit — by outlining how this thirteenth-century racialized discourse would be cited and quoted by much later authors, such as Richard Hakluyt, engaged undeniably in devastating colonialist endeavors.
Concepts of marginality and the colonial impulse are likewise examined in Jeremy DeAngelo’s contribution in the Geography section. His chapter, “AngloSaxons, Evangelization, and Cultural Anxiety: The Impact of Conversion on the Margins of Europe,” outlines Anglo-Saxon adoption of Christianity and its aftermath. Utilizing the theories of post-colonialist scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, DeAngelo argues that conversion involved a tacit acceptance of a broader ethnocentric criticism of the converted people’s own culture. Converts internalized narratives of pagan inferiority, prompting them to accept religious conversion into a Christian community, which they perceived as superior and as the mainstream counterpart to their own marginality. DeAngelo sees Anglo-Saxons as embracing their geographic marginality, differing in their approach to conversion efforts from the Carolingians. Whereas the Franks depended on a narrative that emphasized their cultural superiority in order to advance their imperialist motive of empire building through conversion efforts, Anglo-Saxons recognized, and embraced as a mark of their Christian humility, an awareness of their locus on the margins of Europe.
In contrast, Meg Roland indicates that Thomas Malory rejected England’s marginality and placed it at the center of European Christendom through his telling of the Arthurian legend. In “Malory’s Sandwich: Marginalized Arthurian Geography and the Global Middle Ages,” Roland describes how our contemporary Arthurian geographic imagination has eschewed the town of Sandwich in favor of a nostalgic, delocalized nonurban geographical setting. In the fifteenth century, however, Malory made the palpably real town of Sandwich the point of departure and return for Arthur, giving it a prominent place in his Le Morte Darthur. Re-claiming the port town of Sandwich as central to Arthurian geography serves to remind us that Malory’s Arthur embodied English military and commercial ties to an increasingly globalizing Europe. Via Sandwich, Arthur established England’s international connections and its status as the new center of Europe and of Christendom.
The Arthurian legend is considered as well in Nahir I. Otafio Gracia’s chapter “The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula.” Gracia writes that, for the most part, Arthurian legends advocate for imperial expansion by imagining the European margins in peril — often presenting this peril in the form of imaginary enemies and then claiming the lands of these opponents. In this way, the margins become central to the depiction of an idealized European chivalric system. The textual production of Aragon/Catalonia often uses Arthuriana in this way to present Catalonia as the furthest point of the margin that is defending and conquering the borders against Islam. This self-representation works for the benefit of the Crown of Aragon that uses Arthuriana to compete against other European courts for European supremacy. The fourteenth-century La faula by Guillem de Torroella embodied these tendencies. The text claims Catalan chivalric superiority over that of France and England, in essence making space for Catalonia within European politics. La faula, in novas rimadas (1370-1374) following the style of troubadour poetry, is a fantastical autobiographical poem written in Catalan and a Catalan—French dialect. The narrator, a narrative version of the author, speaks Catalan, and King Arthur and Morgan le Fay respond to the narrator in French. The diglossia, as well as the Mediterranean setting of the poem (the narrator travels from Mallorca east to Sicily), creates a liminal space within the poem for Arthur to claim Catalan chivalry as the future of European supremacy.
Contributing to the volume’s discussion on the negotiation of geographical margins, Lisa Wolverton questions the normative status of kings and kingdoms in the historiography in “Why Kings?” She highlights the implicit denigration of societies and polities lacking a central authority figure that tacitly defines certain people and places as marginal, not just in Slavic lands but in Iceland, and elsewhere within the former Roman Empire, where dukes, counts, margraves, kings, or otherwise designated leaders held negligible power. In place of teleologies linking kings to state formation — as well as coins to monetized economies — she argues for comparative political analysis that bridges “peripheral” and “core” regions of Medieval Europe. Wolverton suggests adopting the designation “prince” for rulers including kings, dukes, etc., so as to permit marginalized regions to be considered along with canonical ones. A more nuanced understanding of the intersections of human agency and geographic constraint can help us better understand the impressive diversity of political communities from Iceland to Bohemia to Wales.
The volume’s sections on Gender, Law, and Body also ask us to reconsider how scholars can resist ascribing marginality where it may not belong, through a rereading of their historical sources. In “Measuring the Margins: Women, Slavery and the Notarial Process in Late FourteenthCentury Mallorca,” Kevin Mummey focuses on women slaveholders and evidence of their activity found in notarial protocols. Mummey describes how record keeping often obscured women’s commercial activities, reflecting cultural biases that perceived and portrayed them as economically marginal. Even so, he demonstrates how attentive reading of these sources can reveal the ways in which women built economic networks, and forged economic authority and independence, within and in spite of laws and customs that ostensibly circumscribed their influence.
In “The Marginality of Clerics’ Concubines in the Middle Ages: A Reappraisal,” Roisin Cossar undertakes a related reexamination of the supposedly marginal status of clerical concubines whom, historians have emphasized, could not be willed property, whose children were illegitimate, and whose position in the clerical household was precarious. These women, generally reviled by ecclesiastical authorities who condemned their sexual and servile natures, have often been marginalized in the historiography and historical documents on which it depends. Yet, Cossar demonstrates through an examination of their participation in local communities, that concubines’ marginal status was by no means fixed or even assumed. Indeed, concubines were central to the survival of the clerical household and fully integrated into, and sometimes acknowledged as leaders in, their social, religious, and economic communities.
By broadening the historical context through which beguines are typically studied, Tanya Stabler Miller sheds new light on the dynamics of male-female spiritual friendships in thirteenth-century Europe. In “Reviled and Revered: The Importance of Marginality in the Pastoral Care of the Beguines,” Miller argues that the beguines, though marginalized by some as suspiciously ostentatious in their active piety, were actually central to the intellectual and spiritual formation of scholars trained at the Sorbonne. She shows how Robert of Sorbon integrated the idea of their marginality for the sake of Christ into his own program for educating secular clergy. Through an analysis of his sermons, we can see how Robert held up their example to students at his new college for them to emulate in a program of pastoral care. Robert and his students not only drew upon the beguines as models of humility and marginality, but also forged career-long friendships with beguines as part of their commitment to pastoral ministry. In the thirteenth century, therefore, there was a period in which the very marginality of the beguines was made central to clerical education.
Ann E. Zimo also encourages a broader reading of the sources as a way of understanding the positionality of people in the Middle Ages. In “How Marginal is Marginal? Muslims in the Latin East,” Zimo reevaluates both medieval and modern representations of Muslims living in the Frankish Crusader States as having been systematically excluded from Frankish society. Noting how the “foundational scholarship” on Frankish administration relied almost exclusively on Frankish legal treatises, which barred Muslims from holding fiefs or serving as jurors, Zimo demonstrates how a much more complex reality emerges when these treatises are read alongside the Arabic sources. Indeed, we discover Muslim elites leasing lands from Franks and bringing cases before the High Court. More striking still is the evidence for shared administration of lands (condominia), including policing and punishment for crimes, as well as tax collection. Detailing how, through the mechanism of the condominia, the Mamluks managed to insert themselves more deeply into the remnants of the Frankish polities and closer to their seats of power. Zimo convincingly argues that the enactment of laws attempting to restrict and impose legal disabilities on Muslims likely was “a reaction against what had happened on the ground”: namely that elite Muslims were “exerting judicial and administrative power in Frankish spaces.”
Kathryn Reyerson and Caley McCarthy invite us to consider marginality as a transitional state. In “Pirates as Marginals in the Medieval Mediterranean World,” Reyerson stresses that, rather than being a fixed occupational category, piracy was but a temporary state. “Pirates” tended to be periodically reintegrated into mainstream society. Therefore, engaging in disreputable and dishonorable piratical acts did not permanently mark someone as irredeemably marginal. Most notably, however, Reyerson — through a fascinating discussion of letter of marque proceedings — significantly complicates the picture of whether pirates were marginal by raising the question of who, in actuality, was “marginalized” in retribution for piratical activity. Reyerson illustrates how the “pirates” themselves evaded punishment for their crimes and that, instead, “mnocent,” non-offending compatriot merchants paid the price.
In “Marginality and Community at the Hospital of Saint-Esprit in Late Medieval Marseille,” McCarthy tracks the daily expenses and income of the Hospital of Saint-Esprit while caring for the sick poor, pilgrims, prostitutes, and mariners as well as abandoned infants, exemplifying the municipalization of institutional caregiving. Such individuals fell outside the urban social networks that might have provided care but within the category of the “deserving poor.” While marginal to urban social networks, they were incorporated into the community of the hospital, both physically and spiritually.
Samantha Katz Seal challenges the idea that marginality is an exception to the rule of centrality. In “Disabled Devotion: Original Sin and Universal Disability in the Prik of Conscience,’ Seal provides a close reading of the fourteenthcentury Middle English devotional poem, in which the author portrays human frailty as a degradation of the perfect human form embodied by Adam and Eve and lost to them through their rebellion in the Garden of Eden. Parents to all of humanity, Adam and Eve passed on both their sin and their impaired bodies to every person. In the Prik of Conscience, human impairment represents not only a degradation of the body but also of the prelapsarian cosmic hierarchy. By turning away from God in the Garden of Eden, humans collapsed divinely sanctioned hierarchies by becoming equal in sinfulness and debased below animals who never wavered in their loyalty to God. Thus, the imperfection of the human form is a result of and constant reminder that all of humanity occupies the margins of God’s creation in its purest form.
Collectively, these essays do more than demonstrate how medieval societies cannot be easily broken down along a divide of “center” and “margin.” Not only was the delineation of true centers and margins inconsistent, depending as they did on the eye of the beholder, but they were also strategically constructed. Many people defined and defended the spaces they occupied — physically and culturally — as the center, as a way of privileging their identities and claiming power over others. Some claimed power by upending the negative connotations of the margin, embracing an ostensible position of vulnerability as a strategic way to justify aggression or expressing humility as a way to assume a position of superiority.
Acknowledging the elusiveness and complexity of the concept of marginality, the studies in this volume emphasize that it is necessary to consider context and subject matter very carefully before labeling medieval inhabitants as marginal. The demarcation of center and margin is inextricably linked with the assumption and assertion of power. The ways in which medieval people and modern scholars label the margin and the center has the potential to privilege, and thus, empower some at the expense of the others. It is important, therefore, to apply the term carefully in order to describe, but not reify, medieval power structures.
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