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The Stranger in Medieval Society (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 17, Number 2, January 2000
- pp. 151-153
- 10.1353/pgn.2000.0007
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews Akehurst, F. R. P. and Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden, ed., The Stranger in Medieval Society (Medieval Cultures 12), Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997; pp. xii, 149; R.R.P. US$44.95 (cloth), US$17.95 (paper). The notion of the stranger is in its fullest sense a modern one; the f i r s t appeared in Late Middle English, which suggests that its usage m a y be connected with shifts in medieval subjectivity in the late Middle Ages towards a heightened sense of individuality. The idea of the stranger hinges on that sense of opposition to the other that depends on the experience of the self as a contained, closed, individual unit. This sense of self is precisely what is lacking in the Middle Ages, according to much recent work on medieval subjectivity by such scholars as David Aers, Lee Patterson, Caroline Bynum, Sarah Beckwith, and, earlier, A. I. Gurevich. I f we bracket out that difference arising from a sharply focused sense of self, we are left with a very limited version of the stranger, the stranger as foreigner, the collective stranger. For us, the stranger is a subjective category requiring a self to experience the other as strange. It begs the question, stranger to w h o m ? W e are all strangers to people somewhere, but that sense of being a stranger is not constellated until w e find ourselves in a marginalised, outsider position. The sense of isolation, of loneliness amid the crowd, is hardly to be found in these medieval versions of the stranger. Perhaps this is the reason that nearly all the essays in this slim interdisciplinary volume of selected papers from a conference on this theme have trouble yoking their material under the 152 Reviews rubric of the stranger. Even the cover seems to belie the isolation of the stranger, with its triplicate images of a feather-capped young man gesturing into what seems to be a large window. The authors' brief is further restricted by the exclusion of categories which might have given us insight into the experience of being a stranger in the Middle Ages: the alienated and the marginal, such as prostitutes, 'parasites', or the insane. The preface mentions the fact that medieval Christians commonly understood themselves as strangers, in the sense of being exiles from paradise (p. 7), but this is another aspect of the stranger that is not pursued. The volume deals with people 'who have their o w n community and culture, and w h o c o m e into a new environment' (p. 7). So the authors are obliged to solve the problem of definition by interpreting stranger in a very literal objective way. The first two papers do so by focusing on merchants, the first being a solid factual informative account of the merchants of the Mediterranean. But the merchants travelled in groups and set up their o w n colonies, thereby limiting their o w n status as strangers. The second paper uses travel writings as its sources, and besides merchants includes missionaries and envoys, drawing the reader in with magical names like Marco Polo and Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, and with colourful anecdotes from their recorded experiences. But these people too were incomplete strangers: the author admits that a degree of assimilation into their chosen countries was necessary in order to pursue their goals (pp. 21, 24). Their writings tell us about the wonders of Asia and the exploits of these travellers, not about the raw anxiety of being a stranger. They lack the personal dimension, as does a third lucidly written essay, the subject of which is the tragic story of the Jews in France, 1315-1322. T w o more chapters opt for disguise as the m o d e of stranger. The first, a most interesting analysis of chivalric disguise in the fourteenth century, argues that incognito is less disguise than a manner of selfpresentation , a thesis that rather defeats the knights' identity as strangers. But its endpoint, the notion that medieval identity is constructed symbolically, that it has to be established 'out there', through visible exploits, is a profound...