Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400 (review)

Epstein’s Purity Lost is about cultural boundaries in the Middle Ages and the people who crossed them. The setting for this stimulating and provocative study is the eastern Mediterranean world between 1000 and 1400. Epstein has drawn on his considerable interdisciplinary skills to investigate the “peoples who were usually separated in the Middle Ages by various constructed boundaries” (xii). Those barriers included color, religion, language, ethnicity, political affiliation, class, gender, and status (slave or free). Epstein has deftly brought together social, political, economic, and cultural history to examine “how people defied, overlooked, or transcended boundaries in order to establish relationships with those different from themselves” (xii).

While many historians continue to explore how and why medieval elites constructed social categories based on skin color, religion, and status, Epstein convincingly demonstrates that “mixed relationships” among those living in the eastern Mediterranean subverted those class-ifications (xiii). Self-interest, especially in its economic form, often trumped the barriers of color prejudice or religious affiliation. These bonds were so strong, the author argues, that “the skills developed in these relationships were one of the major engines of historical change in the eastern Mediterranean region” (xii). (How these social networks actually constituted a “world system” [xiii, 205], as the author argues, is however left unclear.) Throughout his study, Epstein emphasizes the persistence and “durability” of the classical cultural boundaries (especially color prejudice) (206). Nonetheless, the evidence shows that these “boundary makers” had limited influence on those living in this diverse part of the world (5). Real life did not always operate in ways that ancient and medieval guardians of culture would have liked or approved. Notions of honor, purity, and hierarchy may indeed have pervaded Western society, but those living on the periphery of Europe routinely created bonds according to their own interests. In the author’s words, “Purist values ran up against the realities of daily life” (8).

The book consists of five carefully crafted chapters, framed by an introduction and a brief, succinct conclusion. Chapter 1 (“The Perception of Difference”) examines the ancient roots of medieval hierarchies of ethnicity and color. Chapter 2 (“Mixed Relationships in the Archipelago”) relies primarily on notarial records from places like Crete and Chios to demonstrate how the marriages and business partnerships of “ordinary people” constituted “survival strategies in a challenging world” (52, 95). Even masters and slaves crossed boundaries. Chapter 3 (“Treaties and Diplomacy”) shows how the commercial and political tendencies of the Byzantines, the Venetians, the Tartars, and the Genoese could create “common ground” “across major barriers of faith and language” (135). In Chapters 4 and 5 (“Renegades and Opportunists” and “Human and Angelic Faces”), Epstein explores the renegades and opportunists who broke social barriers while the ancient and early medieval concepts of physiognomy and angelology continued to sustain the ideas of purity and inequality.

In his conclusion, Epstein suggests that the social ties examined in the book might have played a role “in eroding the consensus on boundaries and purity, drop by drop, slowly dissolving rigid thinking” (207). Indeed, at least in the eastern Mediterranean, merchants, slave owners, diplomats, and missionaries were routinely bending the “so-called rules” as they went about their lives (207). Ancient notions of hierarchy might still have been persuasive in certain circles, but in others they were mere concepts that did not speak to daily existence. The eastern Mediterranean, as Epstein has elegantly portrayed it, was a special place.