Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality

Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions.

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.

Introduction; Part 1 Race; 1. The Space Between Borno and Palermo: Slavery and Its Boundaries in the Late Medieval Saharan-Mediterranean Region; 2. Race and Vulnerability: Mongols in Thirteenth-Century Ethnographic Travel Writing; Part 2 Geography; 3. Anglo-Saxons, Evangelization, and Cultural Anxiety: The Impact of Conversion on the Margins of Europe; 4. Malory's Sandwich: Marginalized Geography and the Global Middle Ages; 5. The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella's La Faula; 6. Why Kings?; Part 3 Gender; 7. Measuring the Margins: Women, Slavery and the Notarial Process in Late Fourteenth-Century Mallorca; 8. The Marginality of Clerics' Concubines in the Middle Ages: A Reappraisal; 9. Reviled and Revered: The Importance of Marginality in the Pastoral Care of Beguines; Part 4 Law; 10. How Marginal is Marginal? Muslims in the Latin East; 11. Pirates as Marginals in the Medieval Mediterranean World; Part 4 Body; 12. Marginality and Community at the Hospital of Saint-Esprit in Late Medieval Marseille; 13. Disabled Devotion: Original Sin and Universal Disability in the Prik of Conscience