Arthuriana

A close look at the developments and mechanisms of stereotyping and othering is a well-timed and important task of historical scholarship in the midst of ongoing warnings about 'fake news' and parallel realities in contemporary political and social discourses. The editors explain that they have chosen to focus on the 'Polish-German bi-national barrier … to create a counterpart to the modern period [because] [d]espite generally friendly actual relations between both countries, present animosities arising from historical experiences and, in many cases prejudices, can still be recognized' (p. 2). Today, national stereotyping and prejudices are so ubiquitous that sometimes it feels that they have always existed and that their driving forces and motives have [End Page 187] always been similar. However, unraveling the history of stereotyping in medieval Europe is not a simple task for a number of reasons. We would be committing an anachronistic error by assuming that modern national identities have a one-to-one correspondence to medieval group identities, and that all medieval writers who spoke the same vernacular languages had the same experience and concept of the other. The subject of othering is thus interconnected with the thorny question of pre-modern identities of the self. The articles in this volume navigate these and other related theoretical questions by considering texts of diverse historical genres: annals, chronicles, gesta, universal histories, hagiographic legends, administrative records, songs, and poetry; most contributions focus on stereotypes and perceptions of the 'other' by German and Polish individuals and communities from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.

In the introductory chapter, the editors explain the concept of the book, present the state of the field, and set a theoretical background for individual case studies (pp. 1–14). To create a comparative plane, the authors of the contributions in Part One explore 'Zones of Comparison in Medieval Europe' that include the Holy Land, Holy Roman Empire, England, and Bohemia. Kristin Skottki examines the chronicles of the First Crusade to talk about supra-national forms of alterity and identity constructions provoked by religious concerns (pp. 17–40); Georg Jostkleigrewe considers two cases of medieval Franco-German perceptions of the 'other' (pp. 41–56); Isabelle Chwalka examines the views on the Holy Roman Empire—especially as it is associated with German identity—in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman and Angevin sources (pp. 57–80); and David Kalhous analyzes the image of the Theutonici in Latin and vernacular historiographic sources of Bohemia (pp. 81–97). The three chapters in Part Two examine the perceptions of the Germans in Polish hagiographic and historiographic sources. Andrzej Pleszczyński juxtaposes the images of the Germans and the Holy Roman Empire in the works of a foreigner Gallus Anonymous, the first Polish-born historian Vincent Kadłubek, and a detectibly anti-German anonymous author of the Chronica Poloniae Maioris (pp. 101–18); Sławomir Gawlas examines perceptions of the Holy Roman Empire and its diverse people among the Polish elites from the first Polish chronicles to the Annales of Jan Długosz (pp. 119–66); and Roman Michałowski focuses on Polish hagiographic literature devoted to Polish-born and foreign saints Stanislaus, Adalbert, Kinga, Salomea, and Hyacinth, written by Polish authors (pp. 167–82). Part Three includes five chapters that address the German perspectives on the Poles. Volker Scior points out that 'Poland' and 'the Poles' did not play an important role for early and high medieval Frankish-German historians, with the exception of Thietmar of Merseburg (pp. 185–94); Norbert Kersken analyzes the works of late medieval German historians, in whose midst he also includes authors writing in Bohemia (pp. 195–226); Stephan Flemmig comes to similar conclusions about 'a low regard of Poland...