Parergon

This book is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking that I have read for a while. The volume has its genesis in the ‘special strand’ of ‘Otherness’ at the 2017 International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK. The book contains the four keynote lectures (by Sylvia Huot, Nikolas Jaspert, Eduardo Manzano Morena, and Felicitas Schmieder), together with fourteen other papers from the conference ‘special strand’. The papers range across different geographical areas (extending beyond Europe) and use a variety of primary sources. They are written by contributors from different disciplines, who bring a range of methodological approaches to their task. The book’s challenge lies in both the concept of ‘Otherness’ and the breadth of the research presented. [End Page 257]

The introduction is probably the heaviest of the chapters, as the editors work their way through the intellectual complexities and multiple layers of the concept. They draw attention to the varieties of ‘Otherness’ that existed in the Middle Ages. Different iterations of ‘Otherness’ were simultaneously possible because the ‘Other’ was such a flexible notion. A conclusion of ‘Otherness’ could be based upon a selection of a single characteristic as the appropriate standard or measure. A person could view a specific individual as ‘Other’ based on ethnicity, but not as ‘Other’ if applying the filter of religion or gender. An assessment of ‘Otherness’ was therefore not a rigid classification and could depend upon representation and stereotypes.

Some of the complexities of modern methodologies of ‘Otherness’ the editors discuss are recent tendencies to use the term ‘Othering’, which emphasises the ongoing process of construction of the ‘Other’; and a focus on the ‘indicators, criteria and reasons of demarcation’ rather than simply an identification of ‘Otherness’ (p. 23). The editors also highlight the inherent relational basis of the concept: there can be no ‘Other’ without a ‘Self’. The editors chose to provide a survey of the theoretical landscape but did not require their contributors to adopt and develop all the issues that they raised in their introduction—and indeed, it would have been difficult to cover everything within a standard chapter length. The individual chapters vary in the theoretical issues they address.

The subject matter and time period of the individual papers varies considerably. In many of the chapters, there is an attempt to counterbalance old historiographical emphases on difference in the construction of identity with a consideration of belonging as a means of articulating identity. ‘Othering’ and ‘Saming’ are considered in relation to established categories such as ethnicity, religion, gender, and the law. Individual chapters deal with ‘Otherness’ between religious communities and within them (for example, Martin Borýsek’s analysis of internal encounters within distinct Jewish communities in seventeenth-century Corfu; Nick Koutrakou’s chapter on Byzantine monks). Clemens Gantner’s chapter, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place?’, considers the applicability of postcolonial theories to early medieval contexts in relation to political contestation in ninth-century southern Italy. Eduardo Manzano Moreno’s chapter analyses how early Islam borrowed institutional tools inherited from the late antique world to classify, exclude, and assimilate ‘Others’ in complex and contradictory ways. Roland Scheel’s chapter examines ‘Otherness’ as a mechanism used by Scandinavian communities to explain discordances between its historical past as revealed by the law codes referenced in the sagas and its thirteenth-century Christian values.

The types of source materials used by the contributors also range widely and include both documentary evidence and material culture. Individual chapters tend to focus on one form of evidence. Manuscripts and texts are well represented and diverse, including medieval histories, lineages, law codes, and retold Ovidian myths. There are chapters on mortuary culture and religious art and architecture. [End Page 258] This is not a comprehensive summary—I have picked out a few of the chapters to demonstrate just how widely this volume ranges.

I think that there are...